Web Development + Follow

Heck of a CSS trick here from Dongsung Kim. There are hidden HDR videos playing at the corners of this page. When a HDR-capable browser encounters one, it switches to HDR mode. For some reason, CSS backdrop-filter + brightness >100% combo seems to behave like HDR—reaching beyond the user-controlled display brightness, up to the maximum …

You’ll often hear developers talking about “static” vs. “dynamic” sites, or you may have heard someone use the term Jamstack. What do these terms mean, and when does a “static” site become either a Jamstack or dynamic site? These questions sound simple, but they’re more nuanced than they appear. Let’s explore these terms to gain …

We took a surface level look at Pipedream the other day, which really does look cool. It’s like a much more modern and fancy version of what Yahoo Pipes was. A better comparison might be Zapier, except you write code (if you want to) to make easy-to-build cloud functions that can be triggered by anything …

Have you ever wished you could see the HTML source of a web page while on a mobile browser, which generally doesn’t offer that feature? If you have a desktop machine around, there are ways, but what I mean is getting the source without anything but the device itself. The little View Source tool by …

Markdown truly is a great format. It’s close enough to plain text so that anyone can quickly learn it, and it’s structured enough that it can be parsed and eventually converted to you name it. That being said: parsing, processing, enhancing, and converting Markdown needs code. Shipping all that code in the client comes at …

Got a WooCommerce store? It behooves you to offer a variety of payment methods. Just anecdotally, I’m sure both you and me have been annoyed and even abandoned purchases when a merchant, online or otherwise, doesn’t take the payment method we want to pay with. That’s just straight-up lost sales for the merchant. But you …

Here’s Kilian Valkhof on CSS nesting which isn’t available in browsers yet, but will be soon. There are a few differences he notes between CSS nesting and nesting in Sass or Less though. Take, for example, the following code: When CSS nesting lands, that last line border: 1px solid; won’t be applied to the div …

It might be the very first thing a lot of people learn in JavaScript: One day at CodePen, we woke up to a ton of customer support tickets about their Pens being broken, which ultimately boiled down to a version of Chrome that shipped where they ripped out alert() from functioning in cross-origin iframes. And …

We’ve got viewport units (e.g. vw, vh, vmin, vmax), and they are mostly pretty great. It’s cool to always have a unit available that is relative to the entire screen. But when you ask people what they want fixed up in CSS, viewport units are always on the list. The problem is that people use …

In my previous article, I created a fragmentation effect using CSS mask and custom properties. It was a neat effect but it has one drawback: it uses a lot of CSS code (generated using Sass). This time I am going to redo the same effect but rely on the new Paint API. This drastically reduces …

Great little project from Ross Moody: SVG Gobbler is a browser extension that finds the vector content on the page you’re viewing and gives you the option to download, optimize, copy, view the code, or export it as an image.

Nuxt offers an incredible developer experience, with a lot of performance and application setup best practices baked in. In recent releases, they’ve been working on taking this developer experience to the next level, with some newer features that speed up and simplify developer processes. Let’s explore some today.

I recently wrote a very basic Sass loop that outputs several padding and margin utility classes. Nothing fancy, really, just a Sass map with 11 spacing values, looped over to create classes for both padding and margin on each side. As we’ll see, this works, but it ends up a pretty hefty amount of CSS. …

Donnie D’Amato built a whole site around the thesis that “digital designers still expect to use the grid while experienced layout engineers have moved beyond it.” The idea isn’t that we should never literally use display: grid; but rather that strict adherence to an overall page grid isn’t necessary. Brad’s reaction was interesting, as someone …

There’s usually more than one way to code a thing in React. And while it’s possible to create the same thing different ways, there may be one or two approaches that technically work “better” than others. I actually run into plenty of examples where the code used to build a React component is technically “correct” …

Flutter is Google’s UI framework used to create flexible, expressive cross-platform mobile applications. It is one of the fastest-growing frameworks for mobile app development. On the other hand, Fauna is a transactional, developer-friendly serverless database that supports native GraphQL. Flutter + Fauna is a match made in Heaven. If you are looking to build and …

You gotta appreciate the tenacity of Surma. He’s been advocating for Web Workers as a path forward to better-feeling websites for a lot of years now. He’s at it again making sure we all understand the landscape: … regardless of where you look, multithreading is used everywhere. iOS empowers developers to easily parallelize code using Grand Central …

Straight across or down, that’s the proverbial order for user controls on a screen. Like a list of menu items. But what if we change that to a more fluid layout with bends, curves, and nooks? We can pull it off with just a few lines of code. In the age of modern minimalistic designs, …

The first time cloud functions / serverless functions clicked for me was when I saw and tried Auth0’s (now defunct) Webtask. It was a little CodePen-like IDE but you didn’t really see anything aside from code and logs. The point was to write little bits of Node when you hit the functions URL (that’s literally …

Any company that uses GitHub for critical applications needs a backup that can be restored quickly when needed. Cyberattacks, human errors, or a forced push are just some of the scenarios that can result in the loss of GitHub data. In the event of an emergency, you can’t be wasting time asking which developer has …

While most people browsing the web on a computer use a mouse, many rely on their keyboard instead. Theoretically, using a web page with the keyboard should not be a problem — press the TAB key to move the keyboard focus from one focusable element to the next then press ENTER to activate, easy! However, …

They are actually called “CSS Module Scripts” and are a native browser feature, as opposed to the popular open-source project that essentially does scoped styles by creating unique class name identifiers in both HTML and CSS. Native CSS Modules are a part of ES Modules (a lot like JSON modules we recently covered):

With a little knowledge of music theory, we can use regular HTML, CSS and JavaScript — without any libraries or audio samples — to create a simple digital instrument. Let’s put that into practice and explore one method for creating a digital synth that can be played and hosted on the internet.

Looks like it was almost 9 years ago when Airbnb first published their JavaScript Style Guide. 112k stars on GitHub later, it seems like the de facto preset for Babel / ES Lint. But it’s not the only company out there with public ES Lint setups. Katy recently shared Mapbox’s setup. ESLint plugins will help …

The CSS Paint API (part of the magical Houdini family) opens the door to an exciting new world of design in CSS. Using the Paint API, we can create custom shapes, intricate patterns, and beautiful animations — all with a touch of randomness — in a way that is portable, fast, and responsive. We are …

An explanation of those new GitHub social media images: … our custom Open Graph image service is a little Node.js app that uses the GitHub GraphQL API to collect data, generates some HTML from a template, and pipes it to Puppeteer to “take a screenshot” of that HTML. Jason Etcovich on The GitHub Blog in “A framework …

John Resig and I recently self-published our book on GraphQL. There are tons of how-tos for self-publishing a book, or even online classes, but very little in the way of why you would want to, or whether it’s even worth your while. I’m going to share my experience and revenue numbers with you in this …

I’d wager to say that most websites that are business-minded have accounts. A way to log into them. Social media sites, eCommerce sites, CMS systems, you name it, having accounts people log into is at the heart of them. So… make it good. That’s what Magic does (great name!). Have you heard that language used …

It was interesting that when Safari 15 was dropping at this last WWDC, in my circles at least, I mostly heard enthusiasm. Like the colors-in-the-browser-controls stuff was a neat trick and fun to play with. And there were other more serious features, like iCloud Private Relay, which were near-universally applauded for the security innovation. But …

For quite a while now, the CSS spec has included a lot of really useful mathematical functions, such as trigonometric functions (sin(), cos(), tan(), asin(), acos(), atan(), atan2()), exponential functions (pow(), exp(), sqrt(), log(), hypot()), sign-related functions (abs(), sign()) and stepped value functions (round(), mod(), rem()). However, these are not yet implemented in any browser, …