Web Development + Follow

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. …

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 …