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Many users these days expect instant feedback in form validation. How do you achieve this level of interactivity when you’re building a small static site or a server-rendered Rails or Laravel app? Alpine.js and Iodine.js are two minimal JavaScript libraries we can use to create highly interactive forms with little technical debt and a negligible …

ESM, meaning ES Modules, meaning JavaScript Modules. Like, import and friends. Browsers support it these days. There is plenty of nuance, but as long as you’ve dropped IE, the door is fairly open.

Netlify Edge Handlers are in Early Access (you can request it), but they are super cool and I think they are worth wrapping your brain around now. I think they change the nature of what Jamstack is and can be.

Over the last six years or so, I’ve been using these things I’ve been calling “type patterns” in my web design work, and they’ve worked out pretty well for me. I’ll dig into what they are and how they can make their way into CSS, and maybe the idea will click with you too and …

WordPress is a CMS that’s coded in PHP. But, even though PHP is the foundation, WordPress also holds a philosophy where user needs are prioritized over developer convenience. That philosophy establishes an implicit contract between the developers building WordPress themes and plugins, and the user managing a WordPress site. GraphQL is an interface that retrieves …

There are quite a few CSS animation libraries. They tend to be a pile of class names that you can apply as needed like “bounce” or “slide-right” and it’ll… do those things. They tend to be pretty opinionated with nice defaults, and not particularly designed around customization. It looks like AnimXYZ is designed to be …

We rounded up a bunch of published 2020 annual reports right before the year ended and compiled them into a big ol’ list. The end of the list called out a couple of in-progress surveys, one of which was the 2020 State of JavaScript. Well, the results are in and available to check out!

Robin Weser’s “The Shorthand-Longhand Problem in Atomic CSS” in an interesting journey through a tricky problem. The point is that when you take on the job of converting something HTML and CSS-like into actual HTML and CSS, there are edge cases that you’ll have to program yourself out of, if you even can at all. …

In my role as a web developer who sits at the intersection of design and code, I am drawn to Web Components because of their portability. It makes sense: custom elements are fully-functional HTML elements that work in all modern browsers, and the shadow DOM encapsulates the right styles with a decent surface area for …

I just had to debug an issue with focusable elements in Firefox. Someone reported to me that when tabbing to a certain element within a CodePen embed, it shot the scroll position to the top of the page (WTF?!). So, I went to go debug the problem by tabbing through an example page in Firefox, …

With the recent climb of Bitcoin’s price over 20k $USD, and to it recently breaking 30k, I thought it’s worth taking a deep dive back into creating Ethereum applications. Ethereum, as you should know by now, is a public (meaning, open-to-everyone-without-restrictions) blockchain that functions as a distributed consensus and data processing network, with the data …

Serverless, GraphQL, and DynamoDB are a powerful combination for building websites. The first two are well-loved, but DynamoDB is often misunderstood or actively avoided. It’s often dismissed by folks who consider it only worth the effort “at scale.” That was my assumption, too, and I tried to stick with a SQL database for my serverless …

With ES Modules, you can natively import other JavaScript. Like confetti, duh: That import statement is just gonna run. There is a pattern to do it conditionally though. It’s like this: Why? Any sort of condition, I suppose. You could check the URL and only load certain things on certain pages. You could only be …

Louis Lazaris demonstrates a very simple way of doing this. Hide the body (with JavaScript) right away with a CSS class that declares opacity: 0 Wait for all the JavaScript to execute Unhide the body by transitioning it back to opacity: 1

In the not-too-distant past, even basic accordion-like interactions required JavaScript event listeners or some CSS… trickery. And, depending on the solution used, editing the underlying HTML could get complicated. Now, the <details> and <summary> elements (which combine to form what’s called a “disclosure widget”) have made creation and maintenance of these components relatively trivial.

Terence Eden poked around with a way to do footnotes using the <details>/<summary> elements. I think it’s kind of clever. Rather than a hyperlink that jumps down to explain the footnote elsewhere, the details are right there next to the text. I like that proximity in the code. Plus, you get the native open/close interactivity …

Back when we released the v17 design (we’re on v18 now) of this site. I added html { scroll-behavior: smooth; } to the CSS. Right away, I got comments like this (just one example): … when you control+f or command+f and search on CSS-Tricks, it’ll scroll very slowly instead of snapping to the result, which …

WordPress.com is where you go to use WordPress that is completely hosted for you. You don’t have to worry about anything but building your site. There is a free plan to get started with, and paid plans that offer more features. The Business plan is particularly interesting, and my guess is that most people don’t …

Imagine you have a list of items. Say, fruit: Banana, Apple, Orange, Pear, Nectarine We could put those commas (,) in the HTML, but let’s look at how we could do that in CSS instead, giving us an extra level of control. We’ll make sure that last item doesn’t have a comma while we’re at …

Good thinking from Paul Hebert on the Cloudfour blog about colorizing a component. You might look at a design comp and see a card component with a header background of #dddddd, content background of #ffffff, on an overall background of #eeeeee. OK, easy enough. But what if the overall background becomes #dddddd? Now your header …

I got a very helpful bug report the other day (thanks Kilian!) about the <details> element in a blog post of mine not showing the default ▶ icon, and thus looking rather like any ol’ random <p>.

Tiffany B. Brown on how Flash paved the way for some things we might think of as fairly modern web technologies: Flash wasn’t just good for playing multimedia. It was also good for manipulating it. Using ActionScript, you could pan audio, adjusting the input for the user’s left and right speakers, perhaps when they shifted their mouse …

I believe animation on the web is not only fun, but engaging in such a way that it has converted site visitors into customers. Think of the “Like” button on Twitter. When you “like” a tweet, tiny colorful bubbles spread around the heart button while it appears to morph into a circle around the button …

I think it’s great that the CSS Working Group does these. It’s like planting a flag in the ground saying this is what CSS looks like at this specific point in time. They do specifically say it’s not for us CSS authors though… This document collects together into one definition all the specs that together …

One of my favorite things in the world is painters tape (also called masking tape). It seems like something silly: some tape you put on a wall when you’re painting to avoid getting paint on the wall. The tape doesn’t have a strong adhesive, so it can be pulled back off the wall without damaging it.

Jen was just tweetin’ about how the latest Safari Technical Preview has aspect-ratio. Looks like Chrome and Firefox both have it behind a flag, so with Safari joining the party, we’ll all have it soon. I played with it a while back. It’s awesome and much needed. There are ways to make `aspect-ratio` boxes, but …

Spring animations are a wonderful way to make UI interactions come to life. Rather than merely changing a property at a constant rate over a period of time, springs allow us to move things using spring physics, which gives the impression of a real thing moving, and can appear more natural to users. I’ve written …

Simon Willison has a project called Datasette, an open source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data. I’m not sure I’m qualified to explain it, but it’s like a tool to make handling data easier and doing more — through the web — with data you have. Like making that data queryable and giving it an …

I recently had a project with a requirement to support theming on the website. It was a bit of a strange requirement, as the application is mostly used by a handful of administrators. An even bigger surprise was that they wanted not only to choose between pre-created themes, but build their own themes. I guess …

Zell Liew is giving away 10 free copies of his Learn JavaScript course, and entering the giveaway is pretty easy: sign up for his newsletter. I’ve personally subscribed for some time now and all I get is as occasional hand-written email with useful JavaScript gems. It’s sort of like winning no matter if you get …