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Font-size: An Unexpectedly Complex CSS Property — From Manish Goregaokar in 2017. Of many oddities, I found the one where font: medium monospace renders at 13px where font: medium sans-serif renders at 16px particularly weird. The good line-height — Since CSS supports unitless line-height, you probably shouldn’t be setting a hard number anyway. Time to …

The way routing works in JavaScript is usually that you specify which relative URL pattern you want for which component to render. So for /about you want the <About /> component to render. Let’s take a look at how to do this in Vue/Vue Router with lazy loading, and do it as cleanly as possible. …

Algolia is for search. Literally any website can take advantage of Algolia-powered search. You put JSON data (“records”) in, and then you can search them at lightning speed. The magic of Algolia is that they help you with both of those things: getting data in and getting search results out.

Back/forward cache — I always assumed browsers just do fancy stuff with the back/forward buttons and us developers had very little control. Philip Walton tells us it’s critical that we understand “what makes pages eligible (and ineligible) for bfcache to maximize their cache-hit rates.” For example, if you use the unload event, the page is …

Here’s a fun CSS trick to show your friends: a large title that switches from a solid color to knockout text as the background image behind it scrolls into place. And we can do it using plain ol’ HTML and CSS!

I poked at a tweet from Ken Kocienda over the weekend: I don’t know Ken, so I feel a little bad for being harsh. But I haven’t changed how I feel. Saying “Web browsers are for viewing documents” is silly to me at this point, and suggesting it’s “the biggest wrong turn in the history …

One was the footer of an (older) U.S. Government website. The other was the navigation for AWS services from the AWS Console.

A friend once contacted me asking if I had a way to dynamically change one HTML element into another within Vue’s template block. For instance, shifting a <div> element to a <span> element based on some criteria. The trick was to do this without relying on a series of v-if and v-else code. I didn’t …

Here’s the situation: Your site offers a “scroll back to top” button, and you’ve implemented smooth scrolling. As the page scrolls back to the top, users see something that catches their eye and they want to stop the scrolling, so they do a smidge of a scroll on the mouse wheel,, trackpad, or whatever. That’s …

Robert Nyman: Open Web Docs was created to ensure the long-term health of web platform documentation on de facto standard resources like MDN Web Docs, independently of any single vendor or organization. Through full-time staff, community management, and our network of partner organizations, we enable these resources to better maintain and sustain documentation of core web …

Totally free course from Pablo Stanley. Can’t beat that. Figma is just blowing up, and for good reason. It’s good software aligned with what digital designers need. It’s fast. It’s on the web, so you can’t lose stuff and don’t need to figure out a storage strategy. It’s useful beyond designers directly, as the feedback …

My mind goes immediately to repeating-linear-gradient and hard-stop gradients when thinking of creating stripes in CSS. You make one stripe by using the same color between two color stops, and another stripe (or more) but using a different color between two colors stops (sharing the one in the middle).

A clever use of CSS grid from Jay Freestone to accomplish a particular variation of the media object design pattern (where the image is centered with the title) without any magic numbers anything that isn’t flexible and resiliant.

Nolan Lawson has a little emoji-picker-element that is awfully handy and incredibly easy to use. But considering you’d probably be using it within your own app, it should be style-able so it can incorporated nicely anywhere. How to allow that styling isn’t exactly obvious: What wasn’t obvious to me, though, was how to allow users …

High five to the Greensock gang for the ScrollTrigger release. The point of this new plugin is triggering animation when a page scrolls to certain positions, as well as when certain elements are in the viewport. Anything you’d want configurable about it, is. There’s been plenty of scroll-position libraries over the years, but Greensock has …

I can’t stop thinking about this site. It looks like a pretty standard fare; a website with links to different pages. Nothing to write home about except that… the whole website is contained within a single HTML file. What about clicking the navigation links, you ask? Each link merely shows and hides certain parts of …

Building a website in 2021? I’m guessing you’re going to take a component-driven approach. It’s all the chatter these days. React and Vue are everywhere (is Angular still a thing?), while other emerging frameworks continue to attempt a push into the spotlight. Over the last decade or so we’ve seen an explosion of frameworks and …

In this article, we explain how to build an integrated and interactive data visualization layer into an application with Cumul.io. To do so, we’ve built a demo application that visualizes Spotify Playlist analytics! We use Cumul.io as our interactive dashboard as it makes integration super easy and provides functionality that allow interaction between the dashboard …

How to build a very common layout with CSS grid. Header on the top, footer on the bottom. Two columns, sidebar and main content. This one has navigation above the main content but within that same column.

I’m not exactly a large-scale DevOps guy, but I can tell ya we’ve been moving back toward a monorepo at CodePen and it’s rife with advantages over a system with lots of smaller repos. For us, I mean. It’s very likely that you have entirely different challenges and have come to entirely different conclusions at …

You know, Porky Pig coming out of those red rings announcing the end of a Looney Tunes cartoon. We’ll get there, but first we need to cover some CSS concepts.

Steren Giannini in “My stack will outlive yours”: My stack requires no maintenance, has perfect Lighthouse scores, will never have any security vulnerability, is based on open standards, is portable, has an instant dev loop, has no build step and… will outlive any other stack. Jeremy Keith in “npm ruin dev”: Instead of reaching for …

Back when I was 10, I remember my cousin visiting our house. He was (and still is) a cool kid, the kind who’d bring his own self-programmed chess game on a floppy disk. And his version of chess was just as cool as him because a piece of the board would disappear after each move. …

There are a lot of grids on the web like this: My message is that what they really should be is:

There were jokes coming back from the holiday break that JavaScript decided to go all server-side. I think it was rooted in: The Basecamp gang releasing Hotwire, which looks like marketing panache around a combination of technologies. “HTML over the wire,” they say, meaning it makes the server generate and serve HTML, and leaves client-side …

In my recent “Custom Properties as State” post, one of the things I mentioned was that theoretically, UI libraries, like React and Vue, could automatically map the state they manage over to CSS Custom Properties so we could use that state right there if we wanted. Someone should make a useStateWithCustomProperties hook or something to do that. #freeidea Andrew …

Let’s have a look CSS @keyframes animations, and specifically about how you can pause and otherwise control them. There is a CSS property specifically for it, that can be controlled with JavaScript, but there is plenty of nuance to get into in the details. We’ll also look at my preferred way of setting this up …

Are you hosting one or more websites and are using a headless CMS? Are you hosting your CMS on a virtual machine or a container, or using a SaaS solution? If so, then you’re paying for the uptime, regardless if the server or service is serving requests or not. Essentially, you are paying for stuff …

First, scrollbars are a usability and accessibility thing. Second, a rule of thumb: if an area scrolls, it should have a visible scrollbar. But the web is a big place and I like tricks, so I’m going to cover the idea of only revealing them on hover. Even macOS itself¹ hides scrollbars by default, revealing …

And it was released yesterday! The big news for us in CSS Land is that the new release supports the aspect-ratio property. This comes right on the heels of Safari announcing support for it in Safari Technology Preview 118, which released January 6. That gives us something to look forward to as it rolls out …