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Hamburger ☰ Heaven
22.1.2020
A pleasant little romp through iconography and culture from Sophia Lucero. The "hamburger" menu icon we're familiar with now is really a sign from Taoist cosmology.
Besides ☰, which represents heaven 天, we have ☱ for lake/marsh 澤, ☲ for fire 火, ☳ for thunder 雷, ☴ for wind 風, ☵ for water 水,...
Searching the Jamstack
22.1.2020
Here's Raymon Camden on adding site search functionality to a site that is statically hosted. A classic trick! Just shoot 'em to Google and scope the results to your site:
<form action="https://www.google.com/search" method="get"<input type="search" name="q"...
What makes a site JAMstack?
21.1.2020
I admit I didn’t know the ins and outs of what the Jamstack is until recently, despite having heard the term so frequently. I think I’m not alone in this. It’s an elusive term — how is it different from what came before, especially considering it shares so many similarities? Thankfully, Divya...
positionstack
21.1.2020
(This is a sponsored post.)
Say you have an address that your user typed in, like
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC, USA
and now you need more information about it. Maybe you need the proper country code. Maybe you need the latitude and longitude. Maybe you need the postal code....
Getting Started with Front End Testing
20.1.2020
Amy Kapernick covers four types of testing that front-end devs could and should be doing:
Linting (There's ESLint for JavaScript and Stylelint or Prettier for CSS.)
Accessibility Testing (Amy recommends pa11y, and we've covered Axe.)
Visual Regression Testing (Amy recommends Backstop, and we've...
Autumn (macOS window manager)
17.1.2020
I love how nerdy this is. Autumn allows you to write JavaScript to control your windows. Get this window, move it over here. Nudge this window over. There are all sorts of APIs, like keyboard command helpers and doing things on events, like waking up from sleep.
I love that it exists, but for...
The Design Squiggle
16.1.2020
I think we all have an intuitive understanding that, at the beginning of projects that require our creativity (be it design or code), things feel uncertain and messy. Then, as we go, things tend to straighten out. There is still some wiggling and setbacks, but by the end, we find a single solution...
Debunking the Myth: Accessibility and React
15.1.2020
I find it notable when the blog of a major accessibility-focused company like Deque publishes an article called Debunking the Myth: Accessibility and React. Mark Steadman is essentially saying if a site has bad accessibility, it ain't React... it's you. The tools are there to achieve good...
In Defence of “Serverless” —the term
14.1.2020
Ben Ellerby:
For now Serverless, to me at least, manages to do a hard job, defining the borders of a very fluid and complex space of possible solutions in which we can build next-generation architectures. It would help if there was not a framework of the same name, it would help if people didn’t...
A Scandal in Bohemia
13.1.2020
I love that Paravel is so busy doing so much cool stuff they literally just forgot that they built this and are just now releasing it.
It's a Sherlock Holmes story, but designed to be more interesting and immersive (even audio!) than just words-on-a-screen.
Direct Link to Article —...
Why do we have different programming languages?
13.1.2020
"But why do I have to learn Python?" She wailed, "I like Scratch!"
"I know," I said, "But there are different programming languages for different sorts of tasks."
"That's stupid" she said
I can empathize with the little girl in Terence Eden's story. In high school, I got super into Turbo Pascal....
Re-creating the ‘His Dark Materials’ Logo in CSS
11.1.2020
The text logo has a slash cut through the text. You set two copies on top of one another, cropping both of them with the clip-path property.
What's interesting to me is how many cool design effects require multiple copies of an element to do something cool. To get the extra copy, at least with...
Water.css
11.1.2020
It's notable that Water.css was the #1 clicked thing from Louis Lazaris' Web Tools Weekly in 2019. It's from a 13-year old developer named Felix!
It's just a little bit of CSS you apply to class-free semantic HTML to give it nice basic responsive styles — the perfect kind of thing for a...
Things you can do with a browser in 2020
10.1.2020
I edit a good amount of technical articles about the web, and there is a tendency for authors to be super broad in their opening sentence, like "What we're able to do on the web has expanded greatly over the years."
I tend to remove stuff like that because it usually doesn't serve the article well...
Is it better to use ems/rems than px for font-size?
10.1.2020
The answer used to be absolutely yes because, if you used px units, you prevented the text from being resized by the user at all.
But browser zoom is the default method for making everything bigger (including text) these days and it works great even if you use px.
But... Kathleen McMahon really...
let vs. const
9.1.2020
There are multiple ways to declare variables in JavaScript. We had var, and while that still works like it always has, it is generally said that let and const are replacements to the point we rarely (if ever) need var anymore. This doodle explanation does a pretty good job, if you need...
The Ultimate Guide to Dark Mode for Email Marketers
7.1.2020
On the regular web (I suppose) we handle "dark mode" with the CSS prefers-color-scheme media query. But, and to nobody's surprise, it's way weirder in the land of HTML email. The weirdness is that across different email clients, they handle the dark mode thing differently, starting with the fact...
Why every website wants you to accept its cookies
6.1.2020
I'm probably in the minority on this, but I've never ever built one of those "This site uses cookies, here's some kind of explanation of why, and please click this OK button to accept that" bars that feels like they are on half of the internet.
Emily Stewart:
Most of us just tediously click “yes”...
Systems, Mistakes, and the Sea
6.1.2020
Our own Robin Rendle:
[...] folks can’t talk about real design systems problems because it will show their company as being dysfunctional and broken in some way. This looks bad for their company and hence looks bad for them. But hiding those mistakes and shortcomings by glossing over everything...
Gotta Select’em All
3.1.2020
I suspect it is not highly known that CSS can control how text is selected. You can do user-select: none; to prevent some text from being selected. That's probably not terribly good UX in general, but perhaps you use some period (.) characters as decoration or something, I could see preventing...