Web Development + Follow

Making CSS-only loaders is one of my favorite tasks. It’s always satisfying to look at those infinite animations. And, of course, there are lots of techniques and approaches to make them — no need to look further than CodePen to see just how many. In this article, though, we will see how to make a …

Can’t smash the Like button hard enough for what Miriam Suzanne has to say on the challenging technical hurdles of implementing Webmentions: The first round required several online services along with HTML & JS changes to my static site, just to verify my indieweb identity. Then more changes to the site and more online services to help fetch …

QR codes are funny, right? We love them, then hate them, then love them again. Anyways, they’ve lately been popping up again and it got me thinking about how they’re made. There are like a gazillion QR code generators out there, but say it’s something you need to do on your own website. This package …

Those of us who’ve been web developers more than a few years have probably written code using more than one JavaScript framework. With all the choices out there — React, Svelte, Vue, Angular, Solid — it’s all but inevitable. One of the more frustrating things we have to deal with when working across frameworks is …

There’s all kinds of ways to do that. Some more advisable and better-suited for certain situations than others, of course.

Block patterns, also frequently referred to as sections, were introduced in WordPress 5.5 to allow users to build and share predefined block layouts in the pattern directory. The directory is the home of a wide range of curated patterns designed by the WordPress community. These patterns are available in simple copy and paste format, require …

Nolan Lawson sparked some discussion when he described a noticeable shift away from single-page applications (SPAs): Hip new frameworks like Astro, Qwik, and Elder.js are touting their MPA multi-page application with “0kB JavaScript by default.” Blog posts are making the rounds listing all the challenges with SPAs: history, focus management, scroll restoration, Cmd/Ctrl-click, memory leaks, …

I teach a class over at the local college here in Long Beach and a majority of the content is hosted on the Canvas LMS so students can access it online. And, naturally, I want the content to be as accessible as possible, so thank goodness Canvas has a11y tooling built right into it. But …

It wasn’t long ago that Nick Sypteras showed us how to make custom badges for a GitHub repo. Well, Reza Shakeri put Beautify GitHub Profile together and it’s a huuuuuuge repo of different badges that pulls lots of examples together with direct links to the repos you can use to create them. And it doesn’t …

We’ve walked through a series of posts now about interesting approaches to CSS hover effects. We started with a bunch of examples that use CSS background properties, then moved on to the text-shadow property where we technically didn’t use any shadows. We also combined them with CSS variables and calc() to optimize the code and …

Myles C. Maxfield on the WebKit Blog published a nifty how-to for color fonts. It comes on the heels of what Ollie wrote up here on CSS-Tricks the other day, and while they cover a lot of common ground, there’s some nice nuggets in the WebKit post that make them both worth reading.

Earlier this year, I self-published an ebook called Understanding JavaScript Promises (free for download). Even though I didn’t have any intention of turning it into a print book, enough people reached out inquiring about a print version that I decided to self-publish that as well .I thought it would be an easy exercise using HTML …

So, SVG has this stroke-miterlimit presentation attribute. You’ve probably seen it when exporting an SVG from a graphic editor program, or perhaps you find out you could remove it without noticing any change to the visual appearance. After a good amount of research, one of the first things I discovered is that the attribute works …

Ahmad Shadeed — doing what he always does so well — provides an early look at the object-view-box property, something he describes as a native way to crop an image in the browser with CSS. The use case? Well, Ahmad wastes no time showing how to use the property to accomplish what used to require …

As the author of a library called AgnosticUI, I’m always on the lookout for new components. And recently, I decided to dig in and start work on a new dialog (aka modal) component. That’s something many devs like to have in their toolset and my goal was to make the best one possible, with an …

Zeldman: You may not know his name, but he played a huge part in creating the web you take for granted today. And he’s back—kind of. That would be Glenn Davis and the Verevolf site Zeldman’s talking about. The site is a growing archive of Davis’s personal (and unvarnished) recollections pioneering the early web, like …

Don’t you hate it when you load a website or web app, some content displays and then some images load — causing content to shift around? That’s called content reflow and can lead to an incredibly annoying user experience for visitors. I’ve previously written about solving this with React’s Suspense, which prevents the UI from loading until the images come …

I was fortunate last year to get approached by Shawn Wang (swyx) about doing some work for Temporal. The idea was to cast my creative eye over what was on the site and come up with some ideas that would give the site a little “something” extra. This was quite a neat challenge as I …

Utilizing icons in user interface elements is helpful. In addition to element labeling, icons can help reinforce a user element’s intention to users. But I have to say, I notice a bit of icon misalignment while browsing the web. Even if the icon’s alignment is correct, icons often do not respond well when typographic styles …

Global styles, a feature of the block themes, is one of my favorite parts of creating block themes. The concept of global style variations in WordPress were introduced in Gutenberg 12.5 which would allow theme authors to create alternate variations of a block theme with different combinations of colors, fonts, typography, spacing, etc. Different theme.json …

In my last article we saw how CSS background properties allow us to create cool hover effects. This time, we will focus on the CSS text-shadow property to explore even more interesting hovers. You are probably wondering how adding shadow to text can possibly give us a cool effect, but here’s the catch: we’re not …

Braydon Coyer recently launched a monthly CSS art challenge. He actually had reached out to me about donating a copy of my book Move Things with CSS to use as a prize for the winner of the challenge — which I was more than happy to do! The first month’s challenge? Spring. And when thinking …

According to Toshi Omagari, the author of Arcade Game Typography, the world’s first multi-colored digital font was created in 1982 for a never-released video game called Insector. Multi-colored fonts, sometimes called chromatic type, are still relatively rare on the web, even though the COLR font format has had full cross-browser support since 2018 (even in …

By now, you are probably familiar with one or more programming languages. But have you ever wondered how you could create your own programming language? And by that, I mean: A programming language is any set of rules that convert strings to various kinds of machine code output. In short, a programming language is just …

Let’s say you have a website built on a platform that excels at design and it’s available at example.com. But that platform falls short at blogging. So you think to yourself, “What if I could use a different blogging platform and make it available at example.com/blog?” Most people would tell you that goes against how …

So, you’ve decided to build a blog with Next.js. Like any dev blogger, you’d like to have code snippets in your posts that are formatted nicely with syntax highlighting. Perhaps you also want to display line numbers in the snippets, and maybe even have the ability to call out certain lines of code. This post …

If you’ve spent time looking at open-source repos on GitHub, you’ve probably noticed that most of them use badges in their README files. Take the official React repository, for instance. There are GitHub badges all over the README file that communicate important dynamic info, like the latest released version and whether the current build is passing.

In design, reflections are stylized mirror images of objects. Even though they are not as popular as shadows, they have their moments — just think about the first time you explored the different font formats in MS Word or PowerPoint: I bet reflection was your second-most-used style, next to shadow, foregoing others like outline and …

Howdy y’all! Unless you’ve been living under a rock (and maybe even then), you’ve undoubtedly heard the news that CSS-Tricks, was acquired by DigitalOcean. Congratulations to everyone! 🥳 As a little hurrah to commemorate the occasion, I wanted to create the DigitalOcean logo in CSS. I did that, but then took it a little further …

In my last article, we went over how to set up a web app that serves chunks and bundles of CSS and JavaScript from CloudFront. We integrated it into Vite so that when the app runs in a browser, the assets requested from the app’s root HTML file would pull from CloudFront as the CDN. …