Web Development + Follow

Huh! I did not realize that CSS custom properties had their own resolution behavior for how !important works in their values. Uh, despite writing a guide about them. 😬 But hey it’s now updated. Stefan Judis documents it clearly. The deal is that !important is not at all used in the final value. So:

When Chris first sent me this prompt, I was thinking about writing about progressive enhancement, but that subject is so wide-reaching to be one thing and all too predictable, especially for those already familiar with my writing. Saying that, what I’m going to outline in this article also isn’t just one thing either, but the …

Jordan Scales explores the computer science concept of topological sorting, and what it might look like if applied to the concept of z-index in CSS. So, you don’t express what the z-index should be directly; instead, you say exactly what other element you want to be on top of.

Three cheers for (draft stage) progress on a Sanitizer API! It’s gospel that you can’t trust user input. And indeed, any app I’ve ever worked on has dealt with bad actors trying to slip in and execute nefarious code somewhere it shouldn’t. It’s the web developer’s job to clean user input before it is used …

Between Google Chrome experimenting with “following” sites, along with a growing frustration of how social media platforms limit a creator’s reach to their fans through algorithmic feeds, there’s been renewed interest in RSS feeds and they’re primed for a comeback as we get into 2022. This research is brought to you by support from Frontend …

I was reading Jake’s “Cross-fading any two DOM elements is currently impossible” which is a wonderfully nerdy deep dive into how there is no real way to literally cross-fade elements. Yeah, you can animate both of their opacities, but even that isn’t quite the same. Turns out there is a Chrome/WebKit-only CSS function call called …

Matias Capeletto covers the breadth of Vite, from the technological shoulders it stands on, to the peers exploring similar territory, to the other technologies it supports, to the frameworks that now use it primarily, and more. The fact that that a post that is this thick like this exists is a testament to Vite’s meteoric …

Earlier this week, I tried out a starter theme for a blog platform. The theme had loads of nice default features: pretty typography, fancy navigation, dark mode widget… and a couple of default trackers I really don’t want just sitting there in a header component, waiting for me to add my account information. As web …

Google is handing out bucks for CSS-related projects, so you might as well know about it! Nicole Sullivan: All of us who work on the web regularly benefit from the work of people who create specifications, tools, demos, tutorials, and polyfills. Many of these resources are side projects, made available and supported free of charge. …

When’s the last time you read your website? Like out loud in the lobby of a Starbucks on a weekday afternoon, over the phone to your parents, or perhaps even as a bedtime story for your kids. No worries, this isn’t a trick question or anything—just a gut check. If there’s only one thing you …

Ain’t this the truth: It’s like when you’re learning a new language. At some point your brain goes from translating from your mother tongue into the other language, and instead starts thinking in that other language. I don’t speak any other language besides English, but I’ve heard that’s true. With perhaps a last step being when you start dreaming …

What’s the one thing people can do to make their website better? Now that is a good question. One with many right answers, like improving performance, taking care of accessibility, and upgrading user experience as prime examples. These are all great tips, and there’s more like them, but how do you choose just one? And, …

I got this question from a listener the other day. Fair question, I’d say. The word “Static” in “Static Site Generator” is at-odds with the word “Dynamic.” It seems to imply that the website created with a Static Site Generator (SSG) is locked in stone, only to be changed when it is run again some …

Ya know, I used to do one of these posts after making a few podcast appearances I hadn’t had a chance to link up yet, so I could share them. As fate would have it, I haven’t been on many podcasts (other than my own) lately. One exception! I was on Episode 33 of That …

I read a recent Smashing Magazine post that included a recommendation for Hygen. I just happen to be doing quite a bit of new UI work in a Next.js app and the amount of manual folder/file scaffolding I was doing was getting annoying. So the timing was perfect here. In this app I’m working on, …

Josh’s Shadow Palette Generator is a fantastic tool. The premise is that box-shadow pretty much always looks better when there are multiple layered shadows that are a bit tinted. It reminds me of how gradients almost always look better when eased. The generator does that, but also does three levels of them so you’ve got …

So what is the one thing that people can do is to make their website better? To answer that, let’s take a step back in time … The year is 1998, and the web is on the rise. In an attempt to give a high-level overview of the architecture of the WWW, Tim Berners-Lee — …

Amazon has a vision with AWS Amplify. First, a premise: As browsers have become faster and more powerful over the last decade, front-end developers are building web apps that are more feature-rich and performant for both desktop and mobile devices. To implement these features, front-end developers are increasingly becoming full-stack developers who have to think …

I wanted to write down what I think the reasons are here in December of 2021 so that we might revisit it from time to time in the future and see if these reasons are still relevant. I’m a web guy myself, so I’m interested in seeing how the web can evolve to mitigate these …

Say you’ve got a two-column CSS grid and you want one of those columns to behave like position: sticky;. There is nothing stopping you from doing that. But the default height for those two columns is going to be “as tall as the tallest content in either column” because the default behavior for grid columns …

Take two minutes right now and visit your current project in a browser. Then, using only the Tab key, you should be able to navigate between interactive elements including buttons, links, and form elements. If you are sighted, you should be able to visually follow the focus as it jumps between elements in the DOM. …

Quick hits! There is a new web API called EyeDropper: Here’s a very good blog post intro on it. It’s only in Chrome’n’friends right now. I wish I knew better how to watchdog APIs like this. Looks like it originally came from Edge, then became a community group thing, which is where the draft spec …

This is a fantastic article from Julia Evans about duking it out with modern front-end tooling. Julia has made a bunch of Vue projects and typically uses no build process at all:  I usually have an index.html file, a script.js file, and then I do a <script src=”script.js”> and that’s it. Which I think is awesome and probably means those projects …

From my perspective, the question of what one thing we can do to make a website better is not a technical one. The more I browse the internet, the more I realize that the biggest issue with a lot of websites is the fact that they don’t let me accomplish the task I am looking …

MarkUp is the leading visual commenting platform for images, PDFs, and live websites. It’s the perfect companion in your creative process to make your life easier. Manage and organize all web, PDF, and image projects in one location and easily sort between them. Here’s the point: do you need feedback on a design? Does team …

The SVG <path> syntax is a beast. There are all sorts of commands that make up a mini-language all of its own — so powerful that it’s capable of drawing anything. Don’t be too scared of it, though, because some of the commands are very straightforward to understand. They read like “put pen here, draw …

I try to keep up with WordPress news because I’m a big WordPress user and have many production sites that run on it. WordPress has been good to me as a site builder for literally my entire career. So, like we do with typography (example), accessibility (example), and JavaScript (example), I’m hoping to occasionally drop …

I’ve built websites that are used by millions of people all over the world. I’ve made more mistakes than I care to count and I’ve had to deal with the repercussions of those mistakes for years thereafter. Through all of this, my team and I have been trying to strike the best balance between user …

An interesting (scary) trick of an nearly undetectable exploit. Wolfgang Ettlinger: What if a backdoor literally cannot be seen and thus evades detection even from thorough code reviews? I’ll post the screenshot of the exploit from the post with the actual exploit circled:

What if HTML had “tabs”? That would be cool, says I. Dave has been spending some of his time and energy, along with a group of “Tabvengers” from OpenUI, on this. A lot of research leads to a bit of a plot twist: Our research showed there are a lot of variations for what makes …