Web Development + Follow

In this week’s round-up, prefers-contrast lands in Safari, MathML gets some attention, :is() is actually quite forgiving, more ADA-related lawsuits, inconsistent initial values for CSS Backgrounds properties can lead to unwanted — but sorta neat — patterns.

Alex Russell made some interesting notes about performance and how it impacts folks on mobile: … CPUs are not improving fast enough to cope with frontend engineers’ rosy resource assumptions. If there is unambiguously good news on the tooling front, multiple popular tools now include options to prevent sending first-party JS in the first place …

I still remember my excitement when I learned how to build a hover-triggered submenu with just CSS. (It was probably after reading this 2003 article from A List Apart.) At the time, it was a true CSS trick. Seriously. Wild times.

File this under stuff you don’t need to know just yet, but I think the :has CSS selector is going to have a big impact on how we write CSS in the future. In fact, if it ever ships in browsers, I think it breaks my mental model for how CSS fundamentally works because it …

So, you have been working on this new and fancy web application. Be it a recipe app, a document manager, or even your private cloud, you‘ve now reached the point of working with users and permissions. Take the document manager as an example: you don’t just want admins; maybe you want to invite guests with …

I had a very embarrassing CSS moment the other day. I was working on the front-end code of a design that had a narrow sidebar of icons. There isn’t enough room there to show text of what the icons are, so the idea is that we’ll use accessible (but visually hidden, by default) text that …

CSS-Tricks has covered how to break text that overflows its container before, but not much as much as you might think. Back in 2012, Chris penned “Handling Long Words and URLs (Forcing Breaks, Hyphenation, Ellipsis, etc)” and it is still one of only a few posts on the topic, including his 2018 follow-up “Where Lines …

The JS Party podcast sometimes hosts game shows. One of them is Jeopardy-esque, called JS Danger, and some of us here from CSS-Tricks got to be the guests this past week! The YouTube video of it kicks off at about 5:56.

For years, my pain has been not being able to create a somewhat natural-looking pattern in CSS. I mean, sometimes all I need is a wood texture. The only production-friendly solution I knew of was to use an external image, but external images are an additional dependency and they introduce a new complexity. I know …

Let’s spin up a basic Svelte site and integrate Tailwind into it for styling. One advantage of working with Tailwind is that there isn’t any context switching going back and forth between HTML and CSS, since you’re applying styles as classes right on the HTML. It’s all the in same file in Svelte anyway, but …

Looks like 2021 is the time to start using CSS Logical Properties! Plus, Chrome recently shipped a few APIs that have raised eyebrows, SVG allows us to disable its aspect ratio, WordPress focuses on the accessibility of its typography, and there’s still no update (or progress) on the development of CSS custom media queries. Let’s …

If you have a table of contents on a long-scrolling page, thanks to, say, position: fixed; or position: sticky;, the IntersectionObserver API in JavaScript is the perfect companion to highlight items in the table of contents when corresponding content is in view.

It was the year 1994 that the web came out of the shadow of academia and onto the everyone’s screens. In particular, it was the second half of the second week of December 1994 that capped off the year with three eventful days. Members of the World Wide Web Consortium huddled around a table at …

Are you a beginner coder trying to implement to launch your MVP? I’ve just finished my MVP of ReviewBolt.com, a competitor analysis tool. And it’s built using React + Fauna + Next JS. It’s my first paid SaaS tool so earning $150 is a big accomplishment for me. In this post you’ll see why I …

The block editor was a game-changer for WordPress. The idea that we can create blocks of content and arrange them in a component-like fashion means we have a lot of flexibility in how we create content, as well a bunch of opportunities to develop new types of modular content. But there’s so much more happening …

Recently, I had to make a web page displaying a bunch of SVG graphs for an analytics dashboard. I used a bunch of <rect>, <line> and <text> elements on each graph to visualize certain metrics. This works and renders just fine, but results in a bloated DOM tree, where each shape is represented as separate …

Richard MacManus explaining Daniel Kehoe’s approach to building websites, which he calls “Stackless”: There are three key web technologies underpinning Kehoe’s approach: ES6 Modules: JavaScript ES6 can support import modules, which are also supported by browsers. Module CDNs: JavaScript modules can now be downloaded from third-party content delivery networks (CDNs). Custom HTML elements: Developers can …

This article is going to help you, dear front-end developer, understand all that is Firebase. We’re going to cover lots of details about what Firebase is, why it can be useful to you, and show examples of how. But first, I think you’ll enjoy a little story about how Firebase came to be.

AutomateWoo is this handy extension for WooCommerce that adds triggers actions based on your online store’s activity. Someone abandoned their cart? Remind them by email. Someone made a purchase? Ask them to leave a review or follow up to see how they’re liking the product so far. This sort of automated communication is gold. Automatically …

When I’d go to a conference (when we were able to do such things) and see someone do a presentation on web components, I always thought it was pretty nifty (yes, apparently, I’m from 1950), but it always seemed complicated and excessive. A thousand lines of JavaScript to save four lines of HTML. The speaker …

I’ve been lucky enough to be a guest on some podcasts and at some events, so I thought I’d do a quick little round-up here! These Chronicle posts are just that: an opportunity to share some off-site stiff that I’ve been up to. This time, it’s all different podcasts.

Not sure about you, but I often wonder how to build a carousel component in such a way that you can easily dump a bunch of items into the component and get a nice working carousel — one that allows you to scroll smoothly, navigate with the dynamic buttons, and is responsive. If that is …

I really like the kind of tech writing where a fellow developer lays out some specific needs, tries out different tech to fulfill those needs, and documents how it went for them. That’s exactly what Andrew Walpole did here. He wanted to try out bundlers in the context of WordPress themes and needing a handful …

In this week’s news, Chrome tackles focus rings, we learn how to get “donut” scope, Global Privacy Control gets big-name adoption, it’s time to ditch pixels in media queries, and a snippet that prevents annoying form validation styling.

Uh, what’s @property? It’s a new CSS feature! It gives you superpowers. No joke, there is stuff that @property can do that unlocks things in CSS we’ve never been able to do before. While everything about @property is exciting, perhaps the most interesting thing is that it provides a way to specify a type for …

The internet has connected 4.66 billion people with each other as of October 2020. A total of 59% of the world’s total population. Amazingly, this is not even the surprising part. The stat to look out for is mobile users and their rise in the internet world. Out of 4.66 billion people connected to the …

UI components like spinners and skeleton loaders make waiting for a page load less frustrating and might even affect how loading times are perceived when used correctly. They won’t completely prevent users from abandoning the website, but they might encourage them to wait a bit longer. Animated spinners are used in most cases since they …

Jim Nielsen: I think you’ll find it quite refreshing to use React A) with a JSX-like syntax, and B) without any kind of build tooling. Refreshing indeed:

Here’s a nice simple demo from Moritz Gießmann on animating the triangle of a <details> element, which is the affordance that tells people this thing can be opened. Animating it, then is another kind of affordance that tells people this thing is opening now. The tricks? Turn off the default triangle: details summary::-webkit-details-marker { display:none; …

Zach Leatherman wrote up a comprehensive list of font loading strategies that have been widely shared in the web development field. I took a look at this list before, but got so scared (and confused), that I decided not to do anything at all. I don’t know how to begin loading fonts the best way …