Web Development + Follow

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. …

This is your complete guide to CSS cascade layers, a CSS feature that allows us to define explicit contained layers of specificity, so that we have full control over which styles take priority in a project without relying on specificity hacks or !important. This guide is intended to help you fully understand what cascade layers …

Being able to understand Node continues to be an important skill if you’re a front-end developer. Deno has arrived as another way to run JavaScript outside the browser, but the huge ecosystem of tools and software built with Node mean it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. If you’ve mainly written JavaScript that runs in the …

I linked to Jay’s front-end predictions last year and I think they panned out pretty well. I think he’s got a bit of a knack for that wide-scope look at front-end, including tooling and architecture, as well as browser tech. Let’s review.

Font Awesome is an incredibly popular icon library. Unfortunately, it’s somewhat easy to use in a way that results in less-than-ideal performance. By subsetting Font Awesome, we can remove any unused glyphs from the font files it provides. This will reduce the number of bytes transmitted over the wire, and improve performance. Let’s subset fonts …

First things first, if you didn’t know Netlify had a CLI, they do.  One of my favorite things about it running the command netlify dev on nearly any static-site generator project is seeing it detect what it should be doing and spinning the site up in a dev server for you. But not just any dev …

A useful little UI widget thingy here from Jens Kuerschner. Click the add-to-calendar button, get a list of calendar apps, the user selects which one they actually use, and they get what they need for that calendar. Could be a specialized URL they get sent to, or even an .ics file that gets downloaded.

Within Drupal 10 core, we’re implementing a new auto-filling CSS Grid technique that I think is cool enough to share with the world. The requirements are: The user specifies a maximum number of columns. This is the auto-filling grid’s “natural” state. If a grid cell goes under a user-specified width, the auto-filling grid will readjust …

Greensock made the GSAP Flip plugin free in the 3.9 release. FLIP is an animation concept that helps make super performance state-change animations. Ryan Mulligan has a good blog post: FLIP, coined by Paul Lewis, is an acronym for First, Last, Invert, and Play. The Flip plugin harnesses this technique so that web developers can effortlessly …

Creating CSS link hover effects can add a bit of flair to an otherwise bland webpage. If you’ve ever found yourself stumped trying to make a slick hover effect, then I have six CSS effects for you to take and use for your next project.

✋ High fives to WordPress for releasing version 5.9 on January 29! This was the long-awaited introduction of the Site Editor and the reverberations are still being felt across the 43% slice of the web that is powered by WordPress. The Site Editor is more than a neat feature: it’s a completely new approach to …