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Every now and then, I find that I’ve accumulated a bunch of links about various things I find interesting. Like React and JavaScript! Here’s a list of nine links to other articles about them that I’ve been saving up and think are worth sharing.

Imagine you have an element with a multi-value CSS property, such as transform: optional custom property values: Now imagine you don’t always want all the transform values to be applied, so some are optional. You might think of CSS optional custom property values:

I was just writing in my “What’s new in since CSS3?” article about recent and possible future changes to CSS colors. It’s weirdly a lot. There are just as many or more new and upcoming ways to define colors than what we have now. I thought we’d take a really quick look. First, a major …

This is a wonderful roundup from Jeremy, who I picture circling January 1, 2022, in red marker on a giant paper calendar back in 2008 and patiently counting the days. See, there was a little smattering of internet drama back in 2008 (weird, right?) where Hixie kind of “officially speculated” that HTML5 would take 19 …

I recently rewrote one of my projects — Minimal Theme for Twitter — as a Next.js Chrome extension because I wanted to use React for the pop-up. Using React would allow me to clearly separate my extension’s pop-up component and its application logic from its content scripts, which are the CSS and JavaScript files needed …

Cloudinary is a host for your digital assets like images and video. If you don’t already know them, you should, because you can build it into the asset management you almost certainly need to do if you run any size of website. Cloudinary helps you serve the assets as efficiently as technologically possible, meaning optimization, …

Say you have a bitmap graphic — like a JPG, PNG, or GIF — and you wish it was vector, like SVG. What do you do? You could trace it yourself in some kind of design software. Or tools within design software can help. (I don’t wanna delay the lede here, there is a free …

I was updating my portfolio and wanted to use the forward slash (/) as a visual element for the site’s main layout. I hadn’t attempted to create a slanted container in CSS before, but it seemed like it would be easy at first glance. As I began digging into it more, however, there were actually …

There is a code snippet that I see all the time when the media query prefers-reduced-motion is talked about. Here it is: This is CSS that attempts to obliterate any motion on a website under the condition that the user has specified a preference for reduced motion in the accessibility preferences of their operating system.

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 …