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Last time there was a little flurry of activity around the concept of “View Source,” I did get the sense that not everyone was on the same page about what that even means. Jim Nielsen: First, when we talk about “View Source” what precisely are we talking about? I think this is an important point …

Changing specific characters can be a challenge in CSS. Often, we’re forced to implement our desired changes one-by-one in HTML, perhaps using the span element. But, in a few specific cases, a CSS-focused solution may still be possible. In this article, we’ll start by looking at some CSS-first approaches to changing characters, before considering a …

I don’t typically work with UI libraries because they can be cumbersome and hard to override, which can contribute to a bloated. However, Ant Design has recently gained some some of my affection because it’s easy to use, has extensible defaults, and features a delicate design. Nuxt and Ant Design work well together, in part …

As someone who loves creating CSS animations, one of the more powerful tools I use is perspective. While the perspective property is not capable of 3D effects all by itself (since basic shapes can’t have depth), you can use the transform property to move and rotate objects in a 3D space (with the X, Y, …

Everybody is talking about AVIF today because of Jake’s blog post. As the say, I was today years old when I learned AVIF was a thing. But thanks to web technology being ahead of the game for once, we can already take advantage of it.

Many development environments require running things in a terminal window. npm run start, or whatever. I know my biggest project requires me to be running a big fancy Docker-based thing in one terminal, Ruby on Rails in another, and webpack in another. I’ve worked on other projects that require multiple terminal windows as well, and …

Jetpack 8.9 shipped on September 1 and it shows why the plugin continues to be the premier way to take a WordPress site from good to holy smokes! Several new features are packed into the release, but a few really stand out.

There are many different approaches to menus on websites. Some menus are persistent, always in view and display all the options. Other menus are hidden by design and need to be opened to view the options. And there are even additional approaches on how hidden menus reveal their menu items. Some fly out and overlap …

This is a neat page that compares a ton of different libraries with web components. One of the things I learned after posting “A Bit on Web Components Libraries” is that the web platform APIs were designed for libraries to be built around them. Interesting, right? This page makes a counter component. By extending HTMLElement …

We’re living through a weird era where there are tons of JavaScript libraries that were meant to be used as <script> tags that expose available globals. AND there are tons of JavaScript libraries that are meant to be used through module loaders. AND there are tons of JavaScript libraries that assume you will use them …

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of media queries? Maybe something in a CSS file that looks like this: CSS media queries are a core ingredient in any responsive design. They’re a great way to apply different styles to different contexts, whether it’s based on viewport size, motion preference, preferred …

I go into all this in The “Inside” Problem. The gist: you want an edge-to-edge container, but the content inside to have a limited width. I think there is absolutely no problem using a nested element inside, but it’s also fun to look at the possibilities of making that work on a single element.

Beyond using media queries and modern CSS layouts, like flexbox and grid, to create responsive websites, there are certain overlooked things we can do well to make responsive sites. In this article, we’ll dig into a number tools (revolving around HTML and CSS) we have at the ready, from responsive images to relatively new CSS …

Speaking of number scrubbing (i.e. adding mouse UX to number inputs), you can also add better keyboard commands to number inputs. Kilian Valkhof explains how he added up and down arrows to a number input, as well as modifier keys to change how much the keys increment the value, like Emmet does. This would make …

Whenever I think of stroked text on the web I think: nope. There is -webkit-text-stroke in CSS for it, but it places that stroke in the middle of the vector outline of the characters, absolutely ensuring that the character doesn’t look right. Just look at this in Chrome or Safari. Gross. If you’re going to …

There are different ways to work with icons, but the best solution always includes SVG, whether it’s implemented inline or linked up as an image file. That’s because they’re “drawn” in code, making them flexible, adaptable, and scalable in any context. But when working with SVG, there’s always the chance that they contain a lot …

The Jamstack, a modern approach to building websites and apps, delivers better performance, higher security, lower cost of scaling, and a better developer experience. But how popular is it among developers worldwide, and what do they love and hate about it?

Una Kravetz digs into how Chrome now allows you to declare CSS custom properties directly from CSS with more information than just a string.

CSS-Tricks has this pretty cool way of styling hovered links. By default, the text is a fairly common blue. But hover of the links, and they’re filled with a linear gradient.

CSS Grid is a collection of properties designed to make layout easier than it’s ever been. Like anything, there’s a bit of a learning curve, but Grid is honestly fun to work with once you get the hang of it. One area where it shines is dealing with headers and footers. With a little adjustment …

There are a number of these desktop apps where the goal is showing your site at different dimensions all at the same time. So you can, for example, be writing CSS and making sure it’s working across all the viewports in a single glance. They are all very similar. For example, they do “event mirroring” …

Fun fact: it’s possible to create responsive components without any media queries at all. Certainly, if we had container queries, those would be very useful for responsive design at the component level. But we don’t. Still, with or without container queries, we can do things to make our components surprisingly responsive. We’ll use concepts from …

Web Unleashed is a fun conference. I’ve been a number of times. I’m sure you won’t be surprised that it’s online this year, like most events. And, hey, it’s coming up and will take place over three days, October 5-7, 2020. I’d really like to see you there, not just because you’re going to get …

Animations can make a site stand out. Or, they can just as easily kill the experience. When working with web animations, there are a few things that could go wrong like adding animations that serve no purpose, setting durations that are  too long or too quick, or not using right type of animation in the …

If you use <input type=”number”>, some browsers give you an input that has UI for incrementing the number, like up/down arrows (often called “spinners”).

Eric Bailey eviscerates the notion that the term “a11y” isn’t accessible. It’s a hot take that I’ve had myself, embarrassingly enough. I never see people asking why WWI is written out the way it is, either. Won’t people confuse that with the first Wonder Woman movie? Or the first season of Westworld? Or some new …

Remember the last time you dealt with a UI-related bug that left you scratching your head for hours? Maybe the issue was happening at random, or occurring under specific circumstances (device, OS, browser, user action), or was just hidden in one of the many front-end technologies that are part of the project? I was recently …

Remy documented this the other day. Firefox supports a Highlight keyword and both Chrome and Safari support a -webkit-focus-ring-color keyword. So if you, for example, have removed focus from something and want to put it back in the same style as the browser default, or want to apply a focus style to an element when …

Shawn Wang thinks there are deeper, perhaps more uncomfortable, places to go with developer experience (DX) beyond the surface-level stuff that we recently covered. Sure, sure, documentation, CLIs, good demos. But there are much harder questions to answer that are part of the real DX. Shawn lists eight really good ones. I’ll share this one: …

The best way to learn is to build. Let’s learn about this hot new buzzword, Jamstack, by building a site with React, Netlify (Serverless) Functions, and Airtable. One of the ingredients of Jamstack is static hosting, but that doesn’t mean everything on the site has to be static. In fact, we’re going to build an …