Web Development + Follow

Say you have an elements with CSS tooltips and you’re going to position those tooltips such that it opens up next to the element on hover (or probably better: when clicked/tapped). Next to it where? Above it? What if the element is already really close to the top of the screen? In that case, it …

Vite (pronounced “veet”) is a newish JavaScript bundler. It comes batteries-included, requires almost no configuration to be useful, and includes plenty of configuration options. Oh—and it’s fast. Incredibly fast. This post will walk through the process of converting an existing project to Vite. We’ll cover things like aliases, shimming webpack’s dotenv handling, and server proxying. …

Custom Fields in WordPress are arbitrary bits of data that you can apply to Posts, Pages, and Custom Post Types in WordPress. Metadata, as it were, in the form of key/value pairs. For example: Key: subtitle / Value: They are more than they are cracked up to be Key: header_color_override / Value: #e52e05 Key: property_url …

Raw Chromium, perhaps? So, Chrome is based on Chromium which is open-source. Chrome is Chromium with Google’s extra stuff on top of it. What extra stuff? Kinda lots! A few years ago, The Verge published “Microsoft reveals all the Google things it removed in its Chromium Edge browser” with this image from Microsoft listing out …

If you’re disciplined and make use of the inheritance that the CSS cascade provides, you’ll end up writing less CSS. But because our styles often comes from all kinds of sources — and can be a pain to structure and maintain—the cascade can be a source of frustration, and the reason we end up with …

Every now and then, I find that I’ve accumulated a bunch of links about various things I find interesting. Typography is one of those things! Here’s a list of typography links to other articles that I’ve been saving up and think are worth sharing.

I was killing some time browsing my CodePen feed for some eye candy and didn’t need to go past the first page before spotting a neat CSS hover effect by Adam Argyle.

I took a break from work and started some small, personal projects (toys). One of those small projects is potato.horse where I keep all of my doodles, visual short stories and jokes. Check it out! However, this post is not about my break from work, other experiments, or the site itself. People seem to like …

There is an easy-to-use CSS container query polyfill now. You essentially conditionally load it and forget about it. Then write spec-compliant container queries code.

I was working on a client project a few days ago and wanted to create a certain effect on an <img>. See, background images can do the effect I was looking for somewhat easily with background-attachment: fixed;. With that in place, a background image stays in place—even when the page scrolls. It isn’t used all …

We recently talked with Elad Shechter on his new CSS reset, and shortly after that Josh Comeau blogged his. We’re in something of a new era of CSS resets where… you kind of don’t need one? There isn’t that many major differences between browsers on default styling, and by the time you’re off and running …

Your mission — should you decide to accept it — is to build a Button component in four frameworks, but, only use one button.css file! This idea is very important to me. I’ve been working on a component library called AgnosticUI where the purpose is building UI components that aren’t tied to any one particular …

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.