Web Development + Follow

Whatever Google wants it to be. I always thought it was exactly what your <title> element was. Perhaps in lieu of that, what the first <h1> on the page is. But recently I noticed some pages on this site that were showing a title on SERPs that was a string that appeared nowhere at all …

If you’ve recently started working with GraphQL, or reviewed its pros and cons, you’ve no doubt heard things like “GraphQL doesn’t support caching” or “GraphQL doesn’t care about caching.” And for most, that is a big deal. The official GraphQL documentation refers to caching techniques so, clearly, the folks behind it do care about caching …

There is a lot of buzz around apps running on the edge instead of on a centralized server in web development. Running your app on the edge allows your code to be closer to your users, which makes it faster. However, there is a spectrum of edge apps. Many apps only have some parts, usually …

Container queries are going to solve this long-standing issue in web design where we want to make design choices based on the size of an element (the container) rather than the size of the entire page. So, if a container is 600px wide, perhaps it has a row-like design, but any narrower than that it …

When I came up in web development (2005-2010 were formative years for me), one of the first lessons I learned was to have a clean foundation of HTML. “What Beautiful HTML Code Looks Like” is actually one of the most popular posts on this very site. The image in that post made its way to …

Logging, on its own, is a key aspect of any application. Logging helps developers comprehend what it is that their code is doing. It also helps save developers hours of debugging work. This tutorial is about implementing logging in a Node.js application using Pino-logger.

CSS is on a tear lately. Again, I’ve heard of a brand new thing I’ve never seen before, and again it’s via Miriam: CSS Conditionals.

There is a new thing coming in CSS: @layer. As with all new things, it takes time to really wrap your head around it. And despite me tapping at my keyboard about it, full disclosure, I’m not sure my mind is fully there yet. Fortunately, smart people are on the case!

CSS ::before and ::after pseudo-elements allow you to insert “content” before and after any non-replaced element (e.g. they work on a <div> but not an <input>). This effectively allows you to show something on a web page that might not be present in the HTML content. You shouldn’t use it for actual content because it’s …

The web’s premier conference is online this fall, October 11–13, 2021: An Event Apart Fall Summit. If you already know how good of a conference this is (i.e. that some of the web’s biggest ideas debut at AEA) then just go buy tickets and please enjoy yourself. You can buy literally any combination of the …

This is a good tweet from Harry: I like it because, as he says, it’s the correct way to think about it. It helps form a mental model of how websites work.

I’ll never forget one of Karen McGrane’s great lessons to the world: truncation is not a content strategy. The idea is that just clipping off text programmatically is a sledgehammer, and avoids the kind of real thinking and planning that makes for good experiences.

It’s not every day you see a new processor for building websites that reinvents the syntax for HTML and CSS and JavaScript. That’s what imba is doing.

Nowadays, creating complex shapes is an easy task using clip-path, but adding a border to the shapes is always a pain. There is no robust CSS solution and we always need to produce specific “hacky” code for each particular case. In this article, I will show you how to solve this problem using the CSS …

My favorite kind of blog post is when someone takes a subject that I’ve spent all of five minutes considering and then says—no!—this is an enormous topic worthy of a dissertation. Look at all the things you can do with this tiny CSS property! I was reminded of this when I spotted this post by …

Humans crave connections, and the advent of the digital revolution has empowered us to be more connected than ever before. The Internet has unleashed upon billions of people unprecedented economic and political freedom, as well as powerful means of control and domination. Yet, the vast majority of us are oblivious to its inner workings.

There is a helluva gotcha with styling a <details> element, as documented here by Kitty Guiraudel. It’s obscure enough that you might never run into it, but if you do, I could see it being very confusing (it would confuse me, at least). Perhaps you’re aware of the shadow DOM? It’s talked about a lot …

You might already know about the CSS gap property. It isn’t exactly new, but it did gain an important new ability last year: it now works in Flexbox in addition to CSS Grid. That, and the fact that I believe the property is more complicated than it appears, made me want to go back and …

Many developers love working with static site generators like Gatsby and Hugo. These powerful yet flexible systems help create beautiful websites using familiar tools like Markdown and React. Nearly every popular modern programming language has at least one actively developed, fully-featured static site generator. Static site generators boast a number of advantages, including fast page …

Here’s a common thought and question: how do browsers prioritize what they work on? We get little glimpses of it sometimes. We’re told to “star issues” in bug trackers to signal interest. We’re told to get involved in GitHub threads for spec issues. We’re told they do read the blog posts. And, sometimes, we get …

It’s not every day that a new pattern emerges across the web, but I think cmd + k is here to stay. It’s a keyboard shortcut that usually pops open a search UI and it lets you toggle settings on or off, such as dark mode. And lots of apps support it now—Slack, Notion, Linear, …

Have you ever been in a situation where you wish you could have some control over the values in an object or array? Maybe you wanted to prevent certain types of data or even validate the data before storing it in the object. Suppose you wanted to react to the incoming data in some way, …

Blogging about HTML elements¹? *chefs kiss* Here’s Ben Myers on the (aptly described) “underrated” Definition List (<dl>) element in HTML: You might have also seen lists of name–value pairs to describe lodging amenities, or to list out individual charges in your monthly rent, or in glossaries of technical terms. Each of these is a candidate …

Learn how to build an HTML form in PHP using DOMDocument — a structured and expressive way to build logical markup.

What? Jamstack Conf! It’s the best! Learn what’s happening and what’s next for this hot ecosystem. When? October 6–7, 2021 Where? Virtual / online. How much? It’s free! There are workshops as well though, at $100 a seat. Who? You! Oh you mean speakers? Netlify’s CEO Matt Biilmann gives the opening talk and I’d expect …

There is a conversation that has been percolating for as long as I’ve been in the web design and development industry. It’s centered around the conflict between design tools and development tools. The final product of web design is often a mockup. The old joke was that web developers make websites and web designers make …

Browse through Dribbble or Behance, and you’ll find designers using a simple technique to add texture to an image: noise. Adding noise makes otherwise solid colors or smooth gradients, such as shadows, more realistic. But despite designers’ affinity for texture, noise is rarely used in web design. In this article, we’ll generate colorful noise to …

I feel like my quest to make sure this site had pretty sweet (and automatically-generated) social media images (e.g. Open Graph) came to a close once I found Social Image Generator. The trajectory there was that I ended up talking about it far too much on ShopTalk, to the point it became a common topic …

I believe acss.io is the first usage of “Atomic CSS” where the point of it is to be a compiler. You write CSS like this: And it will generate CSS like: (Or something like that.)

We might leave a text input unstyled. We might leave a link unstyled. Even a button. But checkboxes… we don’t leave them alone. That’s why styling checkboxes never gets old. Although designing checkboxes is not that complicated, we also don’t have to settle for simple background color changes, or adding and removing borders, to indicate …