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An Event Apart Boston is Coming. Save Now!
18.4.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
An Event Apart Boston is almost here! We're talking, like, less than a month away. If you've been holding off from registering, this might be your last chance because time and seating are both limited. Besides, we're talking about three days of pure knowledge-dropping...
Get a CSS Custom Property Value with JavaScript
11.4.2019
Here’s a neat trick from Andy Bell where he uses CSS Custom Properties to check if a particular CSS feature is supported by using JavaScript.
Basically, he's using the ability CSS has to check for browser support on a particular property, setting a custom property that returns a value of either...
While solving for collaboration, we built a product that our own teams love and use everyday!
11.4.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
Flock is a messaging and collaboration tool built for both designers and developers. With close-to-zero setup, it brings together all your team’s conversations, appointments, and files in one place, helping you spend more time on what you are best at — building...
Under-Engineered Toggles
10.4.2019
Toggles. Switches. Whatever you want to call them, they've been with us for some time and have been a dominant a staple for many form interfaces. They're even baked right into many CSS frameworks, including Bootstrap and Foundation.
It's easy to think of them in binary terms: on and off. Off...
Revisiting the Rendering Tier
5.4.2019
Have you ever created a well-intentioned, thoughtful design system only to watch it grow into an ever-increasing and scary codebase? I've been working in sort of the opposite direction, inheriting the scary codebase and trying to create a thoughtful system from it.
Here's Alex Sanders on the topic...
A Couple of New Wufoo Tips
4.4.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
High fives to Wufoo, our long-time sponsor here on CSS-Tricks. It's powered the vast majority of forms I've built over the past decade. If you've never used it or heard of it: it's a form builder. It makes the arduous task of implementing forms trivially easy. Building...
Responsible JavaScript
3.4.2019
We just made a note about this article by Jeremy Wagner in our newsletter but it’s so good that I think it’s worth linking to again as Jeremy writes about how our obsession with JavaScript can lead to accessibility and performance issues:
What we tend to forget is that the environment websites...
Who has the fastest website in F1?
2.4.2019
Jake Archibald looks at the websites of Formula One race teams and rates their performance, carefully examining their images and digging into the waterfall of assets for each site:
Trying to use a site while on poor connectivity is massively frustrating, so anything sites can do to make it less...
KV Storage
1.4.2019
localStorage is...
Good! It's an incredibly easy API to use.
localStorage.setItem('name', 'Chris'); let name = localStorage.getItem('name');
Bad! Philip Walton explains why:
localStorage is a synchronous API that blocks the main thread, and any time you access it you potentially prevent your...
A historical look at lowercase defaultstatus
1.4.2019
Browsers, thank heavens, take backward compatibility seriously.
Ancient websites generally work just fine on modern browsers. There is a way higher chance that a website is broken because of problems with hosting, missing or altered assets, or server changes than there is with changes in...
Scroll-Linked Animations
29.3.2019
You scroll down to a certain point, now you want to style things in a certain way. A header becomes fixed. An animation triggers. A table of contents appears. To do anything based on scroll position, JavaScript is required right now. You watch the scroll position via a DOM event and alter...
You probably don’t need input type=“number”
29.3.2019
Brad Frost wrote about a recent experience with a website that used <input type="number">:
Last week I got a call from my bank regarding a wire transfer I had just scheduled. The customer support guy had me repeat everything back to him because there seemed to be a problem with...
Powers of Two
28.3.2019
Refactoring is one of those words that evokes fear in the eyes of many folks, from developers to product owners and everyone in between. It may as well be a four-letter word in many ways. It's also something that we talk about quite a bit around here because, like books on the topic, where to start...
Buddy: 15 Minutes to Automation Nirvana
26.3.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
Deploying a website to the server in 2019 requires much more effort than 10 years ago. For example, here's what needs to be done nowadays to deliver a typical JS app:
split the app into chunks
configure webpack bundle
minify .js files
set up staging environment
upload...
Podcasts on The Great Divide
24.3.2019
Nick Nisi, Suz Hinton, and Kevin Ball talk about The Great Divide in JS Party #61, then I get to join Suz and Jerod again in episode #67 to talk about it again.
Dave and I also got into it a bit in ShopTalk #346.
Direct Link to Article — Permalink… Read article
The post Podcasts...
Technical Debt is Like Tetris
21.3.2019
Here’s a wonderful post by Eric Higgins all about refactoring and technical debt. He compares giant refactoring projects to being similar to Tetris:
Similar to running a business, Tetris gets harder the longer you play. Pieces move faster and it becomes harder to keep up.
Similar to running...
See No Evil: Hidden Content and Accessibility
15.3.2019
There is no one true way to hide something on the web. Nor should there be, because hiding is too vague. Are you hiding visually or temporarily (like a user menu), but the content should still be accessible? Are you hiding it from assistive tech on purpose? Are you showing it to assistive tech...
Perfect Image Optimization for Mobile with Optimole
14.3.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
In 2015 there were 24,000 different Android devices, and each of them was capable of downloading images. And this was just the beginning. The mobile era is starting to gather pace with mobile visitors starting to eclipse desktop. One thing is certain, building...
The Process of Implementing A UI Design From Scratch
13.3.2019
This is a fantastic post by Ahmad Shadeed. It digs into the practical construction of a header on a website — the kind of work that many of us regularly do. It looks like it's going to be fairly easy to create the header at first, but it starts to get complicated as considerations for screen...
Application Holotypes
13.3.2019
It's entirely too common to make broad-sweeping statements about all websites. Jason Miller:
We often make generalizations about applications we see in the wild, both anecdotal and statistical: "Single-Page Applications are slower than multipage" or "apps with low TTI loaded fast". However,...