Web Development + Follow

I’ve been a manager for many years at companies of different scale. Through these experiences, I’ve done my share of learning, and made some mistakes along that way that were important lessons for me. I want to share those with you. But before diving in, I want to mention a strong caveat that my advice …

Simeon Griggs with some nice UX ideas for a recipe website: No math. Swap between units and adjust servings on-the-fly. Offer alternative ingredients. Re-list the ingredient amounts when they’re referenced in the instructions. I totally agree, especially on that last one: Of all our improvements I think this is my favourite. A typical recipe layout …

HTML has a built-in native audio player interface that we get simply using the <audio> element. Point it to a sound file and that’s all there is to it. We even get to specify multiple files for better browser support, as well as a little CSS flexibility to style things up, like giving the audio …

Zach takes a look at some fundamental HTML+CSS usage for fluid, responsive images. Most of it, I’d say, is what you’d expect, but things get weird when srcset gets involved. I poked my way through, and in addition to the weird thing Zach noted, wanted to add one more thing. Let’s start like this:

I’ve been enjoying these little “You want…” style posts. Post titles like that are a little more… forceful for my normal taste, but I like the spirit of sharing a best practice that perhaps isn’t well-known-enough. Killian started it with “You want overflow: auto, not overflow: scroll.” I followed up with “You want minmax(10px, 1fr) …

Some nice coverage from Andy about CSS things that are truly new. If you haven’t looked at new things in CSS in, say, a year, I’d bet pretty much all of this will be new to you. A lot of it is cutting-edge enough that you might not be able to get it into projects …

CSS is yet to have a switch rule or conditional if, aside from the specific nature of @media queries and some deep trickery with CSS custom properties. Let’s have a look at why it would be useful if we did, and look at a trick that is usable today for pulling it off.

I like Andy’s idea here: Normally I’d just set a max-width there, but as Andy says: This becomes a slight issue in mid-sized viewports, such as tablets in portrait mode, in long-form content, such as this article because contextually, the line-lengths feel very long. So, on super large screens, you’ll get capped at 70rem (or whatever …

People really latched onto Brad’s framing. And for good reason. Front-end development has gotten so wide scoping that there are specialists inside of it. Two years ago, I cut it down the middle and now Brad is putting a point on that here, saying he has actual clients who have shifted their hiring strategy away …

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 …