Web Development + Follow

Imagine a header of a website that is nice and thick, with plenty of padding on top and bottom of the content. As you scroll down, it shrinks up on itself, reducing some of that padding, making more screen real estate for other content. Normally you would have to use some JavaScript to add a …

Malte Ubl’s list for: 8 image loading optimization techniques to minimize both the bandwidth used for loading images on the web and the CPU usage for image display.

I love this piece from Remy Sharp where he argues that the web didn’t get more complicated over the last 20 years, despite what we might think: Web development did not change. Web development grew. There are more options now, not different options. Browsers have become more capable and still work with web pages built over 20 years …

High five to Netlify for the ❥ sponsorship. Netlify is a great place to host your static (or not-so-static!) website because of the great speed, DX, pricing, and feature set. I’ve thought of Netlify a bunch of times just in the past week or so, because either they release something cool, or someone else is …

The idea of an “abortable” fetch came to life in 2017 when AbortController was released. That gives us a way to bail on an API request initiated by fetch() — even multiple calls — whenever we want. Here’s a super simple example using AbortController to cancel a fetch() request: You can really see its value …

Imagine if your :focus styles animated from element to element as you tab through a site. Like the focus ring up and flew across the page to the next element. The spirit of it is similar to smooth scrolling: it’s easier to understand what is happening when movement accompanies the change¹. Rather than scrolling (or …

Asko Nõmm reached a breaking point with front end: I want to have a personal life and not have to spend my nights reading up on some new flavour of *.js in fear that if I don’t I would soon be made irrelevant. I don’t want to learn nor use a million different tools. I …

In this week’s roundup, WebKit’s prefixed autofill becomes a standard, the pointer cursor is for more than just links, and browsers are jumping on board to delay videos set to autoplay until they’re in view… plus more! Let’s jump right into it.

Bruce Lawson with the tip of the day, warning against the use of pointer-events: none on forms labels. We know that pointer-events is used to change how elements respond to click, tap, hover, and active states. But it apparently borks form labels, squashing their active hit target size to something small and tough to interact …

Joy Heron bought a cool domain name and published an article there: Luckily, with modern HTML and CSS, we can create responsive and accessible web apps with relative ease. In my years of doing software development, I have learned some HTML and CSS tips and tricks, and I want to present these in this post. …

Components are great, aren’t they? They are these reusable sources of truth that you can use to build rock-solid front-ends without duplicating code. You know what else is super cool? Headless content management! Headless content management system (CMS) products offer a content editing experience while freeing that content in the form of data that can …

Nils Binder talks about a technique for spacing between two elements. Picture a header on a large screen with a logo in the upper left and nav in the upper right. Then a small screen, when they can no longer be on the same “row” and need to wrap, they don’t just wrap but are …

An interesting conversation came up at work the other day: Should we use the CSS float property now that we have CSS Grid and Flexbox?

Maximiliano Firtman has a look at PWAs this year, including trying to get a bead on how widespread they are: At the end of 2020, approximately 1% of websites included a Service Worker, and 2.2% had an installable Web App Manifest file. Remember that some platforms -such as Safari on iOS or Chrome on Android- do …

WordPress core is making the jump from jQuery 1.12.4 to jQuery 3.5.1! This is a big deal for lots of reasons — like modern features, better DX, and security improvements to name a few. Right now, the plan is to release the update in WordPress 5.7, which is slated to release on March 9. 🤞 …

GraphQL is a query language and server-side runtime environment for building APIs. It can also  be considered as the syntax that you write in order to describe the kind of data you want from APIs. What this means for you as a backend developer is that with GraphQL, you are able to expose a single …

What if an <iframe> had within it another <iframe> of the exact same source? Inception, as they say. Baptise Crespy does this all-important research in the name of art and science. Turns out browsers are smart enough to not allow this infinite looping to occur (and likely crash your browser/computer). They strip the content after …

Scott Jehl doesn’t mince words here: Removing media support from HTML video was a mistake. It means that for every video we embed in HTML, we’re stuck with the choice of serving source files that are potentially too large or small for many users’ devices (resulting in poor performance, wasteful data consumption, and even sub-optimal quality on …

Look at that! The :focus-visible pseudo-selector is now supported in Firefox, as of version 85 which shipped yesterday. I had to rush over to the MDN Docs just to confirm, and yep, the :focus-visible page has been updated to reflect the news. What’s so cool about :focus-visible? It’s all about the blue focus ring that …

I always appreciate someone looking into and re-evaluating the best practices of something that literally every website needs and has a complex set of requirements. Andrey Sitnik has done that here with favicons.

One of our readers checked out “Helping a Beginner Understand Getting a Website Live” and had some follow up questions specifically about hosting providers. Here’s what they asked: What’s the difference between hosting providers? For example, what is the difference between GoDaddy and Hostgator, which seems like “traditional” web hosting providers, to others like Heroku, Digital …

We’ve covered that individual <table> cells, <th> and <td> can be position: sticky. It’s pretty easy to make the header of a table stick to the top of the screen while scrolling through a bunch or rows (like this demo). But stickiness isn’t just for the top of the screen, you can stick things in …

We don’t have “regular” nesting in CSS. Maybe this becomes a thing someday, or something like it. That would be cool, although that pre-spec doesn’t mention anything about media queries. I’d hope we get that right out of the gate if we ever do get native CSS nesting. In fact, I’d trade it for selector …

As a web developer, I pay close attention to the design of video games. From the HUD in Overwatch to the catch screen in Pokemon Go to hunting in Oregon Trail, games often have interesting mechanics and satisfying interactions, many of which inspire my own coding games at Codepip. Beyond that, implementing small slices of …

Stefan Judis has a “Today I Learned” (TIL) post explaining how SVGs filters can be inlined in CSS. The idea is that CSS has the filter property which supports some built-in functions, like grayscale(100%) and stuff like that. But it can also point to a filter defined by SVG. So you could do filter: url(#my-custom-filter) …

This little trick for gradient borders is super useful: Here’s some basic demos from our article on the subject. Sephanie Eckles was sharing around the idea with more detail. Bramus Van Damme saw that and stretched it a bit by adding, then animating an angle to the gradient. Like: But wait! That’s not actually going …

React framework maturity, early container queries, WASM adoption, and monoliths. I’ll take all four, please. Not feeling like a particularly front-end-y? Jay says: Interestingly, the biggest developments in the front-end are unlikely to be traditionally front-end concerns. Back in our 2019 forecast, we noted that the role of the front-end developer was increasingly shifting towards ‘full-stack’, and this has …

The following article is co-authored by Uri Shaked and Michal Porag. Let’s explore the complexities of how CSS computes the width and height dimensions of elements. This is based on countless late-night hours debugging and fiddling with lots of combinations of CSS properties, reading though the specs, and trying to figure out why some things …

Hey, we’re back with weekly updates about the browser landscape from Šime Vidas. In this week’s update, the CSS :not pseudo class can accept complex selectors, how to disable smooth scrolling when using “Find on page…” in Chrome, Safari’s support for there media attribute on <video> elements, and the long-awaited debut of the path() function …

The React Hooks Announcement In Retrospect: 2 Years Later — Ryan Carniato considers hooks to be the most significant turning point in front end in the past five years, but he also says hooks have muddied the waters as well. Mediator Component in React — Robin Wieruch’s article made me think just how un-opinionated React …