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A tournament bracket UI where you pick your favorite between two coding fonts and your choices are whittled down all the way to a final winner. A clever way to suss out your own taste and arrive at a choice.

Good friend Kent C. Dodds has recently dropped his new website which had a lot of work go into it. I was fortunate enough that Kent reached out a while back and asked if I could come up with some “whimsy” for the site. ✨ One of the first things that drew my attention was …

VS Code is built from web technologies (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript), but dare I say today it’s mostly used a local app that’s installed on your machine. That’s starting to shift, though, as there has been an absolute explosion of places VS Code is becoming available to use on the web. I’d say it’s kind …

Dealing with dates and times is one of those things that can frustrate programmers a lot. At the same time, they are fundamental to software development, used from everything from meta and how things are ordered to time-based triggers and lots in between. Dates and times are prone to errors too. Handle them incorrectly, and …

I feel like half of all “custom-designed radio buttons and checkboxes” do two things: Make them bigger Colorize them

Like this: <input type=”search”> You get an extra-round-y appearance in Safari, which at one time matched the macOS look for search inputs, but not really anymore. I don’t hate the look, except… Safari totally ignores the font-size you set on it, so careful about that. Unless you smash off the round-y look with -webkit-appearance: none …

In part 5 of this series, we looked at rebasing and merging. Although there are a couple of differences between git merge and git rebase, both commands have the same goal: they integrate changes from one branch into another.

Egor Kloos describes a situation where a (purely visual) designer asks for some changes to a component. There is a misunderstanding where the (code monkey) developer implements the change exactly as requested—but really what was required was both a bug fix and a new variation to the component. Because of the skill siloing: problems.

Upon hearing “sticky footer” these days, I would think most people imagine a position: sticky situation where a footer element appears fixed on the screen while in the scrolling context of some parent element. That’s not quite what I’m talking about here. “Sticky footers” were a UI concept before position: sticky existed and they mean …

Mary Dyson produces nitty gritty research on the long-accepted notion that shorter line lengths are more legible than longer ones. The study finds that shorter lines do not necessarily lead to faster reading. If you’re looking for a definitive answer to use in your next design review debate, though, no dice. The big finding is …

Jamstack has been in the website world for years. Static Site Generators (SSGs) — which often have content that lives right within a GitHub repo itself — are a big part of that story. That opens up the idea of having contributors that can open pull requests to add, change, or edit content. Very useful!

That’s the name of Netlify’s YouTube Channel. Love that. I linked up Rich’s talk the other day, which was a part of this past JamstackConf, but now all the talks are up on there. Rich got to talk about Svelte, but there are talks on Astro, RedwoodJS, Eleventy, Vue… all the cool kids really. I’m …

In my “Different Degrees of Custom Property Usage” article, I noted a situation about colors and CSS custom properties where I went “too far” with breaking up HSL color values. Breaking every single color into its H, S, and L parts is may be a step too far. But you probably do want to split it …

Theming UI refers to the ability to perform a change in visual styles in a consistent manner that defines the “look and feel” of a site. Swapping color palettes, à la dark mode or some other means, is a good example. From the user’s perspective, theming involves changing visual styles, whether it’s with UI for …

Remember when Ahmad Shadeed wrote about that border-radius “toggle” he found in Facebook’s CSS? It was interesting! I covered it. A few weeks after that surge of linkage, a couple of articles came out digging into it a little deeper.

Interactive Rebase is the Swiss Army knife of Git commands: lots of use cases and lots of possibilities! It’s really a great addition to any developer’s tool chain, because it lets you revise your local commit history—before you share your work with the rest of the team. Let’s see what you can do with an interactive rebase and then look at some practical examples.

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 …