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 …
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 …
I recently blogged about how images are hard and it ended up being a big ol’ checklist of things that you could/should think about and implement when placing images on websites. I think it’s encouraging to see frameworks — these beloved tools that we leverage to help us build websites — offering additional tools within them to help tackle …
Optimizing the user experience you offer on your website is essential for the success of any online business. Google does use different user experience-related metrics to rank web pages for SEO and has continued to provide multiple tools to measure and improve web performance. In its recent attempt to simplify the measurement and understanding of …
Frontity is a framework for creating de-coupled (or “headless”) WordPress sites. In this article, we dive into the process of spinning up such a site, with a detailed overview of the building blocks provided by Frontity and its flagship theme, Mars.
Here’s Atif Afzal on using a <div> that is permanently on the page where tooltips are added/removed and how they perform vastly better than plopping those same tooltips right into the <body>. It’s not really discussed, but the reason you put them that high-up in the DOM is so you can absolutely position them exactly …
I love shapes, especially colorful ones! Shapes on websites are in the same category of helpfulness as background colors, images, banners, section separators, artwork, and many more: they can help us understand context and inform our actions through affordances. A few months back, I built an application to engage my 7-year old daughter with mathematics. …
Stefan Judis notes that there is a spec for custom media queries, but seemingly no momentum on it at the moment. That lack of movement is unfortunate, as it’s almost guaranteed front-end developers all over would start using it as soon as it’s ready. I know I would, as I liberally use custom properties now, …
When requirements read “when visible” your brain should go straight to IntersectionObserver. That’s exactly what Zach is doing here to kick off an animation when it scrolls into view. Except this animation is an SVG SMIL animation: an <animate> situation. SMIL animations have some kinda cool things they can do, like begin when another animation …
I did a sponsored video the other week explaining how to build a paid subscription newsletter using WordPress (we did it on WordPress.com but it could be hosted anywhere), MailPoet (a plugin to visually author the emails, as well as send them), and WooCommerce (to manage the payments and subscriptions). I published the video here …
Variable fonts make it easy to create a large set of font styles from a single font file. Unfortunately, the default rendering of the <b> and <strong> elements in browsers today is not very compatible with the wide range of font-weight values enabled by variable fonts.
There is a working draft spec for CSS scoping now. Other than a weird period where <style scoped> shipped and then was subsequently removed from the spec (and browsers), this is the furthest a scoping proposal has gotten (the Level 1 spec never got anywhere). This one comes from Miriam Suzanne. The basics: If I’m …
I’d say cloud functions are one of the most transformative technologies in the last bunch of years. They are (usually) cheap, scale well, secure in their inherent isolation, and often written in JavaScript—comfortable territory for front-end developers. Nearly every cloud provider offers them, but AWS Lambda was the OG and remains the leader. But also: …
We’ve already discussed how creating web components is easier than you think, but there’s another aspect of the specification that we haven’t discussed yet and it’s a way to customize (nay, supercharge) a built-in element. It’s similar to creating fully custom or “autonomous” elements — like the <zombie-profile> element from the previous articles—but requires a few differences. …
HTTP Caching is a Superpower — Hugh Haworth covers how the Cache-Control header is an awfully potent ingredient in web performance. I mis-read the title at first and was waiting to read about HTML caching. Hugh covers it a bit (like how you’d need to be careful doing so on something like a forum, where …
Have you ever fretted that front-end web development moves so fast that if you stepped away for a while, you’d be lost coming back? Rachel Smith has: The hectic pace of needing to learn one thing after the next didn’t bother me so much because when I was 26 because I was quite happy to …
Zach did that thing where each of his blog posts has a special URL with the design of social image card that is screenshat by a headless browser (like Puppeteer) and used as a true meta Open Graph image, meaning it’s displayed on Twitter, Facebook, iMessage, Slack, Discord, and whatever else supports that card look.
Static site generators are popular for their speed, security, and user experience. However, sometimes your application needs data that is not available when the site is built. React is a library for building user interfaces that helps you retrieve and store dynamic data in your client application. Fauna is a flexible, serverless database delivered as …
Nathan Hardy shares when things “clicked”: Reflecting back on this time, I think there are a few key concepts that were vital to things finally all making sense and fitting together. These were: • The Box Model (e.g. box-sizing, height, width, margin, padding)• Layout (e.g. display)• Document Flow and Positioning (e.g. position, top, left, etc.) I called this my ah-ha moment a few years …
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