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CSS overrides can change the default look of almost anything: You can use CSS to override what a checkbox or radio button looks like, but if you don’t, the checkbox will look like a default checkbox on your operating system and some would say that’s best for accessibility and usability. You can use CSS to …

I’ve encountered two bugs in Chrome while testing the new CSS text-decoration-thickness and text-underline-offset properties, and I want to share them with you here in this article.

We use and love Jetpack around here. It’s a WordPress plugin that brings a whole suite of functionality to your site ranging from security to marketing with lots of ridiculously useful stuff in between! Here’s our favorite features around here.

Fingerprinting is bad. It’s a term that refers to building up enough metadata about a user that you can essentially figure out who they are. JavaScript has access to all sorts of fingerprinting possibilities, which then combined with the IP address that the server has access to, means fingerprinting is all too common. You don’t …

I’ll bet you are using browser extensions right now. Some of them are extremely popular and useful, like ad blockers, password managers, and PDF viewers. These extensions (or “add-ons”) are not limited to those purposes — you can do a lot more with them! In this article, I will give you an introduction on how …

The year has come to a close and it’s time again for our end-of-year wrapup. The most important message is this: thank you. (thankyouthankyou) Thanks for stopping by and reading this site. If you didn’t, I’d be out of a job around here, and I quite like this job so I owe it all to …

Ahmad Shadeed nails it again with “Defensive CSS.” The idea is that you should write CSS to be ready for issues caused by dynamic content. More items than you thought would be there? No problem, the area can expand or scroll. Title too long? No problem, it either wraps or truncates, and won’t bump into anything …

I’m actually working on a talk (whew! been a while! kinda feels good!) about just how good the world of building websites has gotten. I plan to cover a wide swath of web tech, on purpose, because I feel like things have gotten good all around. CSS is doing great, but so is nearly everything …

When you’re about to start a new website, what do you think first? Do you start with a library or framework you know, like React or Vue, or a meta-framework on top of that, like Next or Nuxt? Do you pull up a speedy build tool like Vite, or configure your webpack? There’s a great …

High-velocity, online businesses produce multiple digital assets like banners, images, videos, PDFs, etc., to promote their businesses online. For such businesses, Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions are essential. These solutions help centrally store, manage, organize, search and track digital assets. Having a central repository of assets helps in the faster execution of campaigns and improves …

Animation on the web is often a contentious topic. I think, in part, it’s because bad animation is blindingly obvious, whereas well-executed animation fades seamlessly into the background. When handled well, animation can really elevate a website, whether it’s just adding a bit of personality or providing visual hints and lessening cognitive load. Unfortunately, it …

Lea Verou made a Web Component for processing Markdown. Looks like there were a couple of others out there already, but I agree with Lea in that this is a good use case for the light DOM (as opposed to the shadow DOM that is normally quite useful for web components), and that’s what Lea’s …

One of the best things you can do for your website in 2022 is add a service worker, if you don’t have one in place already. Service workers give your website super powers. Today, I want to show you some of the amazing things that they can do, and give you a paint-by-numbers boilerplate that …

I hadn’t heard of most of the Chrome extensions that Sarem Gizaw lists as 2021 favorites. Here are my hot takes on all of them, except the virtual learning specific ones that aren’t very relevant to me.

One of the coolest things I’ve been messing with in the last couple years is the CSS Paint API. I love it. I did a talk on it, and made a little gallery of my own paint worklets. The other cool thing is the prefers-color-scheme media query and how you can use it to adapt …

The first time I had my breath taken away by a humble scrollbar was on this very site. When CSS-Tricks v17 rolled out with its FAT CHONKY BOI, my jaw dropped.

How do you make a great website? Everyone has an answer at the ready: Flashy animations! The latest punk-rock CSS trick! Gradients! Illustrations! Colors to pack a punch! Vite! And, sure, all these things might make a website better. But no matter how fancy the application is or how dazzling the technology will ever be …

One thing people can do to make their websites better is to remember that you are not representative of all your users. Our life experiences and how we interact with the web are not indicative of how everyone interacts with the web.

Last year, we kicked out a roundup of published surveys, research, and other findings from around the web. There were some nice nuggets in there, like a general sentiment that the web needs more documentation, Tailwind CSS dun got big, TypeScript is the second most beloved language, and that the top one million sites are …

How much time do you spend designing the content presentation for your websites? When you write a new blog post or create a new page, are you thinking about just the words, or how your readers will engage with those words? With these few tips in mind, you can make your site’s content easier to …

Ensuring accessibility is a clear path to making your website better. When you make your site accessible, you grow your audience, improve the experience for all people using it (not just those with accessibility needs), and you get SEO benefits as well. Along the same lines, preference-query customization is another great opportunity to give your …

There was a time when I’d write React, Angular, and Ember as a kind of generic grouping of three major JavaScript frameworks. And maybe just because three is a nice number, that became React, Vue, and Angular over time, thanks to Vue having shot up in popularity over the years. Ember, in my view, has …

NGL, I was a little overwhelmed when I sat down to write this article. There are so many things that immediately flooded my mind—take out any extra divs; use links for URLs, use buttons for events and actions; use semantic HTML instead of divs everywhere; use variable fonts… the list went on and on. But, …

Does shadow DOM improve style performance? — Nolan Lawson covers how, because of the inherent encapsulation of the shadow DOM, the styling gets applied a bit faster than it would if those styling rules were relevant to the entire page. But as ever, it depends, and it turns out that classes and IDs are actually faster …

Everything kind of sucks right now. Things—generally—feel bad. Setting aside the broader realities of a global pandemic and rampant social injustices, we’re watching the identity of the web platform, an intrinsically free and open medium of creative expression, co-opted for the “Web 3.0” grift built on artificial scarcity and an accelerating climate crisis. Websites (mostly) …

There are a number of ways to approach a dark mode for your website, but essentially you get all the styles ready for it and then apply them when the user has indicated they want them, whether by direct choice or a system-level preference. If your website doesn’t have a dark mode, well, then, it …

We’re going to go over details on how designer ↔️ developer collaboration in AWS Amplify Studio can make app building easier, but let’s cover one of those things right at the top here. Say your designer (or you!) like to work in Figma, the predominant tool in UI design these days. The whole design system …

When I was working at my first “real” job in the field in the mid-2000s, it was hammered in the web dev field to build tiny websites (no more than 100KB per page), only use JavaScript for special effects, and make sure everything—from images to Flash content—has a fallback so that JavaScript features progressively enhance. …

Just the first sentence alone here from Stepanie Yee and Tony Chu is solid: In machine learning, computers apply statistical learning techniques to automatically identify patterns in data. These techniques can be used to make highly accurate predictions. And what follows is one of those two-column “scrollytelling” websites that does an incredible job at demystifying a concept. …

What’s one thing we can do to make our site better? Maybe nothing at all! Our websites keep getting bigger and bigger! When we have a team with so many exciting ideas and such interesting technology, it can be easy to get swept up and not as easy to prioritize all those ideas.   However, there …