Web Development + Follow

We’re going to walk through the technical process of hooking into Google Drive’s API to source content on a website. We’ll examine the step-by-step implementation, as well as how to utilize server-side caching to avoid the major pitfalls to avoid such as API usage limits and image hotlinking. A ready-to-use npm package, Git repo, and …

Hashnode is a free platform for developer blogging. Say you’ve just finished an ambitious project and want to write about 10 important lessons you’ve learned as a developer during it. You should definitely blog it—I love that kind of blog post, myself. Making a jump into the technical debt of operating your own blog isn’t a small choice, but it’s important to own your own content. With Hashnode, the decision gets a lot easier. You can blog under a site you entirely own, and at the same time, reap the benefits of hosted software tailor-made for developer blogging and be part of a social center around developer writing.

Remember Tyler Hall’s personal story of a UX moment where the popup sharing context menu on iOS had no visible indication that the content inside was scrollable? The thing his mom wanted to do seemed impossible because it was out of view. iOS isn’t alone here — Terence Eden documents essentially the same problem on …

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer looks at JSON modules, which is already live in Chrome 91 (but nothing else). It looks just like an ES Modules-style import, only you asset the type at the end. How nice is that? Once this makes its way across browsers, we’ve gone on a journey from “you’ll almost definitely want to …

Turning website design files into a combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript is the bread and butter of many front-end web development jobs, but there’s a part of this work that doesn’t neatly fit in to tutorials on any specific topic. There’s a process of breaking down a design and figuring out how to approach …

Here’s a really good ol’ post from way back in 2015 all about the nine states of design and how we should think all the edge cases whenever we’re building interfaces. Vince Speelman writes:

Eric doesn’t mince words, especially in the title, but also in the conclusion: In modern web design and development, displaying an image is a highly intentional act. Alternate descriptions allow us to explain the content of the image, and in doing so, communicate why it is worth including. Just because an image displays something fanciful doesn’t …

I watched Kevin Powell’s video where he was able to recreate a nice typewriter-like animation using CSS. It’s neat and you should definitely check it out because there are bonafide CSS tricks in there. I’m sure you’ve seen other CSS attempts at this, including this site’s very own snippet. Like Kevin, I decided to recreate …

Putting images on websites is incredibly simple, yes? Actually, yes, it is. You use <img> and link it to a valid source in the src attribute and you’re done. Except that there are (counts fingers) 927 things you could (and some you really should) do that often go overlooked. Let’s see… Make sure you use …

The Scroll-Linked Animations specification is an upcoming and experimental addition to CSS. Thanks to the @scroll-timeline at-rule and animation-timeline property this specification provides, you can control the time position of regular CSS Animations by scrolling. In this post, we’ll take a look at some practical use cases where scroll-linked animations come in handy, replacing a …

We sent out an email the other week that ultimately had a <video> in the HTML markup. We send the newsletter by creating it here in the WordPress block editor, which is fetched through RSS-to-Mailchimp. Mailchimp dutifully sent it out, but the HTML was such that it totally borked the layout. This lead to some …

Let’s build a fully functioning and settable “analog” clock with CSS custom properties and the calc() function. Then we’ll convert it into a “digital” clock as well. All this with no JavaScript!

Glitter text — whO (I learned a name for people who go by a one-word moniker like that: Mononymous) created a builder for fancy SVG-based type. It’s a custom font with <text>, and the fancy comes in with a gradient and somewhat exotic filters that make noise and blend the noise into the color. Optical …

Dynamically scaling CSS values based on the viewport width is hardly a new topic. You can find plenty of in-depth coverage right here on CSS-Tricks in articles like this one or this one. Most of those examples, though, use relative CSS units and unitless values to achieve fluid scaling. That loses pixel perfection and usually …

I recently illustrated how we can achieve complex CSS animations using cubic-bezier() and how to do the same when it comes to CSS transitions. I was able to create complex hover effect without resorting to keyframes. In this article, I will show you how to create even more complex CSS transitions. This time, let’s use …

Most of us grumble when running across a frustrating UX experience online (like not being able to complete a transaction because of a misplaced button). We might pen a whiny tweet. Jason Grigsby is like I’m going to write 2,000 words on this and show them what’s what. And of course, he has a strong …

As a day-job, React-using person, I like to stay abreast of interesting React news. As such, I save a healthy amount of links. Allow me to dump out my latest pile. Most of this is about React but not all of it.

Starting with Version 15, Safari supports the theme-color <meta> tag both on macOS and iOS. That’s exciting news because now the first desktop browser supports this <meta> tag and it also supports the media attribute and the prefers-color-scheme media feature. I never really took much note of the theme-color meta tag, but now is a …

The folks over at Netlify have opened up the Jamstack Community Survey for 2021. More than 3,000 front-enders like yourself took last year’s survey, which gauged how familiar people are with the term “Jamstack” and which frameworks they use. This is the survey’s second year which is super exciting because this is where we start …

The reasons that are often cited that make container queries difficult or impossible is things like infinite loops—e.g. changing the width of an element, invalidating a container query, which changes the width again, which makes the container query take effect, etc. But that was solved with containment. A “parent selector”, or :has as it is …

I don’t know about you, but I write these three declarations many times in my CSS: You might yell at me and say I can just put those in my CSS resets. I wish I could, but I don‘t want to and I’ll tell you why in a second.

This is a nice update from Manuel Rego Casasnovas. Igalia has this idea to sort of crowd-source important web platform features that need to get worked on (that’s the sort of work they do). They call it Open Prioritization. The “winner” of that (the one with the most-pledged dollars) is what they’ll do. That turned …

Ever heard of favicons made with SVG? If you are a regular reader of CSS-Tricks, you probably have. But does your website actually use one? The task is more non-trivial than you might think. As we will see in this article, creating a useful SVG favicon involves editing an SVG file manually, which is something …

Wes has a heck of a set of “notes” for learning JavaScript. It’s organized like a curriculum, meaning if you teach JavaScript, you could do a lot worse. It’s actually more like 85 really fleshed-out blog posts organized into sections and easily navigable. If you want to be walked through it via video, then buy …

The wonderful company I work for, Payoneer, has a new logo, and my job was to recreate it and animate it for a loader component in our app. I’ll explain exactly how I did it, share the problems I had, and walk you through the solution I came up with. And, as a bonus, we’ll …

Command line tools are one of the most popular applications we have today. We use command line tools every day, and they range from git, npm or yarn. Command line tools are very fast and useful for automating applications and workflows. We will be building a command line tool with Node.js and Fauna for our …

Astro is a brand new framework for building websites. To me, the big thing is that it allows you to build a site like you’re using a JavaScript framework (and you are), but the output is a zero-JavaScript static site. You can opt-in to client-side JavaScript as needed, and there are clever options for doing …

There are a lot of great defaults when it comes to browsers and the web. Think about all the accessibility features that are baked into HTML so that you don’t have to do weird stuff, like this example from Manuel: You can just write your <h2> and the browser deals with the accessibility parts. This …

I appreciate the clarity of this trick that Mikael Ainalem posted over on Reddit:

And maybe an optional follow-up if you’re up for it. Automattic, the makers of Jetpack and many other WordPress-y things, have sponsored my site (me = Chris Coyier; site = CSS-Tricks) for quite a while. I use Jetpack myself, and I’m always trying to tell people about its features and benefits. Yet I get the …