Web Development + Follow

Scott digs into the history of the <menu> element. He traced it as far back as HTML 2 (!) in a 1994 changelog. The vibe then, it seems, was to mark up a list. I would suspect the intention is much like <nav> is today, but I really don’t know. Short story: HTML 4 deprecated …

I was working on a large React application for a startup, and aside from just wanting some good strategies to keep our styles organized, I wanted to give this whole “dark mode” thing a shot. With the huge ecosystem around React, you might think that there would be a go-to solution for style themes, but …

Measuring things is great. They say what you only fix what you measure. Raygun is great at measuring websites. Measuring performance, measuring errors and crashes, measuring code problems. You know what’s even better than measuring? Having a system in place to notify you when anything significant happens with those measurements. That’s why Raygun now has …

Whatever, I just needed a title. Everyone’s favorite web security feature has crossed my desk a bunch of times lately and I always feel like that is a sign I should write something because that’s what blogging is.

Oh, Bootstrap, that old standard web library that either you hate or you spend all your time defending as “it’s fine, it’s not that bad.” Regardless of what side you fall on, it’s a powerful UI framework that’s everywhere, most people know the basics of it, and it gives you extremely predictable results. For better …

Nice domain, eh? Does just what it says on the tin: cleans up pictures. You draw over areas of the image you want cleaned up, and it does its best using weird science. It’s like Photoshop’s Spot Healing Brush, only a single-use free website. Much like the amazing remove.bg which is an equally amazing single-use …

Louis Lazaris breaks down some bonafide CSS trickery from Jane. The Pen shows off interactivity where: You have to press a special combination of keys on a keyboard. Then type a secret password. From there, a special message pops up on the screen. Easily JavaScript territory, but no, this is done here entirely in HTML …

The leade here is that VideoPress makes video on WordPress way better. VideoPress is a part of Jetpack. And now, if VideoPress is the only thing you care about from the Jetpack world, you can pay for it à la carte as low as $4.77/month. Or, get it included in the Jetpack Complete plan. Lemme …

Suspense is React’s forthcoming feature that helps coordinate asynchronous actions—like data loading—allowing you to easily prevent inconsistent state in your UI. I’ll provide a better explanation of what exactly that means, along with a quick introduction of Suspense, and then go over a somewhat realistic use case, and cover some lessons learned. The features I’m …

Bonafide CSS trick alert! Nelson Menezes figured out a new way (that only works in Firefox for now) that is awfully clever. Perhaps you know that CSS cannot animate to auto dimensions, which is super unfortunate. Animating from zero to “whatever is necessary” would be very helpful very often. We’ve documented the available techniques. They …

I recently came across a cool effect known as glassmorphism in a Dribble shot. My first thought was I could quickly recreate it in a few minutes if I just use some emojis for the icons without wasting time on SVG-ing them.

Just ran across îles, a new static site generator mostly centered around Vue. The world has no particular shortage of static site generators, but it’s interesting to see what this “next generation” of SSGs seem to focus on or try to solve.

Šime Vidas DM’d me the other day about this thread from subzey on Twitter. My HTML for favicons was like this: The attribute size is a typo there, and should be sizes. Like this: And with that, Chrome no longer double downloaded both icons, and instead uses the SVG alone (as it should). Just something …

One of the toughest things about being someone who cares deeply about design systems is making the case for a dedicated design system. Folks in leadership will often ask you to prove the value of it. Why should we care about good front-end development and consistency? Sure, sure, sure, they say—everyone wants a flashy design …

We have many well-known chart types: bar, donut, line, pie, you name it. All popular chart libraries support these. Then there are the chart types that do not even have a name. Check out this dreamt-up chart with stacked (nested) squares that can help visualize relative sizes, or how different values compare to one another:

I only just recently learned the enterkeyhint attribute on form inputs was a thing! It seems like kind of a big deal to me, as crafting HTML form markup is a decent slice of a front-end developer’s life, and this attribute could (should?) be used on nearly every input.

Josh Collingsworth is clearly a big fan of Svelte, so while this is a fun and useful comparison article, it’s here to crown Svelte the winner all the way through. A few things I find compelling:

Steve Ruiz calls this post an “extra-obscure edition of design tool micro-UX,” but I find it fascinating! If you select a bunch of elements in a design tool, then rotate then, then later select those same elements and try to rotate them back, you’ll find they have “drifted” a bit from the original location.

The Scroll-linked Animations specification is an upcoming and experimental addition that allows us to link animation-progress to scroll-progress: as you scroll up and down a scroll container, a linked animation also advances or rewinds accordingly. We covered some use cases in a previous piece here on CSS-Tricks, all driven by the CSS @scroll-timeline at-rule and …

In June of 1995, representatives from Microsoft arrived at the Netscape offices. The stated goal was to find ways to work together—Netscape as the single dominant force in the browser market and Microsoft as a tech giant just beginning to consider the implications of the Internet. Both groups, however, were suspicious of ulterior motives. Marc …

First, check out how incredibly easy it is to write a Cloudflare Worker to proxy another URL: It doesn’t have any error handling or anything, but hey, it works:

I keep bookmarking Adam’s GUI Challenges posts/videos and, before I even have a chance to review and link them up, another one is already published! Fortunately, the homepage for them on web.dev is a nice roundup.

This article is part of our “Advanced Git” series. Be sure to follow us on Twitter or sign up for our newsletter to hear about the next articles! Most developers understand that it’s important to use branches in Git. In fact, I’ve written an entire article on branching strategies in Git, explaining Git’s powerful branching …

High five to Jeremy on the big release of Responsible JavaScript on A Book Apart. There is a lot of talk about how the proliferation of JavaScript has had a negative impact on the web, but now we have the canonical reference tome.

There are thousands of articles out there about buttons and links on the web; the differences and how to use them properly. Hey, I don’t mind. I wrote my own as well¹. It’s such a common mistake on the web that it’s always worth repeating:

A big heaping 19-minute bowl of not-too-hot, not-too-cold baby bear porridge website building from Rich Harris. I’ve certainly overheard more than my fair share of arguments about Single Page Apps (SPAs) vs Multi-Page Apps (MPAs). Although it’s only recently that I’ve heard people put an acronym to MPA, and it feels weird. My guess is …

We’re all familiar with the concept of autocompletion, right? You type something into a search box and it tries to guess what you’re looking for as you type, displaying suggestions, often below the cursor. While we’re used to autocomplete on eCommerce sites that redirect to search or product pages, an underrated usage is when used …

Recently, while looking for some ideas on what to code as I have zero artistic sense so the only thing I can do is find pretty things that other people have come up with and remake them with clean and compact code… I came across these candy ghost buttons! They seemed like the perfect choice …

A guide to designing accessible, WCAG-compliant focus indicators — Sara Soueidan says you can make more accessible focus outlines by doing your own, rather than leaving it to the browser — as long as you do it right. Deep dive! a11y-syntax-highlighting — Eric Bailey’s repo of code syntax highlighting themes for a variety of software …

There has been a lot of talk about automated social images lately. GitHub has created its own. A WordPress plugin has been acquired by Jetpack. There is definitely interest! People like Ryan Filler and Zach Leatherman have implemented social images on their websites. They had to code a lot of things on their own. But …