Web Development + Follow

You know how there are JavaScript dialogs for alerting, confirming, and prompting user actions? Say you want to replace JavaScript dialogs with the new HTML dialog element.

Hey! Scheduled Functions are cool! Think of them like a CRON job. I want this code to run every Monday at 2pm. I want this code run every hour on the hour. That kind of thing. Why would you want to do that? There are tons of reasons! Perhaps something like “send my newsletter” where …

A little gradient generator tool from Tom Quinonero. You’d think fading one color to another would be an obvious, simple, solved problem — it’s actually anything but! Tom’s generator does two things that help make a gradient better: You can pick an “interpolation space.” Gradients that use the sRGB color space (pretty much all the …

Virtual conferences have changed the game in terms of how a presenter is able to deliver content to an audience. At a live event it’s likely you just have your laptop, but at home, you may have multiple monitors so that you can move around windows and make off-screen changes when delivering live coding demos. …

The relatively new WordPress editor, also known as the WordPress Block Editor, always under development via the Gutenberg plugin, has been with us since 2018. You can use the block editor on any WordPress theme, provided the theme loads CSS that the blocks use. But there are new themes that lean into the Block Editor …

Pedro Santos suggests: Using naming conventions such that you can learn them once and apply them everywhere Unidirectional data flows. Make it easy to follow the app flow. No magic numbers. I’d add they are even worse in CSS as it’s both the confusion they cause and how they are often tied to awkward or …

I interviewed Thierry Koblentz, creator of Atomic CSS, to understand the history and background that led to making of the popular CSS framework. Thierry, now retired, has vast experience writing CSS at large scale and has previously worked as a front-end engineer at Yahoo!. Thierry is widely credited with bringing the concept of Atomic CSS …

Here’s a super classy demo from Michelle Barker over on Codrops that shows how to build a scrollable and draggable timeline with GSAP. It’s an interesting challenge to have two different interactions (vertical scrolling and horizontal dragging) be tied together and react to each other. I love seeing it all done with nice semantic markup, …

The ability to identify users is vital for maintaining the security of any applications. Equally important is the code that’s written to manage user identities, particularly when it comes to avoiding loopholes for unauthorized access to data held by an application. Writing authentication code without a framework or libraries available can take a ton of …

Jim Nielsen’s mom couldn’t open a website. Jim worked on confirming the issue and documented how he got to the bottom of it: “… well it can’t be a browser issue. It’s not like my Mom is using Internet Explorer! She has relatively modern tech: an iPad (Safari) and a Chromebox (Google Chrome).” But the …

I have a coworker who is smart, capable, and technologically-literate. Like me, they work on the web full-time. When they are sharing their screen in a meeting, I find myself disassociating fixating on the red update button in their copy of Chrome.

Maggie Appleton gets into what is perhaps the foremost metaphor the web is founded on: paper. Paper documents were the original metaphor for the web. … The page you’re reading this on still mimics paper. We still call it a page or an HTML document. It follows the same typographic rules and conventions – black text on white backgrounds …

Lemme do this one quick-hits style: Mary Lou published a quintessentially-Codrops-y demo called Alternate Column Scroll. The scrolling effect is powered by Locomotive Scroll, which we’ve coincidentally covered before. Bramus has been exploring native CSS scrolling effects using the future CSS Scroll-Timeline feature for a while now. He’s got a four-parter that digs deep into …

It’s 2022. And the current relevance of TypeScript is undisputed. TypeScript has dominated the front-end developer experience by many, many accounts. By now you likely already know that TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript, building on JavaScript by adding syntax for type declarations, classes, and other object-oriented features with type-checking. And when I say dominated, …

I was doing my Advent of UI Components, and I stumbled upon the from-font value for the text-decoration-thickness CSS property. I was curious about it, so I did a little research and I think what I found (and learned) is both interesting and worth sharing.

I’m always on the wrong branch. I’m either on master or main working on something that should be on a fix or feature branch. Or I’m on the last branch I was working on and should have cut a new branch. Oh well. It’s never that big of a deal. Basically means switching unstaged changes …

TypeScript is a wonderful tool for writing JavaScript that scales. It’s more or less the de facto standard for the web when it comes to large JavaScript projects. As outstanding as it is, there are some tricky pieces for the unaccustomed. One such area is TypeScript discriminated unions. Specifically, given this code: …many developers are …

Design systems are an entire job these days. Agencies are hired to create them. In-house teams are formed to handle them, shipping them so that other teams can use them and helping ensure they do. Design systems aren’t a fad, they are a positive evolution of how digital design is done. Backlight is the ultimate …

Say you have three HTML classes, and a DOM element should only have one of them at a time: Now your job is to rotate them. That is, cycle through classes on an HTML element. When some event occurs, if the element has state-1 on it, remove state-1 and add state-2. If it has state-2 …

Have you ever tried to make CSS borders in a repeating zig-zag pattern? Like where a colored section of a website ends and another differently colored section begins — not with a straight line, but angled zig zags, rounded humps, or waves. There are a number of ways you could do this sort of CSS …

Say you’ve got a <Card /> component. It’s highly likely it shouldn’t be butted right up against any other components with no spacing around it. That’s true for… pretty much every component. So, how do you handle component spacing in a design system? Do you apply spacing using margin directly on the <Card />? Perhaps …

A little bit of animation on a site can add some flair, impress users, and get their attention. You could have them run, no matter where they are on the page, immediately when the page loads. But what if your website is fairly long so it took some time for the user to scroll down …

You know that joke, “Two front-end developers walk into a bar and find they have nothing in common”? It’s funny, yet frustrating, because it’s true. This article will present three different perspectives on accessibility in web design and development. Three perspectives that could help us bridge the great divide between users and designers/developers. It might …

SVG is a great image format, so it’s nice to able to use it in WordPress. If you’re looking to be using SVG in WordPress. , we’ve got you covered here with all the best options.

Another aspect of web components that we haven’t talked about yet is that a JavaScript function is called whenever a web component is added or removed from a page. These lifecycle callbacks can be used for many things, including making an element aware of its context.

I remember vividly a period early in my coding career when I began to feel that things were changing away from what I knew, and headed towards a more complex set of tools and practices, anchored in the command line and something called npm. This is the first part of a beginner’s guide where we …

One of the things that makes this new, tooling-heavy era of front-end development so seemingly hard to understand at first is that, while we often call things by a singular name, they tend to be actually comprised of several different interconnected pieces. The same is true for npm and the ecosystem around it. For example: …

Now that we know what npm stands for and have a super general idea of what it does and how it fits into web development, we ought to spend a little bit of time looking at the command line, because it’s how we interact with npm.

Here’s what you need to know about Node.js (or simply Node) and how it relates to npm right off the bat: Node is JavaScript, but as a server-side language. This is possible because of V8, Chromium’s JavaScript engine, which can run on its own, outside the confines of the browser. Node and browser-based JavaScript can …

If you’re keeping score, so far in this npm guide we’ve developed a general understanding of what npm is—notably, that it stands for Node Package Manager. In the process, we’ve discussed the importance of the command line and how it’s used with npm. We also looked specifically at the “n” in npm—Node—and learned that Node …