Web Development + Follow

A grouping of hand-selected posts from our site about Web Components. We’ve published a very useful article series from Caleb Williams, so that’s here, but also sprinkled in some other informational and link posts on the subject.

Over on Smashing, Adebiyi Adedotun Lukman covers all these styling methods. It’s in the context of Next.js, which is somewhat important as Next.js has some specific ways you work with these tools, is React and, thus, is a components-based architecture. But the styling methods talked about transcend Next.js, and can apply broadly to lots of …

Many forms of assistive technology use keyboard navigation to understand and take action on screen content. One way of navigating is via the Tab key. You may already be familiar with this way of navigating if you use it to quickly jump from input to input on a form without having to reach for your …

Always worth repeating: all interactive elements should have a focus style. That way, a keyboard user can tell when they have moved focus to that element. But if you use :focus alone for this, it has a side effect that a lot of people don’t like. It means that when you click (with a mouse) …

Just the other day, Jeremy Keith wrote that problems with performance work isn’t only a matter of optimization and fixing code, but also tackling people problems: It struck me that there’s a continuum of performance challenges. On one end of the continuum, you’ve got technical issues. These can be solved with technical solutions. On the …

We’ve covered techniques before for when you want a full-width element within a constrained-width column, like an edge-to-edge image within a narrower column of text. There are loads of techniques. Perhaps my favorite is this little utility class:

Layoutit Grid is an interactive open source CSS Grid generator. It lets you draw your designs and see the code as you go. You can interact with the code, add or remove track lines and drag them around to change the sizing — and you get to see the CSS and HTML change in real …

Before we delve into making a realistic motion blur in CSS, it’s worth doing a quick dive into what motion blur is, so we can have a better idea of what we’re trying to reproduce. Have you ever taken a photo of something moving quickly, especially under low light, and it turned into a blurry …

Authentication is one of the most challenging tasks for developers just starting with GraphQL. There are a lot of technical considerations, including what ORM would be easy to set up, how to generate secure tokens and hash passwords, and even what HTTP library to use and how to use it.  In this article, we’ll focus …

Some very cool news from Netlify: Edge Handlers are in Early Access (request it here). I think these couple of lines of code do a great job in explaining what an Edge Handler is: So that’s a little bitty bit of JavaScript that runs at “the edge” (at the CDN level) for every request through …

When I open my local project for this very site, there is a 100% chance that I need to run this command before anything else: gulp. I set that up fresh less than a year ago so I’m on the latest-and-greatest stuff and have my workflow just how I like it. I did a few …

When I first discovered Material Design, I was particularly inspired by its button component. It uses a ripple effect to give users feedback in a simple, elegant way. How does this effect work? Material Design’s buttons don’t just sport a neat ripple animation, but the animation also changes position depending on where each button is …

Number animation, as in, imagine a number changing from 1 to 2, then 2 to 3, then 3 to 4, etc. over a specified time. Like a counter, except controlled by the same kind of animation that we use for other design animation on the web. This could be useful when designing something like a …

Let me show you a way I recently discovered to center a bunch of elements around what I call the pivot. I promise you that funky HTML is out of the question and you won’t need to know any bleeding-edge CSS to get the job done. I’m big on word games, so I recently re-imagined …

This is an extended version of my essay “When front-end means full-stack” which was published in the wonderful Increment magazine put out by Stripe. It’s also something of an evolution of a couple other of my essays, “The Great Divide” and “Ooops, I guess we’re full-stack developers now.”

AWS Amplify is a collection of tools from AWS to help you build applications. Allow me to set the stage here to try to make that as clear as I know how. I have a friend (true story) who wants to build an app centered around physical training. His wife is a physical trainer, and …

Lately I’ve been taking a look into designing with color (or “colour” as we spell it where I’m from in New Zealand). Looking at Adam Wathan and Steve Schroger’s advice on the subject, we find that we’re going to need more than just five nice looking hex codes from a color palette generator when building …

I think the Web Share API is very cool (here’s our coverage). In a nutshell, it taps into the native sharing features on whatever platform you’re on, if that platform supports it.

Danielle Romo covers the HTML pattern you need when you have a wordy <label> with fancy styling for an <input type=”radio”>. The trick? The ol’ <span class=”hidden-visually”> that contains the label that you want to be read, and a <span aria-hidden=”true”> with the visual-only content.

A button to return to the top of the page allows the user to quickly return to the top of the page without making too much effort. This can be very useful when the page has a lot of content or which happens, for example, on one page websites, when infinite scrolling is used, or …

If you’ve ever thought to yourself, gosh, self, I wish I could have an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) of this CSS selector, Lea has your back. If you’ve ever thought that same thing for an entire CSS file, that’s what PostCSS is, which has gone v8. PostCSS doesn’t do anything by itself, remember. It just …

Media queries can modify the appearance (and even behavior) or a website or app based on a matched set of conditions about the user’s device, browser or system settings.

I feel like Jerod Santo really understood what I was trying to say in Weaved Webs, when I was trying to cover the emerging WordPress (“versus”) Jamstack conversation. If you asked El Duderino if you should go Jamstack he’d probably tell you, “It’s a complicated case. Lotta ins. Lotta outs. Lotta what-have-yous. Lotta strands to keep in …

Clearleft made a 6-episode Season One It’s called The Clearleft Podcast if you can believe that. It gets into new (at least to me) concepts like Design Ops and Design Sprints, which are loaded terms and need nuanced discussion. It’s really well-edited, pulling in clips from relevant talks and such. A cut above the hit-record-hit-stop …

I’ve been lucky to have worked with some of the best designers in the industry, including Zhenya Rynzhuk, Louis Paquet, Maria de la Paz Vargas, and of course, dozens of the amazing designers at MediaMonks. Many of the projects we’ve worked on require custom animation and guidelines that enable developers to be fully creative and …

Our tools for vertical alignment have gotten a lot better as of late. My early days as a website designer involved laying out 960px wide homepage designs and aligning things horizontally across a page using a 12-column grid. Media queries came along which required a serious mental shift. It solved some big problems, of course, …

As a connoisseur of web trickery, this is a must share: POW stands for Packaged Offline/online Webpage. It turns out the png format includes ways to save metadata alongside the image file. A powfile has a metadata entry that contains a zip file that contains a full website. So a PNG file can contain and …

I’ve bookmarked some icon sets lately, partly because I can never find a nice set when I need to. I figured I’d even go the extra mile here and blog them so I can definitely find them later. Aside from being nice, cohesive, and practical sets of icons, I find it interesting that literally all …

Amber Wilson on making bookmarklets to help yo-self. She shows off one that injects an accessibility script — I like this approach, as it means you don’t have to maintain the bookmarklet, just the script it links to. Another example runs some code contained right in the link. The result is literally a bookmark in …

In my research, I’ve found there are four approaches to Object-Oriented Programming in JavaScript. Which methods should I use? Which one is “the best” way? Here I’ll present my findings along with information that may help you decide which is right for you.