Web Development + Follow

I’ve been thinking about social media images again. You know, the images that (can) show up when you share a link in places like Twitter, Facebook, or iMessage. You’re essentially leaving money on the table without them, because they turn a regular post with a little ol’ link in it into a post with a …

!default is a Sass flag that indicates conditional assignment to a variable — it assigns a value only if the variable was previously undefined or null. Consider this code snippet: To the Sass compiler, this line says: Assign $variable to value ‘test’, but only if $variable is not already assigned. Here’s the counter-example, illustrating the other side …

Manuel Matuzović goes line-by-line through a boilerplate HTML document. I like it. It’s a good reference and has a lot of the same type of stuff I tend to put in the main HTML template. It makes me think about how opinionated this kind of thing can be. Dang near every line! Not the DOCTYPE, …

Chen Hui Jing covers some recent movement in DevTools: Firefox’s grid inspector was pretty full-featured from the get-to and released together with CSS grid in Firefox 52. It was constantly improved upon since. Chrome added a basic grid inspector tool in Chrome 62 that let developers highlight elements using grid layout, but more robust features were only added in …

My friends at Sparkbox are doing a survey on design systems, as they do each year. Go ahead and fill it out if you please. Here are the results from last year. In both 2019 and 2020, the vibe was that design systems (both as an idea and as a real thing that real companies …

When dealing with complex CSS animations, there is a tendency to create expansive @keyframes with lots of declarations. There are a couple of tricks though that I want to talk about that might help make things easier, while staying in vanilla CSS: Multiple animations Timing functions The first one is more widely used and familiar …

Building animations can get complicated, particularly compelling animations where you aren’t just rolling a ball across the screen, but building a scene where many things are moving and changing in concert. When compelling animation is the goal, a timeline GUI interface is a long-proven way to get there. That was true in the days of …

Let’s talk about disabled buttons. Specifically, let’s get into why we use them and how we can do better than the traditional disabled attribute in HTML (e.g. <button disabled> ) to mark a button as disabled. There are lots of use cases where a disabled button makes a lot of sense, and we’ll get to …

Kitty reflected on an ancient blog post here on CSS-Tricks on how to make an animated pie timer. The old technique is still clever. The new technique is equally clever and much easier. I particularly like the steps() animation function that “flips” the “mask” from side-to-side by rotating a pseudo-element half a turn, That’s just …

How many times have you heard that (or even uttered it under your own breath)? I know I’ve heard it in conversations. I also know I’ve wondered the same thing about a product or two — hey, the idea here is super simple, let’s get a couple buddies together and make the same thing, only …

Chrome is experimenting with @container, a property within the CSS Working Group Containment Level 3 spec being championed by Miriam Suzanne of Oddbird, and a group of engineers across the web platform. @container brings us the ability to style elements based on the size of their parent container.

Like Jamstack, Netlify is coining this term. If your reaction is: great, a new thing I need to know about and learn, know that while Distributed Persistent Rendering (DPR) does involve some new things, this is actually a push toward simplification and leverages ideas as old as the web is, just like Jamstack.

This is extremely fun. Jeff Lindsay has created Topframe, and writes: Anybody that knows how to mess around with HTML can now mess around with their desktop computing experience. Topframe is an open source tool that lets you customize your desktop screen using HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

I find build tooling endlessly interesting, especially right now as we’re in a juicy next-gen transitional period with players like Vite, wmr, Snowpack, and esbuild. Hugh Haworth has a good run-down of the new players, and we’ve chatted on ShopTalk about them several times. I especially like it when people blog their personal journeys in moving …

I recently came across an interesting problem. I had to implement a grid of cards with a variable (user-set) aspect ratio that was stored in a –ratio custom property. Boxes with a certain aspect ratio are a classic problem in CSS and one that got easier to solve in recent years, especially since we got …

I have a real distaste for this question. It might seem like a fun question to dig into on the surface, but the way it enters public discourse rarely seems to be in good faith. There are ulterior motives at play involving respect, protective emotions, and desires to break or maintain the status quo.

These are a few great links about typography that have been burning a hole in my saved bookmarks folder that I’m just now getting around to sharing. There’s good stuff in there, from how to choose typefaces for app design to ideas for how to fix the concept of font sizing in CSS.

While I’m 85% certain you’ve seen and used Can I Use…, I bet there is only a 13% chance that you’ve seen and used Can I Email…. It’s the same vibe—detailed support information for web platform features—except instead of support information for web browsers, it is email clients. Campaign Monitor has maintained a guide for …

Route53 is DNS management service by AWS. DNS is absolutely not a database, and yet here’s Nicholas Martin writing up some very clever trickery originally done by Corey Quinn: When you think about it, DNS configuration is actually a very rudimentary NoSQL database. You can view and modify it at any time quite easily through …

It’s easy to forget that, as a search engine, Google doesn’t just compare keywords to generate search results. Google knows that if people don’t enjoy their experience on a web page, they won’t stay on the page long enough to consume the content — no matter how relevant it is. As a result, Google has …

There is an increasing number of “custom” features on the web platform. We have custom properties (–my-property), custom elements (<my-element>), and custom events (new CustomEvent(‘myEvent’)). At one point, we might even get custom media queries (@media (–my-media)). But that’s not all! You might have missed it because it wasn’t mentioned in Google’s “New in Chrome …

You can’t even look at code or documentation for Astro (publicly) yet — it’s an in-progress idea — but you can watch a video of Fred showing it off to Feross. I gotta admit: it looks awesome. I’m bullish on two major parts of this:

The bombshell article of the week is from Alex Russell of Google/Chrome. Alex has long been super critical of Apple, particularly about how there is literally no option to run any other browser than Safari on iOS. This article isn’t just fist-waving about that, but a dissertation accusing Apple of real harm to the web …

Let‘s take a quick stroll down memory-lane to revisit how vendor prefixing CSS properties came to be. I hope I don’t trigger PTSD for anyone! It‘s not clear who started prefixing, or when it began exactly. What is clear, is that by 2006, prefixed features were in Internet Explorer and Firefox. The raison d’être of …

This was a great “Today I Learned” for me from Josh W. Comeau. If the font-size of an <input> is 16px or larger, Safari on iOS will focus into the input normally. But as soon as the font-size is 15px or less, the viewport will zoom into that input. Presumably, because it considers that type …

Here’s a dilemma: what happens if your WooCommerce site has a problem and the quickest and best way to fix it is to roll back to a previous version? The dilemma is, if you roll back the database, you would lose literal customer orders that are stored in the database. That’s not acceptable for an …

I was just chatting with Eric Meyer the other day and I remembered an Eric Meyer story from my formative years. I wrote a blog post about CSS specificity, and Eric took the time to point out the misleading nature of it (I remember scurrying to update it). What was so misleading? The way I …

A bona fide CSS trick from Kirupa Chinnathambi here. To match a colored shadow with the colors in the background-image of an element, you inherit the background in a pseudo-element, kick it behind the original, then blur and filter it.

In June of 2006, web developers and designers from around the world came to London for the second annual @media conference. The first had been a huge success, and @media 2006 had even more promise. Its speaker lineup was pulled from some of the most exciting and energetic voices in the web design and browser …

I hope people think of SVG as a vector format that is good for drawing things. There is plenty more to know, but here’s one more: SVG is good for composition. You draw things at very specific coordinates in SVG and, while they can scale, they tend to stay put. And while SVG is a …