Web Development + Follow

All-things-typography, from a hard-edged monospaced variable font to fonts in the “Twilight Zone” … and much, much more.

I think this is good advice from Silvestar Bistrović: An enabling selector is what I call a selector that does a job without disabling the particular rule. The classic example is applying margin to everything, only to have to remove it from the final element because it adds space in a place you don’t want.

You know like https:? That’s a URL Scheme. You’re probably familiar with the concept, thanks to others that come up in front-end development, like mailto:. You can actually make your own, which is pretty cool. There are a lot of them. I find that custom URL schemes come up the most with apps that are …

A bonafide CSS trick if there ever was one! @ShadowShahriar created a CodePen demo that uses pseudo-elements to place commas between list items that are displayed inline, and the result is a natural-looking complete sentence with proper punctuation.

After the fragmentation effect, I am going to tackle another interesting animation: the blob! We all agree that such effect is hard to achieve with CSS, so we generally reach for SVG to make those gooey shapes. But now that the powerful Paint API is available, using CSS is not only possible, but maybe even …

That’s a heartwrenching title from Michael Williamson. I believe it though. It’s kinda like a maximized version of the blogging phenomenon where if you work on a post for weeks it’ll flop compared to a post that’s some dumb 20-minute thought. Or how your off-handed remark to some developer at the perfect time might cause …

What options do you have if you want the body background in a fixed position where it stays put on scroll? background-attachment: fixed in CSS, at best, does not work well in mobile browsers, and at worst is not even supported by the most widely used mobile browsers. You can ditch this idea completely and …

When I think about what front-end development really is and feels like, this is at the heart of it: designing around a huge set of unknowns, and really embracing that notion as a strength of the web rather than a weakness or unfortunate truth we have to work around. Cathy Dutton digs into this with …

The perfect link — Rian Rietveld defines them: “When you click on them, they take you somewhere else.” Not much code in here (we’ve got that), just a lot of practical accessibility advice. For example, the alt text for a linked image can allude to the fact that it is a link. Just an image: …

While learning Vue.js, I started building free web tools that involved the exploration of SVG, with the goal of learning something about both! Let’s take a look at one of those tools: a generator that makes SVG loaders and lets you choose between SMIL or Sass animation, different styles, colors, shapes, and effects. It even …

A question: If you copy a code sample that uses two-space indentation and you want to convert it to four-space indentation, what’s the *fastest* and easiest option? Matt Stauffer, Twitter I wrote about doing this in Sublime Text a few years back. It’s not terribly different in VS Code, I don’t think. But here’s another …

Today’s websites are overflowing with animations—often too many. They get in the way of the content and slow down our busy users. But at the same time: they’re wonderful. They bring websites to life, are fun to implement and can be incredibly impressive to show off. I think they’re great. Sorry impatient users. The way …

This is a bit of advice for developers on Macs I’ve heard quite a few times, and I’ll echo it: go into System Preferences > General > Show scroll bars and set to always. This isn’t about you, it’s about the web. See, the problem is that without this setting on, you’ll never experience scrollbar-triggered …

Free event hosted by Netlify coming up next week (Wednesday, August 25th): Architecting with Next.js. It’s just a little half-day thing. No brainer. Join us for a special event where we’ll highlight business teams using Next.js in production, including architecture deep dives, best practices and challenges. Next.js is the fastest-growing framework for Jamstack developers. With …

Solid is a reactive JavaScript library for creating user interfaces without a virtual DOM. It compiles templates down to real DOM nodes once and wraps updates in fine-grained reactions so that when state updates, only the related code runs. This way, the compiler can optimize initial render and the runtime optimizes updates. This focus on …

You can’t just do @media (prefers-reduced-data: no-preference) alone because, as Kilian Valkhof says: … that would be false if either there was no support (since the browser wouldn’t understand the media query) or if it was supported but the user wanted to preserve data. Usually @supports is the tool for this in CSS, but that doesn’t work …

We can update the URL in JavaScript. We’ve got the APIs pushState and replaceState: JavaScript is also capable of replacing any content in the DOM. So with those powers combined, we can build a website where we navigate to different “pages” but the browser never refreshes. That’s literally what “Single Page App” (SPA) means.

I appreciated this bit of nuance from a post on Viget’s blog: There could be a whole article written about the many flavours of Tailwind, but broadly speaking those flavours are: 1. Stock tailwind, ie. no changes to the configuration,2. Tailwind that heavily relies on @apply in CSS files but still follows BEM or some other component …

Frontity is a WordPress-focused React-based server-side dynamic-rendering framework (phew!) that allows us to create fast headless websites. Chris has a good introduction to Frontity. I guess you could think of it like Next.js for WordPress. And while the demand for headless WordPress sites may be a niche market at the moment, the Frontity showcase page …

I’ve seen this confuse more than a handful of people recently, including myself, so I’m making sure it’s written down.

Nuxt is a JavaScript framework that extends the existing functionality of Vue.js with features like server-side rendering, static page generation, file-based routing, and automatic code splitting among other things. I’ve been enjoying using frameworks like Nuxt and Next because they offer not only more features, but better performance and a better developer experience than the …

In this article, we will discuss how we can apply schema stitching across multiple Fauna instances. We will also discuss how to combine other GraphQL services and data sources with Fauna in one graph.

Over at the JS Party podcast: Kend C. Dodds: … ask anybody who’s done regular, old CSS and they’ll tell you that “I don’t know if it’s okay for me to change this, so I’m gonna duplicate it.” And now we’ve got – at PayPal (this is not made up) we had 90% unused CSS …

Have you already tried using WordPress headlessly with Gatsby? If you haven’t, you might check this article around the new Gatsby source plugin for WordPress; gatsby-source-wordpress is the official source plugin introduced in March 2021 as a part of the Gatsby 3 release. It significantly improves the integration with WordPress. Also, the WordPress plugin WPGraphQL …

Dave points to Sarah’s post on Developer Experience (DX) at Netlify. Part of what Sarah did there is lay out what the role means. It’s a three-part thing: Integrations Engineering (e.g. features) Developer Experience Engineering (e.g. building integrations to ensure quality end-to-end for customers) Documentation (e.g. … uh, documentation) I like it. You gotta define …

I’ve been working on the same project for several years. Its initial version was a huge monolithic app containing thousands of files. It was poorly architected and non-reusable, but was hosted in a single repo making it easy to work with. Later, I “fixed” the mess in the project by splitting the codebase into autonomous …

Brian Kardell shares a bit about the progress of bringing “Tabs” to HTML. We kinda think we know what they are, but you have to be really specific when dealing with specs and defining them. It’s tricky.

Ahmad Shadeed dug into shape “cutouts” the other day. Imagine a shape with another smaller shape carved out of it. In his typical comprehensive way, Ahmad laid out the situation well—looking at tricky situations that complicate things.

HTML is not a programming language. I’ve heard that sentence so many times and it’s tiring. Normally, it is followed by something like, It doesn’t have logic, or, It is not Turing complete,.so… obviously it is not a programming language. Like it’s case-closed and should be the end of the conversation. Should it be, though?

Looks like… 253 of them. I love the little water ⥾ spout one. (U+297e). Because. And I like how it’s a fairly useful little site at a great domain and with a little business model behind it. Reminds me of a little feature I like in Notion where if you type dash-arrow (like ->) it …