Web Development + Follow

I believe animation on the web is not only fun, but engaging in such a way that it has converted site visitors into customers. Think of the “Like” button on Twitter. When you “like” a tweet, tiny colorful bubbles spread around the heart button while it appears to morph into a circle around the button …

I think it’s great that the CSS Working Group does these. It’s like planting a flag in the ground saying this is what CSS looks like at this specific point in time. They do specifically say it’s not for us CSS authors though… This document collects together into one definition all the specs that together …

One of my favorite things in the world is painters tape (also called masking tape). It seems like something silly: some tape you put on a wall when you’re painting to avoid getting paint on the wall. The tape doesn’t have a strong adhesive, so it can be pulled back off the wall without damaging it.

Jen was just tweetin’ about how the latest Safari Technical Preview has aspect-ratio. Looks like Chrome and Firefox both have it behind a flag, so with Safari joining the party, we’ll all have it soon. I played with it a while back. It’s awesome and much needed. There are ways to make `aspect-ratio` boxes, but …

Spring animations are a wonderful way to make UI interactions come to life. Rather than merely changing a property at a constant rate over a period of time, springs allow us to move things using spring physics, which gives the impression of a real thing moving, and can appear more natural to users. I’ve written …

Simon Willison has a project called Datasette, an open source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data. I’m not sure I’m qualified to explain it, but it’s like a tool to make handling data easier and doing more — through the web — with data you have. Like making that data queryable and giving it an …

I recently had a project with a requirement to support theming on the website. It was a bit of a strange requirement, as the application is mostly used by a handful of administrators. An even bigger surprise was that they wanted not only to choose between pre-created themes, but build their own themes. I guess …

Zell Liew is giving away 10 free copies of his Learn JavaScript course, and entering the giveaway is pretty easy: sign up for his newsletter. I’ve personally subscribed for some time now and all I get is as occasional hand-written email with useful JavaScript gems. It’s sort of like winning no matter if you get …

There is a <code> tag in HTML. I literally just used it to wrap that tag in the previous sentence — so meta. It is an inline-by-default element that denotes any sort of code. It has default (user agent) styles that apply a monospace font-family, which feels like a fine default (as it’s true, most …

We’ve seen the checkbox hack and how it can be used to build a complete state machine in CSS. Today, we’ll take that line of thought a step further and build a simple game of Whack-A-Mole, where the player needs to react quickly to win … all without a touch of JavaScript. This might seem …

Here’s a little hodgepodge of videos I’ve recently bookmarked (and watched). I couldn’t decide if each one of them should be a separate blog post or if I should do this combined list post thing. If I had a lot more to say about each video I would have split them off, but I went …

Here’s a fun idea from James Stanley: a CSS file (that presumably updates daily) containing CSS custom properties for “seasonal” colors (e.g. spring is greens, fall is oranges). You’d then use the values to theme your site, knowing that those colors change slightly from day to day.

Hasura is one of my favorite ways to create a managed GraphQL API for my applications. I find it easy and straightforward as well as suitable for a wide range of use cases. However, since working with Hasura, I’ve seen the same question come up again and again: how should we make an array? Given …

I come to bury Flash, not to praise it, writes Matt May in this excellent thread about the end of Adobe Flash. Not so long ago, web designers used Flash to create striking visuals and animations and games. But shortly after that, it began to replace HTML and CSS which caused a ton of accessibility …

Spencer Miskoviak on the Wealthfront blog: By creating custom DevTools specific to an app, they can operate at an even higher abstraction to handle things like user interactions, or debugging tracking events. While this requires building and maintaining the custom DevTools, it also means it can be tailored to the needs of the app and …

Nice site from Google (and guest contributors) with a bunch of fun demos of what Houdini can do. Plus a write-up from Una. These are all Paint API demos. Houdini is technically a group of seven things that are all pretty cool, and the Paint API is just one of them. Paint is fun, but …

Adam Argyle has a post over on web.dev digging into this. He starts with the assumption that you need to do vertical centering and horizontal centering. It’s that vertical centering that has traditionally been a bit trickier for folks, particularly when the height of the content is unknown. We have a complete guide to centering …

Heck of a year, eh? Like we do every year, I’d like to give you a huge thanks for reading CSS-Tricks, and recap the year. More downs than ups, all told. Here at CSS-Tricks, it was more of a wash. Allow me to me share some numbers, milestones, and thoughts with you about our journey …

Eleventy is increasing in popularity because it allows us to create nice, simple websites, but also — because it’s so developer-friendly. We can build large-scale, complex projects with it, too. In this tutorial we’re going to demonstrate that expansive capability by putting a together a powerful and human-friendly environment variable solution.

Me, I really dislike FOUT. I like that it’s an option, because not displaying text quickly on the web is no good. I know font-display: swap; is popular because it’s good for performance, but that FOUT stuff pains me. Matt Hobbs: If there’s one thing I’d like readers to take away from this post it’s …

The goal of Client Hints is to provide a framework for a browser when informing the server about the context in which a web experience is provided. HTTP Client Hints are a proposed set of HTTP Header Fields for proactive content negotiation in the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. The client can advertise information about itself through …

The WebKit blog details how to use individual CSS Transform properties in the latest version of Safari Technology Preview. This brings the browser in line with the CSS Transforms Module Level 2 spec, which breaks out the translate(), rotate() and scale() functions from the transform property into their own individual properties: translate, scale, and rotate.

Creating video is time consuming. A well-made 5-minute video can take hours to plan, record, and edit — and that’s before we start talking about making that video consistent with all the other videos on your site. When we took on the Jamstack Explorers project (a video-driven educational resource for web developers), we wanted to find the right balance …

Josh Comeau covers the concept of margin collapsing: This idea might sound simple, but if you’ve been writing CSS for a while, you’ve almost certainly been surprised when margins either don’t collapse, or they collapse in weird and unexpected ways. In real-world projects, all kinds of circumstances can complicate matters.

I redesigned the site! I can never think about the word redesign without also thinking about realigning, from Cameron Moll’s seminal article. I did not start from nothing. This design wasn’t a blank design canvas and empty code editor thing. I doubt any future redesign will be either. I started with what we already had …

It’s a pretty low-effort thing to get a big fancy link preview on social media. Toss a handful of specific <meta> tags on a URL and you get a big image-title-description thing. Here’s Twitter’s version of an article on this site:

Alec Pollak was little more than a junior art director cranking out print ads when he got a call that would change the path of his career. He worked at advertising agency, Grey Entertainment, later called Grey Group. The agency had spent decades acquiring some of the biggest clients in the industry. Pollak spent most …

Ask a hundred front-end developers, and most, if not all, of them will have used the box-shadow property in their careers. Shadows are enduringly popular, and can add an elegant, subtle effect if used properly. But shadows occupy a strange place in the CSS box model. They have no effect on an element’s width and …

The answer to “What is the most accessible HTML for an SVG icon?” isn’t one-size-fits all, because what an icon needs to do on a website varies. I’m partial to Heather Migliorisi’s research on all this, but I can summarize. Extremely quickly: hide it if it’s decorative, title it if it’s stand-alone, let the link …

I’ve always liked tag clouds. I like the UX of seeing what tags are most popular on a website by seeing the relative font size of the tags, popular tags being bigger. They seem to have fallen out of fashion, though you do often see versions of them used in illustrations in tools like Wordle. …