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Patternico
20.6.2020
I remember searching for tutorials for making seamless patterns in Photoshop¹ all the time back in the day.
It’s fun to see this little website for building repeating patterns as its one job. It does everything you’d expect: pick a background, drag some decorations onto it and position...
Building a hexagonal grid using CSS grid
18.6.2020
I think of grids as arrangements of rectangles with vertical and horizontal lines running through. And they are, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still do clever things in how we place things on those grids and what we do with the elements afterwards.
In this demo by Jesse Breneman,...
Learn Z-Index Using a Visualization Tool
12.6.2020
There are some neat interactive demos in here from Thiru Manikandan. There are a couple of very tricky things with z-index that never fail to confuse. In addition to things like requiring positioning and source order, the trickiest are the stacking contexts and parent/child relationships. z-index...
CUBE CSS
11.6.2020
A CSS methodology from Andy Bell:
The most important part of this methodology is the language itself: CSS. It’s key to note its existence in the name because some alternative approaches, such as BEM—which I have enjoyed for many years—can veer very far away from Cascading Style Sheets. I love CSS...
CSS :is() and :where() are coming to browsers
10.6.2020
Šime Vidas with the lowdown on what these pseudo-selectors are and why they will be useful:
:is() is to reduce repetition¹ of parts of comma-separated selectors.
:where() is the same, but nothing inside it affects specificity. The example of wrapping :where(:not()) is really great, as now there...
Analyzing Notion app performance
8.6.2020
Here’s a fantastic case study where Ivan Akulov looks at the rather popular writing app Notion and how the team might improve the performance in a variety of ways; through code splitting, removing unused vendor code, module concatenation, and deferring JavaScript execution. Not so long ago, we made...
A/B Testing Instant.Page With Netlify and Speedcurve
5.6.2020
Instant.Page does one special thing to make sites faster: it preloads the next page when it’s pretty sure you’re going to click a link (either by hovering over 65ms or mousedown on desktop, or touchstart on mobile), so when you do complete the click (probably a few hundred milliseconds...
Understand why CSS has no effect with the Inactive CSS rules indicator in Firefox DevTools
5.6.2020
It’s useful when DevTools tells you that a declaration is invalid. For example, colr: red; isn’t valid because colr isn’t a valid property. Likewise color: rd; isn’t valid because rd isn’t a valid value. For the most part, a browser’s DevTools shows...
Adding CSS to a Page via HTTP Headers
4.6.2020
Only Firefox supports it, but if you return a request with a header like this:
Header add Link "<style.css;rel=stylesheet;media=all"
…that will link to that stylesheet without you having to do it in the HTML. Louis Lazaris digs into it:
[…] the only thing I can think of that could...
On fixed elements and backgrounds
3.6.2020
After just playing with apsect-ratio and being pleasantly surprised at how intuitive it is, here’s an example of CSS acting unintuitively:
If you have a fixed element on your page, which means it doesn’t move when you scroll, you might realise that it no longer acts fixed if you apply a...
Behind the Source: Cassie Evans
3.6.2020
I feel like the tech industry takes itself far too seriously sometimes. I get frustrated by all the posturing and gatekeeping – “You’re not a real developer unless you use x framework”, “CSS isn’t a real programming language”.
I think this kind of rhetoric often puts new developers off,...
Overlapping Header with CSS Grid
1.6.2020
Snook shows off a classic design with an oversized header up top, and a content area that is “pulled up” into that header area. My mind goes to the same place:
Historically, I’ve done this with negative margins. The header has a height that adds a bunch of padding to the bottom...
Global CSS options with custom properties
30.5.2020
With a preprocessor, like Sass, building a logical “do this or don’t” setting is fairly straightforward:
$option: false;
@mixin doThing {
@if $option {
do-thing: yep;
}
}
.el {
@include doThing;
}
Can we do that in native CSS with custom properties? Mark Otto shows...
Why we at $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY
29.5.2020
Too funny:
After careful consideration, we settled on rearchitecting our platform to use $FLASHY_LANGUAGE and $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY. Not only is $FLASHY_LANGUAGE popular according to the Stack Overflow developer survey, it’s also cross platform; we’re using it to reimplement our mobile apps as well....
PureCSS Gaze
28.5.2020
Diana Smith with another mind-bending all HTML & CSS painting.
I love that these occupy a special place on the “Should I draw this in CSS?” curve. Things like simple shapes are definitely on the “yes” side of the curve. Then there’s a large valley where things...
The Many Bad (and Good!) Patterns for Close Buttons
27.5.2020
Manuel Matuzović details 10 bad HTML patterns for a close button. You know, stuff like this:
<a class="close" onclick="close()"×</a
Why is that bad? There is no href there, so it really isn’t a link (close buttons aren’t links). Not to mention the missing href makes this...
Responsive web design turns ten.
27.5.2020
Ethan on the thinking and research that inspired the term:
Around that time, my partner Elizabeth visited the High Line in New York City shortly after it opened. When she got back, she told me about these wheeled lounge chairs she saw in one section, and how people would move them apart for a...
Responsive web design turns ten.
27.5.2020
Ethan on the thinking and research that inspired the term:
Around that time, my partner Elizabeth visited the High Line in New York City shortly after it opened. When she got back, she told me about these wheeled lounge chairs she saw in one section, and how people...
CSS Tips for New Devs
27.5.2020
Amber Wilson has some CSS Tips for New Devs, like:
It’s not a good idea to fix shortcomings in your HTML with CSS. Fix your HTML first!
And…
You can change CSS right in your browser’s DevTools (to open them, right-click the browser window and choose “inspect”...
Framer Web
26.5.2020
The prototyping app Framer just launched the web version of their design tool and it looks pretty darn neat. I particularly love the design of the marketing site that explains how to use Framer and what sets it apart from other design tools. They have a ton of examples that you can pop open...