Web Development + Follow

You know, this is the time of year where Chris normally publishes a big ol’ reflection of the past year. The first one was published in 2007, the same year CSS-Tricks began, and it continued all the way through 2021 without missing a beat. Having been a CSS-Tricks reader myself all those years, I’d hate …

We’ve started making a tradition of rounding up the latest front-end research at the end of each year. We did it in 2020 and again in 2021. Reports are released throughout the year by a bunch of different companies and organizations researching everything from web design trends to developer skills to popular coding languages and …

CSS Nesting is making the rounds yet again. Remember earlier this year when Adam and Miriam put three syntax options up for a vote? Those results were tallied and it wasn’t even even close. Now there’s another chance to speak into the future of nesting, this time over at the WebKit blog. The results from …

Being able to quickly spin up a WordPress instance has been the strength of WordPress ever since its famous “five-minute install”. Upload a few files, configure a few settings, and you’re off. The friction of uploading files has gotten a lot easier, thanks to plenty of “one-click” install options many hosts offer (including DigitalOcean and …

In this series, we’ve been making image sliders with nothing but HTML and CSS. The idea is that we can use the same markup but different CSS to get wildly different results, no matter how many images we toss in. We started with a circular slider that rotates infinitely, sort of like a fidget spinner …

The CSS Working Group gave that a thumbs-up a couple weeks ago. The super-duper conceptual proposal being that we can animate or transition from, say, display: block to display: none. It’s a bit of a brain-twister to reason about because setting display: none on an element cancels animations. And adding it restarts animations. Per the …

Every so often, I find that the links I save to read later fall into natural groups or patterns that reveal common threads of interest. The past couple of weeks have produced a lot of thoughts about ChatGPT, an AI-powered interface that responds to requests in a chat-like exchange. Sorta like a “Hey Siri” request, …

Suzy Naschansky from the HTMHell Advent Calendar: See that aria-labelledby attribute? It chains two IDs from the markup, one for the heading (#article1-heading) and one for the link (#article1-read-more). What happens there is a screenreader will replace the existing semantic label between the link tags and use the content from both elements and announce them …

We’ve got ourselves a real holiday treat! Join host Alex Trost from the Frontend Horse community for the Holiday Snowtacular 2022 this Friday, December 16. There’s a lineup of 12 awesome speakers — including Chris Coyier, Cassidy Williams, Kevin Powell, and Angie Jones — each discussing various front-end and web dev topics. It’s like the …

CSS Container Queries are still gaining traction and many of us are getting our hands wet with them, even if it’s for little experiments or whatnot. They’ve got great, but not quite full, browser support — enough to justify using them in some projects, but maybe not to the extent where we might be tempted …

Sara Soueidan with everything you need, from what screen reading options are out there all the way to setting up virtual machines for them, installing them, and confguring keyboard options. It’s truly a one-stop reference that pulls together disparate tips for getting the most out of your screen reading accessibility testing. Thanks, Sara, for putting …

We’ve accomplished a bunch of stuff in this series! We created a custom WordPress block that fetches data from an external API and renders it on the front end. Then we took that work and extended it so the data also renders directly in the WordPress block editor. After that, we created a settings UI …

In the last article, we made a pretty cool little slider (or “carousel” if that’s what you prefer) that rotates in a circular direction. This time we are going to make one that flips through a stack of Polaroid images.

How often to do you reach for the CSS background-size property? If you’re like me — and probably lots of other front-end folks — then it’s usually when you background-size: cover an image to fill the space of an entire element. Well, I was presented with an interesting challenge that required more advanced background sizing: …

The CSS box-shadow and outline properties gained theme.json support in WordPress 6.1. Let’s look at a few examples of how it works in real themes, and what options we have to apply these styles to WordPress blocks and elements.

Nothing but ear-to-ear smiles as I was watching this video from @quayjn on YouTube. (No actual name in the byline, though I think it’s Brian Katz if my paper trail is correct). The best is this Pen you can use to sing along… The little song Una did for memorizing for JavaScript’s map(), filter(), and …

For years, a small pedantry war has been raging in our address bars. In one corner are brands like Google, Instagram, and Facebook. This group has chosen to redirect example.com to www.example.com. In the opposite corner: GitHub, DuckDuckGo, and Discord. This group has chosen to do the reverse and redirect www.example.com to example.com. Does “WWW” belong in a URL? Some developers …

Image sliders (also called carousels) are everywhere. There are a lot of CSS tricks to create the common slider where the images slide from left to right (or the opposite). It’s the same deal with the many JavaScript libraries out there that create fancy sliders with complex animations. We are not going to do any …

I wrote up some early thoughts on container style queries a little while back. It’s still early days. They’re already defined in the CSS Containment Module Level 1 specification (currently in Editor’s Draft status) but there’s still a couple of outstanding discussions taking place. The basic idea is that we can define a container and …

One of the main goals of the WordPress Site Editor (and, yes, that is now the “official” name) is to move basic block styling from CSS to structured JSON. JSON files are machine-readable, which makes it consumable by the JavaScript-based Site Editor for configuring a theme’s global styles directly in WordPress. It’s not all the …

I’m a sucker for anything about front-end job titles. Anselm Hannemann: CSS evolved and we’re beyond the point where everyone can just do it as a side interest. We all can learn it and build amazing stuff with it, but using it wisely and correctly in a large-scale context isn’t an easy job anymore. It …

HTML lists are boring. They don’t do much, so we don’t really think about them despite how widely used they are. And we’re still able to do the same things we’ve always done to customize them, like removing markers, reversing order, and making custom counters. There are, however, a few “newer” things — including dangers …

Well, color me this! I was griping to myself last night about just how gosh dang hard it is to read text messages in Apple Messages. You know, not the blue bubbles that you get when messaging other iPhone users. Those are iMessages. What I’m talking about are the green bubbles you get when messaging …

Well, hey check this out. Looks like there is a brand spankin’ new blog over at WordPress.org all about WordPress development. In the original proposal for the blog, Birgit Pauli-Haak writes:

BEM. Like seemingly all techniques in the world of front-end development, writing CSS in a BEM format can be polarizing. But it is – at least in my Twitter bubble – one of the better-liked CSS methodologies. Personally, I think BEM is good, and I think you should use it. But I also get why …

What I will be doing here is kind of an experiment to explore tricks that leverage a bug with the way CSS gradients handle sub-pixel rendering to create a static noise effect — like you might see on a TV with no signal.

So far, we’ve covered how to work with data from an external API in a custom WordPress block. We walked through the process of fetching that data for use on the front end of a WordPress site, and how to render it directly in the WordPress Block Editor when placing the block in content. This …

Hey folks! If you’ve been keeping up with the latest DigitalOcean news, you might be aware that we recently announced our acquisition of a company called Cloudways. In case you’re curious about what this means, we thought it might be helpful to share a short description of Cloudways and why we’re pumped to have them …

I’m often asked where to learn web development. The answer varies, of course, and we’ve published a few posts on the topic over the years, the most recent of which was Chris taking a stab at different learning paths in 2020. The answer doesn’t have to be school. But sometimes it is, and if your …

Is it Fall? Winter? I don’t know, but I woke up with snow in the front yard this morning and felt like it was time to write a little update about what’s been happening around CSS-Tricks this past month, as we’re known to do from time to time.