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Font Playground
20.7.2018
This is a wondrous little project by Wenting Zhang that showcases a series of variable fonts and lets you manipulate their settings to see the results. It’s interesting that there’s so many tools like this that have been released over the past couple of months, such as v-fonts, Axis-Praxis...
CSS: A New Kind of JavaScript
19.7.2018
In this wacky and satirical post, Heydon Pickering describes a wild new technology called Cascading Style Sheets that solves a lot of the problems you might bump into when styling things with JavaScript:
A good sign that a technology is not fit for purpose is how much we have to rely on workarounds...
Accessibility for Teams
19.7.2018
Maya Benari:
Accessibility is a crucial part of government product design. First, it’s the law. Federal agencies face legal consequences when they don’t meet accessibility requirements. Second, it affects us all. Whether you have a motor disability, you sprained your wrist playing dodgeball,...
The State of Headless CMS Market
19.7.2018
(This is a sponsored post.)
In March and April 2018, Kentico conducted the first global report about the state of headless CMS market. We surveyed 986 CMS practitioners in 85 countries about their opinions, adoption, and plans for using headless CMS. The survey contains valuable industry insights...
What bit of advice would you share with someone new to your field?
18.7.2018
The most FA of all the FAQs.
Here's Laura Kalbag:
Find what you love. Don’t worry about needing to learn every language, technique or tool. Start with what interests you, and carve your own niche. And then use your powers for good!
And my own:
Buy a domain name. Figure out how to put an HTML file...
The div that looks different in every browser
13.7.2018
It's not that Martijn Cuppens used User Agent sniffing, CSS hacks, or anything like that to make this quirk div. This is just a plain ol' <div> using the outline property a la:
div {
inset 100px green;
outline-offset: -125px;
}
It looks different in different browsers because browsers...
Scrolling Gradient
13.7.2018
If you want a gradient that changes as you scroll down a very long page, you can create a gradient with a bunch of color stops, apply it to the body and it will do just that.
But, what if you don't want a perfectly vertical gradient? Like you want just the top left corner to change color? Mike...
Design Systems at GitHub
12.7.2018
Here’s a nifty post by Diana Mounter all about the design systems team at GitHub that details how the team was formed, the problems they've faced and how they've adapted along the way:
When I started working at GitHub in late 2015, I noticed that there were many undocumented patterns, I had...
Emojis as Icons
11.7.2018
There are lots of unicode symbols that make pretty good icons already, like arrows (←), marks (✘), and objects (✂︎).You can already colorize these like a normal font glyph. Then, there are emojis, those full-color suckers we all know about. What if you could take just the shape of an emoji...
itty.bitty
9.7.2018
Mark this down as one of the strangest things I’ve seen in a good long while. Nicholas Jitkoff has made a tool called itty.bitty that creates websites with all of the assets being contained within their own link. You can create a website without any HTML or CSS resources at all because it’s...
Reinvest Your Time with HelloSign API
5.7.2018
HelloSign API makes it simple to embed secure and legally binding eSignatures directly into any website. It's 2x faster to implement than other eSign solutions and is also the only eSign API that allows customers to completely white label the integration, meaning our customers can give their...
Writing Good Support Requests
2.7.2018
My take on trying to be helpful to a support staff.
One bit is just as relevant for learning development:
Writing out a ticket will help you figure out the problem.
Sometimes when you have to take a second to collect your thoughts and explain something, the problem will become clear and maybe even...
How to create a logo that responds to its own aspect ratio
28.6.2018
One of the cool things about <svg> is that it's literally its own document, so @media queries in CSS inside the SVG are based on its viewport rather than the HTML document that likely contains it.
This unique feature has let people play around for years. Tim Kadlec experimented with...
Free E-book: Modernize for Mobile Apps
28.6.2018
(This is a sponsored post.)
No sign up required to read the free e-book.
Building modern apps (mobile, PWAs or Single Page Apps) that connect to legacy or enterprise systems is a pain. We put together an e-book that discusses the various options for how to make it all work. Here are some of...
Better rendering for variable fonts
26.6.2018
I was messing around with a variable font the other day and noticed this weird rendering issue in the latest version of Chrome where certain parts of letterforms were clipping into each other in a really weird way. Thankfully, though, Stephen Nixon has come to the rescue with a temporary hack...
Add real-time comments to a Gatsby blog
26.6.2018
(This is a sponsored post.)
This tutorial will show you how to add realtime comments to a Gatsby blog. You will use Node and Express to create a simple backend, allowing users to add and view comments instantly.
Direct Link to Article — Permalink…
The post Add real-time comments to...
Resilient, Declarative, Contextual
25.6.2018
Keith J. Grant:
I want to look at three key characteristics of CSS that set it apart from conventional programming languages: it’s resilient; it’s declarative; and it’s contextual. Understanding these aspects of the language, I think, is key to becoming proficient in CSS.
Like HTML, unknown...
Users DO Change Font Size
24.6.2018
Evan Minto:
The question was “How many users browse the main Internet Archive site with a default font size other than the common value of 16 pixels?” By knowing this, we would determine how many users would be affected by sizing with relative units like rems/ems.
Using the methodology I describe...
Don’t Use The Placeholder Attribute
22.6.2018
Eric Bailey takes a hardline position on <input placeholder>.
You might be thinking, as I did: yeah, yeah I know the pitfalls. I'm capable of using placeholder responsibly. But when you look at all the negatives together:
Can’t be automatically translated;
Is oftentimes used in place of...
An Almost Ideal React Image Component
21.6.2018
Yes, this is a React component, but regardless if you care about that part or not, the "ideal image component" part could be of interest. There is a lot to consider with how we put images on web pages these days. This deals with:
Placeholder space (and then flexible responsive styles after...