Web Development + Follow

The HTTP Archive looked at more than 7 million websites and compiled their annual report detailing how the sites were built. And there’s an enormous wealth of information about how the web changed in 2020. In fact, this report is more like an enormous book and it’s entirely fabulous. The data comes from making queries …

One thing I noticed about building websites in 2020: despite all the social networks and publishing platforms craving our content, our stories, and our attention, people are somehow still building personal websites. Over the course of the year, many of you have launched or relaunched your website. It indeed feels like the personal website is …

This year I learned, or relearned maybe, that “normal” is subjective at best, and pretty misleading otherwise. If this forsaken year has taught us anything, it’s that there is no such thing as normal. Things change. People adapt. Everything is relative to everything else.

An event bus is a design pattern (and while we’ll be talking about JavaScript here, it’s a design pattern in any language) that can be used to simplify communications between different components. It can also be thought of as publish/subscribe or pubsub. The idea is that components can listen to the event bus to know …

Max Stoiber wrote some interesting notes about why he loves Tailwind. (Max created styled-components, so he has some skin in the styling methodology game.) There’s a lot of great history in this post about how Tailwind emerged and became a valuable tool for designers and engineers alike, but he also talks about what beats at …

This year, I learned that there is a wide world of free stock imagery available beyond Unsplash and Pexels. You see, I’ve been working on designing WordPress themes this year, and all images need to be compatible with the GPL. Unsplash and Pexels both have free and open licenses, but unfortunately, aren’t compatible. Many other …

I remember sitting in the back seat of our family’s Subaru station wagon. I was six and this was long before child carseats were a thing. My dad was at the wheel and my mom played 20 Questions with me while we drove to some vacation spot I can’t even remember.

Connectivity has evolved beyond recognition since the beginning of the internet. We are lightyears past dial up, these days, and can watch a video in high resolution on our smartphone while being connected to a mobile network. But not all mobile connections are created equal – older generation networks (3G, 2G, etc.) are still quite …

Black isn’t always slimming. When recently testing a dark mode option for one of my sites, I experienced first-hand the issue that Robin Rendle addresses in this article. All of my page text — headings and body copy — appeared to bulk up when I switched to dark mode. And it didn’t matter what fonts …

There, I said it. What did I learn about building websites in 2020? A lot. But what I learned is not nearly as important as how I learned it. So instead, I want to share a couple of strategies I used to unblock learning in less-than-ideal times. I spent almost a decade teaching design and, …

In 2020, I rediscovered the enjoyment of building a website with plain ol’ HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — no transpilin’, no compilin’, no build tools other than my hands on the keyboard.

I found this Free Favicon Maker the other day. It’s a nice tool to make a favicon (true to its name), but unlike other favicon generators, this one lets you create one from scratch starting with a character or an emoji. Naturally, I was curious to look at the code to see how it works …

I’ve always enjoyed the CSS art people create, but I’ve never ventured into it much myself. I’m familiar with many of the tricks involved, but still find it surprising every time: the way people are able to make such fluid and beautiful images out of little boxes. I always end up digging around in dev …

In our wide world of building for the web, we have every opportunity to talk about tools. We lunge to fill every gap we find in our projects with a definitive technological approach. Some of us are given “a seat at the table” feasting on even the most minuscule of technological debates. This marketplace of …

As websites are becoming more and more dynamic when it comes to design, there is sometimes a need to incorporate complex, animated elements. There are many ways to do that from CSS transitions to 3D rendering on canvas, and animated SVG. But it is often easier to use a <video> since they can be rather …

Spoiler alert: There is no support for it yet. But it is defined in the Media Queries Level 5 spec that includes other recent, but more familiar user preference features, like prefers-color-scheme and prefers-reduced-motion. The Polypane blog goes into incredible depth on prefers-reduced-data, especially for something that we have yet to see in the wild. …

In 2020, I learned about the power of web development for organizations and nonprofits outside of tech. I learned that you can leverage your skills to affect change and build long-lasting partnerships. This year, I joined the Board of Directors of the League of Women Voters San Francisco (LWVSF), which, despite its name, welcomes people …

2020 brought another wave of logical property features to major browsers and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my investment into logical, rather than physical, web styling. I feel like I’ve learned a new way to speak about the box model that results in less written code with more global coverage. Like I described in the web.dev article …

Comment threads are one of those things that look really simple when executed right. When designing them yourself, you may find that they are rather deceptively simple. There is a lot that goes into designing nice and usable comment threads, and in this article, I will try my best to walk you through the steps …

The Web Performance Calendar just started up again this year. The first two posts so far are about, well, performance! First up, Rick Viscomi writes about the mythical “fast” web page: How you approach measuring a web page’s performance can tell you whether it’s built for speed or whether it feels fast. We call them …

This is about a wildly specific combination of technologies — Eleventy, the static site generator, with pages with images on them that you ultimately want hosted by Cloudinary — but I just wanna document it as it sounds like a decent amount of people run into this situation. The deal: Cloudinary has a fetch URL …

I had a unique requirement the other day: to build a layout with full-bleed elements while one element stays stuck to the top. This ended up being rather tricky to pull off so I’m documenting it here in case anyone needs to re-create this same effect. Part of the trickiness was dealing with logical positioning …

It’s kind of neat that we can do input:invalid {} in CSS to style an input when it’s in an invalid state. Yet, used exactly like that, the UX is pretty bad. Say you have <input type=”text” required>. That’s immediately invalid before the user has done anything. That’s such a bummer UX that you never …

The Jamstack is a modern web development architecture based on client-side JavaScript, reusable APIs, and prebuilt Markup. The key aspects of a Jamstack application are the following: The entire app runs on a CDN (or ADN). CDN stands for Content Delivery Network and an ADN is an Application Delivery Network. Everything lives in Git. Automated …

Let’s take a look at how to combine the border-image property in CSS with animated SVGs that move around a border. In the process, we’ll cover how to hand-craft resizable, nine-slice animated SVGs that you can use not only re-create the effect, but to make it your own.

It’s sounding more and more likely that we’re actually going to get real container queries. Google is prototyping a syntax idea from David Baron and refined by Miriam Suzanne. Apparently, there has already been some prototyping done for a switch() syntax which is like container queries on values. Even now, there is stuff like the …

First, quickly: AWS Amplify has a new Admin UI. Amplify always had a CLI that helps you build projects by setting up stuff like auth, storage, and APIs. That’s super useful, but now, you can do those things with the new Admin UI. And more, like model your data (!!), right from a local UI. …

You might know a few ways to create charts with pure CSS. Some of them are covered here on CSS-Tricks, and many others can be found on CodePen, but I haven’t seen many examples of “area charts” (imagine a line chart with the bottom area filled in), particularly any in HTML and CSS alone. In …

Matthias Ott, comparing how painter Gerhard Richter paints (do stuff, step back, take a look) to what can be the website building process and what can wreck it: … this reminds me of designing and building for the Web: The unpredictability, the peculiarities of the material, the improvisation, the bugs, the happy accidents. There is …

We made one! It’s open source if you want to make it better or fix things. There are quite a few purpose-built fonts for writing code. The point of this site is to show you some of the nicest options so you can be aware of them and perhaps pick one out to try that …