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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 …

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. …