Web Development + Follow

Let’s forego the usual circles and bars we typically see used in charts for more eccentric shapes. With online presentations more and more common today, a quick way to spruce up your web slides and make them stand out is to give the charts a shapely makeover 🪄 I’ll show you how to create charts …

The outline property in CSS draws a line around the outside of an element. This is quite similar to the border property, the main exception being that outline isn’t a part of the box model. It is often used for highlighting elements, for example, the :focus style. In this article, let’s put a point on …

Modern apps place high demands on front-end developers. Web apps require complex functionality, and the lion’s share of that work is falling to front-end devs: building modern, accessible user interfaces creating interactive elements and complex animations managing complex application state meta-programming: build scripts, transpilers, bundlers, linters, etc. reading from REST, GraphQL, and other APIs middle-tier …

I’ve been using Local for ages. Four years ago, I wrote about how I got all my WordPress sites running locally on it. I just wanted to give it another high five because it’s still here and still great. In fact, much great than it was back then. Disclosure, Flywheel, the makers of Local, sponsor …

Typically, a single favicon is used across a whole domain. But there are times you wanna step it up with different favicons depending on context. A website might change the favicon to match the content being viewed. Or a site might allow users to personalize their theme colors, and those preferences are reflected in the …

It’s very popular to put a $ on lines that are intended to be a command in code documentation that involves the terminal (i.e. the command line). Like this: The point of that is that it mimics the prompt that you (may) see on your command line. Here’s mine: So the dollar sign ($) is …

Most images on the web are superfluous. If I might be a jerk for a bit, 99% of them aren’t even that helpful at all (although there are rare exceptions). That’s because images don’t often complement the text they’re supposed to support and instead hurt users, taking forever to load and blowing up data caps …

Serverless architectures have brought engineering teams a great number of benefits. We get simpler deployments, automatic and infinite scale, better concurrency, and a stateless API surface. It’s hard to imagine going back to the world of managed services, broken local environments, and SSHing into servers. When I started doing web development, moving from servers in …

In his last An Event Apart talk, Dave made a point that it’s really only just about right now that Web Components are becoming a practical choice for production web development. For example, it has only been about a year since Edge went Chromium. Before that, Edge didn’t support any Web Component stuff. If you …

How we use Web Components at GitHub — Kristján Oddsson talks about how GitHub is using web components. I remember they were very early adopters, and it says here they released a <relative-time> component in 2014! Now they’ve got a whole bunch of open source components. So easy to use! Awesome! I wanted to poke …

Wondering what’s even more challenging than choosing a JavaScript framework? You guessed it: choosing a CSS-in-JS solution. Why? Because there are more than 50 libraries out there, each of them offering a unique set of features. We tested 10 different libraries, which are listed here in no particular order: Styled JSX, styled-components, Emotion, Treat, TypeStyle, …

I fell in love with coding the moment I created my first CSS :hover effect. Years later, that initial bite into interactivity on the web led me to a new goal: making a game.

Choosing the right tools to build a website for your organization is essential, but it can be tough to find the right fit. Simple site builders like Wix and Squarespace are easy for marketers to use, but severely limit developers when it comes to customizing site functionality. WordPress is a more robust content management system …

Making GitHub’s new homepage fast and performant — Tobias Ahlin describes how the scrolling effects are done more performantly thanks to IntersectionObserver and the fact that it avoids the use of methods that trigger reflows, like getBoundingClientRect. Also, WebP + SVG masks! Everything we know about Core Web Vitals and SEO — Simon Hearne covers …

I like a good trick. What if… a URL was… a promise… that fetched said URL? That’s what @justjavac did with JavaScript Proxys. A clever trick, that. Don’t @ me about the practicality. Trick, folks.

By our last estimate, there are now more PDFs in the world than atoms in the universe (not verified by outside sources) so chances are, from time to time, you’re going to run into a PDF document or two. Browsers do a reasonably good job of handling PDFs. Typically, clicking a link to a PDF …

Stefan Judis, two days before I mouthed off about using (X, X, X, X) for talking about specificity, has a great blog post not only using that format, but advocating that browser DevTools should show us that value by selectors. I think that the above additions could help to educate developers about CSS tremendously. The …

This post is an accelerated introduction to Svelte from the point of view of someone with solid experience with React. I’ll provide a quick introduction, and then shift focus to things like state management and DOM interoperability, among other things. I plan on moving somewhat quickly, so I can cover a lot of topics. At …

Collection of common CSS mistakes, and how to fix them From Stefánia Péter. Clever idea for a site! Some of them are little mind-twisters that could bite you, and some of them are honing in on best practices that may affect accessibility.

Jonathan Neal tweeted a heck of a little CSS trick the other day, putting JSON inside CSS and plucking it out with JavaScript. Valid values for custom properties are quite liberal! So this looks for a CSS rule (e.g. a whole block, like #x { y: z; } where the cssText starts with — (which …

Ooo look at this mighty SEO flex from Google: Learn CSS! Well deserved — this is great content. Twenty-three chapters taking you through all the fundamentals of CSS with extra content, like relevant podcasts, interactive examples, and even quizzes to make sure you retained what you read. Has CSS become… a real system? Heck yes, it has.

If you follow new developments in CSS, you’ve likely heard of the impending arrival of container queries. We’re going to look at the basics here, but if you’d like another look, check out Una’s “Next Gen CSS: @container” article. After we have a poke at the basics ourselves, we’re going to build something super fun …

Here’s some hardcore deep-dive CSS nerdery from PPK. If you can wrap your mind around min-content (the smallest an element can be based on the content it contains) and max-content (the largest the content of an element can push it) then it’s just one more little step to understanding fit-content. As PPK says, it’s shorthand …

The Public Beta of the Notion API dropped! Woot! Here’s their guide. I’ve been a Notion user and fan for a long time, for both personal and professional team use. They even sponsored a few videos around here a while back that are still a great representation of how I use Notion. Because Notion is …

SVGs are awesome: they are small, look sharp on any scale, and can be customized without creating a separate file. However, there is something I feel is missing in web standards today: a way to include them as an external file that also retains the format’s customization powers. For instance, let’s say you want to …

I’m afraid I have to start this with a whole backstory, as the journey here is the point, not so much the theme. A fella wrote to me a while back outlining a situation he was in. His company has a bunch of WordPress sites for public radio, many of which are essentially homes for …

Neon text can add a nice, futuristic touch to any website. I’ve always loved the magic of neon signs, and wanted to recreate them using CSS. I thought I’d share some tips on how to do it! In this article, we’re going to take a look at how to add glowing effects to text. We’ll …

Addy Osmani on images in HTML: The humble <img> element has gained some superpowers over the years. Given how central it is to image optimization on the web, let’s catch up on what it can do and how it can help improve user experience and the Core Web Vitals.

I see you. In the back there, behind JavaScript and React and PHP and all those “real” programming languages, I see you. And I appreciate you.

An interactive tool for learning grid syntax from Etesam Ansari. In the Learn section, it teaches you some concepts (involving multiple bits of the grid syntax) then gives you a task to complete by filling out the right syntax. I’m sharing because I think this sort of thing really clicks with people — I know Flexbox Froggy …