Web Development + Follow

A while ago, Geoff wrote an article about a cool hover effect. The effect relies on a combination of CSS pseudo-elements, transforms, and transitions. A lot of comments have shown that the same effect can be done using background properties. Geoff mentioned that was his initial thought and that’s what I was thinking as well. …

When creating a component-based, front-end infrastructure, one of the biggest pain points I’ve personally encountered is making components that are both reusable and responsive when there are nested components within components.

Automated front-end tests are awesome. We can write a test with code to visit a page — or load up just a single component — and have that test code click on things or type text like a user would, then make assertions about the state of the application after the interactions. This lets us …

In the 15 or so years since I started making WordPress websites, nothing has had more of an impact on my productivity — and my ability to enjoy front-end development — than adding Tailwind CSS to my workflow (and it isn’t close). When I began working with Tailwind, there was an up-to-date, first-party repository on …

Mermaid diagrams and flowcharts have been gaining traction, especially with GitHub’s announcement that they are natively supported in Markdown. Let’s take a look at what they are, how to use them, and just as importantly: why. Just like you might want to embed your CodePen demo directly in your documentation source, having your diagrams and …

I’m a big fan of movies by J.J. Abrams. I enjoy their tight plots, quippy dialog, and of course: anamorphic lens flares. Filmmakers like Abrams use lens flare to add a dash of ‘homemade’ realism to their movies, a technique we can easily recreate in tools like Photoshop, then add to our sites as raster …

Content delivery networks, or CDNs, allow you to improve the delivery of your website’s static resources, most notably, with CDN caching. They do this by serving your content from edge locations, which are located all over the world. When a user browses to your site, and your site requests resources from the CDN, the CDN …

We recently covered creating fancy borders with CSS mask properties, and now we are going to cut the corners with CSS mask and clip-path! A lot of techniques exist to cut different shapes from the corners of any element. In this article, we will consider modern techniques to create unique corner shapes while trying to …

A bookmarklet is a JavaScript-based bookmark that adds to a web browser. I’d like to show you some awesome web browser hacks to aid your web development workflow and how to convert those hacks into time-saving bookmarklets.

You may not use XHTML (anymore), but when you write HTML, you may be more influenced by XHTML than you think. You are very likely writing HTML, the XHTML way. What is the XHTML way of writing HTML, and what is the HTML way of writing HTML? Let’s have a look.

I recently created a brick wall pattern as part of my #PetitePatterns series, a challenge where I create organic-looking patterns or textures in SVG within 560 bytes (or approximately the size of two tweets). To fit this constraint, I have gone through a journey that has taught me some radical ways of optimizing SVG patterns …

Hey hey! I’ve got a big announcement to make here. (Where’s my gong? I feel like this really needs a good gong hit.) CSS-Tricks, this very website you’re looking at, has been acquired by DigitalOcean! You can hear from them directly on the DigitalOcean blog as well.

I want to introduce you to a new, experimental form control called <selectmenu>. We’ll get deep into it, including how much easier it is to style than a traditional <select> element. But first, let’s fill in some context about why something like <selectmenu> is needed in the first place, as it’s still evolving and in …

What would your business be like if you sold memberships? It might be more than fun to think about, in fact, it might just be transformative. With membership, would you include little add-ons or perks for your biggest fans? Or could it become the entire core of what you do? Likewise, what might you help …

I have a handful of good links to articles about performance that are burning a hole in my bookmarks folder, and wanna drop them here to share.

“Raise the curtains” is what I call an effect where the background goes from dark to light on scroll, and the content on top also goes from light to dark while in a sticky position.

Styling ranges of text in software is a very useful thing to be able to do. Thankfully, we have the CSS Custom Highlight API to look forward to because it represents the future of styling text ranges on the web.

Ahmad Shadeed covers the CSS fit-content sizing keyword. It’s useful! It just doesn’t come up super often. I find myself using min-content a lot more, like when setting up the height of a grid-template-row. The fit-content keyword is actually closely related to min-content and max-content — it just has a little heuristic it follows that …

I enjoy articles like Hartley Charlton’s “Microsoft Edge Looks Set to Overtake Safari as World’s Second Most Popular Desktop Browser.” It’s juicy! We know these massive players in the browser market care very much about their market share, so when one passes another it’s news. Like an Olympic speed skater favored for the gold getting …

We’ve discussed a lot about the internals of using CSS in this ongoing series on web components, but there are a few special pseudo-elements and pseudo-classes that, like good friends, willingly smell your possibly halitotic breath before you go talk to that potential love interest. You know, they help you out when you need it …

A fun deep dive from Zach. Do you have an opinion on which you should use? The first option has a “trailing slash.” The second does not. I’ve always preferred this thinking: you use a trailing slash if that page has child pages (as in, it is something of a directory page, even if has …

In my recent article about CSS underline bugs in Chrome, I discussed text-decoration-thickness and text-underline-offset, two relatively new and widely-supported CSS properties that give us more control over the styling of underlines. Let me demonstrate the usefulness of text-decoration-thickness on a simple example. The Ubuntu web font has a fairly thick default underline. We can …

If you’re looking for a primer on CSS specificity, we’ve got that. And if you’re trying to get ahead of the game, you should be aware of CSS Cascade Layers as well.

 Nic Chan: … the will-change property landed in major browsers in August 2015, and I’ve been on the lookout for when to use it ever since. It might seem self-evident to apply it to commonly animated properties such as transform or opacity, but the browser already classifies them as composite properties, thus, they are known as the few …

For the past few weeks, I’ve been hiring for a senior full-stack JavaScript engineer at my rental furniture company, Pabio. Since we’re a remote team, we conduct our interviews on Zoom, and I’ve observed that some developers are not great at live-coding or whiteboard interviews, even if they’re good at the job. So, instead, we …

In recent years, the Jamstack methodology for building websites has become increasingly popular. Performance, scalable, and secure, it’s easy to see why it’s becoming an attractive way to build websites for developers. GatsbyJS is a static site generator platform. It’s powered by React, a front-end JavaScript library, for building user interfaces. And uses GraphQL, an …

Kinda silly sounding, isn’t it? CSS database queries. But, hey, CSS is capable of talking to other languages in the sense that it can set the values of things that they can read. Plus, CSS can request other files, and I suppose a server could respond to that request with something it requested from a …

Let’s face it: building an AA or AAA-accessible product can be quite daunting. Luckily, having an accessible product isn’t all-or-nothing. Even seemingly small improvements can have nice quality of life benefits for many people. In that spirit, here are five accessibility quick wins you can implement today.

That’s a damn one-two punch from Dave. He goes for the ultimate clickbait title¹, then follows up with a pile of epic advice for us all. If you want web browsers to get better, listen up: Complaining on Twitter sure does feel good but it doesn’t do much other than burning bridges and burning through …

On several occasions, I’ve needed to send off an HTTP request with some data to log when a user does something like navigate to a different page or submit a form. Consider this contrived example of sending some information to an external service when a link is clicked: There’s nothing terribly complicated going on here. …