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Big ol’ same to Michelle Barker here: Here’s something I find myself needing to do again and again in CSS: completely covering one element with another. It’s the same CSS every time: the first element (the one that needs to be covered) has position: relative applied to it. The second has position: absolute and is positioned so that all …

Over on the Polypane blog (there’s no byline but presumably it’s Kilian Valkhof (it is)), there is a great article, Creating websites with prefers-reduced-data, about the prefers-reduced-data media query. No browser support yet, but eventually you can use it in CSS to make choices that reduce data usage. From the article, here’s one example where …

Svelte is one of the newer JavaScript frameworks and it’s rapidly rising in popularity. It’s a template-based framework, but one which allows for arbitrary JavaScript inside the template bindings; it has a superb reactivity story that’s simple, flexible and effective; and as an ahead-of-time (AOT) compiled framework, it has incredibly impressive perf, and bundle sizes. …

This article has no byline and is on a website that is even more weirdly specific than this one is, but I appreciate the trick here. A seven-column grid makes for a calendar layout pretty quick. You can let the days (grid items) fall onto it naturally, except kick the first day over to the …

Even though GitHub Readme files (typically ./readme.md) are Markdown, and although Markdown supports HTML, you can’t put <style> or <script> tags init. (Well, you can, they just get stripped.) So you can’t apply custom styles there. Or can you? You can use SVG as an <img src=”./file.svg” alt=”” /> (anywhere). When used that way, even …

Lighthouse is a free and open-source tool for assessing your website’s performance, accessibility, progressive web app metrics, SEO, and more. The easiest way to use it is through the Chrome DevTools panel. Once you open the DevTools, you will see a “Lighthouse” tab. Clicking the “Generate report” button will run a series of tests on …

Sara Soueidan digs into this HTML/UX situation. “Yes” or “no” is a boolean situation. A checkbox represents this: it’s either on or off (uh, mostly). But is a checkbox always the best UX? It depends, of course: Use radio buttons if you expect the answer to be equally distributed. If I expect the answer to …

The series is a wrap, my friends! Thanks for reading and a big special thanks to all the authors this year who shared something they have learned. Many authors really swung wide with thoughts about how we can be better and do better, which, of course, I really love. Adam showed us logical properties and, …

There’s a “C” word in web development that we don’t give enough attention to. No, I’m not talking about “continuous integration”, or even “CSS”. The “C” word I’m talking about is “constraints”. Understanding constraints is a vital part of building software that works the best it can in its targeted environment(s). Yet, the difficulty of …

Whether you use the eCommerce features on WordPress.com or use WooCommerce on your self-hosted WordPress site (like we do), you can use the WooCommerce mobile app. That’s right WooCommerce has native apps for iOS and Android. They’ve just released some nice upgrades to both, making them extra useful.

This article is for anyone interested in the emerging ecosystem of tools and technologies related to Jamstack and serverless. We’re going to use Fauna’s GraphQL API as a serverless back-end for a Jamstack front-end built with the Redwood framework and deployed with a one-click deploy on Vercel. In other words, lots to learn! By the …

My 2020 was colored by the considerable amount of time I spent analyzing data about CSS usage in the wild, for the CSS chapter of the Web Almanac, by the HTTP Archive. The results were eye-opening to me. A wake-up call of sorts. We spend so much time in the bubble of bleeding-edge tech that …

It’s December! Lots of things are published this time of year, like developer advent calendars and organizations reflecting on the past year. We have even our own end-of-year series where we asked folks what they learned in 2020. But we also see lots of research come out around this time. Some of it we’ve already …

I really appreciate a real-world walkthrough of a technology. Not only in what that technology does, but why it was chosen and how it worked for a team. Anybody can read the docs, but what you know after years of real-world usage is far more valuable. Hugo “Kitty” Giraudel: I want to properly reflect on …

Images take up to 50% of the total size of an average web page. And if images are not optimized, users end up downloading extra bytes. And if they’re downloading extra bytes, the site not only takes that much more time to load, but users are using more data, both of which can be resolved, …

I’ve learned to be more comfortable not knowing. “I don’t know”, comes easier now. “I don’t know anything about that.” It’s okay. It feels good to say. Whether it’s service workers, Houdini, shadow DOM, web components, HTTP2, CSS grid, “micro-front ends”, AVIF… there are many paths before us. This list doesn’t even broach JavaScript frameworks …

Recently, I’ve become more deeply aware of the inherent tension between change and inertia, as it applies to the evolution and use of web technologies. These forces have always been present and opposed to each other, but it seems to me that the side effects of these collisions are impacting web development more noticeably.

Something I learned (or, I guess, re-learned) this year is how important it is to pay close attention to the bit depth of images. Way back in the day, we used to obsessively choose between 2-, 4-, or 8-bit color depth on our GIFs, because when lots of users were using dialup modems to surf …

Tim Severien: I feel we, the community, have to acknowledge that CSS is easy to get started with and hard to master. Let’s reflect on the language and find out what makes it hard. Tim’s reasons CSS is hard (in my own words): You can look at a matching Ruleset, and still not have the …

This year, I learned a lot about how “old” tricks can solve a lot of modern problems if you use the right tools. Following the growth of Jamstack-style development has been both a learning experience, while also a nostalgic one. It’s been amazing to see how you can power plain ol’ HTML, CSS, and JavaScript …

I spent a good chunk of my work life this year trying (in collaboration with the amazing Noam Rosenthal) to standardize a new web platform feature: a way to modify the intrinsic size and resolution of images. And hey! We did it! But boy, was it ever a learning experience. This wasn’t my first standardization …

Pluralsight is giving away 25 courses on JavaScript for free to celebrate JavaScript’s 25th birthday. It’s no cheapie, either. The courses range from getting your hands dirty with JavaScript for the first time, to full-on reactive development. Pluralsight’s been around a long time and they know how to design a great course.

In an age where so much web design is already neat, clean, and simple, I can think of three ways to distinguish your site from the norm: Stunning visuals that cannot be created in UI vector editors, like Figma and Sketch Beautifully-animated interactions that cannot be dreamt in the language of Stacks of Rectangles Typography

When I first got this writing prompt, my mind immediately started thinking stuff like, “What tech have I learned this year?” But this post isn’t really about tech, because I think what I’ve learned the most about building websites this past year is simplification. This year, I’ve learned that keeping it simple is almost always …

There was a time when I felt overwhelmed by how fast the web developed. It seemed like not a single day passed without a new plugin, framework, technique, or language feature being released. I believed that in order to survive as a freelancer and to compete with others I had to learn everything everyone else …

I was recently looking for a way to perform scrolling effects on a project and I stumbled on the Locomotive Scroll library. It lets you perform a variety of scrolling effects, like parallax and triggering/controlling animations at scroll points. You might also call it a “smooth scrolling” library, but it doesn’t leverage native smooth scrolling …

I enjoyed this blog post from Shawn. Lampshading is apparently the idea of a TV show calling attention to some weakness (like an implausible plot point) so that the show can move on. By calling it out, it avoids criticism by demonstrating the self-awareness. For developers, Shawn notes, it’s like admitting to your teammates/boss that …

In the short term, opinions about technology often follow a compressed form of Laver’s Law: Everything just before me was completely broken. Everything that comes after me is completely unnecessary. Everything I use right now is perfectly fine; stop changing things. We tend to judge things based on where we started, our personal “Year Zeros.” …

When Chris asked me to write about “one thing I learned about building websites this year” I admit my brain immediately went through a list of techniques and CSS properties I started using this year. But then I paused. Other people can write about that much better than I can. What’s something that I specifically …

WCAG 2.1 Recommendations rolled out in 2018. It’s been a couple years now and there are some new Success Criterion. In this article, I will discuss Label in Name, which is how we visually label components. We’ll take a look at what some failure states look like, how to fix them, and examples of how …