Web Development + Follow

I have spent the past several years working (alongside a bunch of super talented people) on a font family called Recursive Sans & Mono, and it just launched officially on Google Fonts! Wanna try it out super fast? Here’s the embed code to use the full Recursive variable font family from Google Fonts (but you …

A very fun jaunt through the early days of front-end web development. They are open to pull requests, so submit one if you’re into this kind of fun chronicling of our weird history! That CSS3 Button generator really hits home. 😬

In April of last year, Facebook revealed its big new redesign. An ambitious project, it was a rebuild of a large site with a massive amount of users. To accomplish this, they used several technologies they have created and open-sourced, such as React, GraphQL, Relay, and a new CSS-in-JS library called stylex. This new library …

A run of Web Components news crossed my desk recently so I thought I’d group it up here. To my mind, one of the best use cases for Web Components is pattern libraries. Instead of doing, say, <ul class=”nav nav-tabs”> like you would do in Bootstrap or <div class=”tabs”> like you would in Bulma, you …

A friend of mine recently asked me to teach her to code. She was an absolute beginner, having no idea what coding really involves. I decided to start where I started: HTML and CSS. Using CodePen, we started forking Pens and altering them. Soon, a learning path started to unravel. The aim of this article …

Monica Powell shared a really cool trick the other day: The profile README is created by creating a new repository that’s the same name as your username. For example, my GitHub username is m0nica so I created a new repository with the name m0nica.

This is a neat interactive page by Ville V. Vanninen to reference the names of things in the CSS syntax. I feel like the easy ones to remember are “selector,” “property,” and “value,” but even as a person who writes about CSS a lot, I forget some of the others. Like the property and value …

Sometimes our sites need a little sprinkling of content management. Not always. Not a lot. But a bit. The CMS market is thriving with affordable, approachable products, so we’re not short of options. Thankfully, it is a very different world to the one that used to force companies to splash out a ga-jillionty-one dollars (not …

When you change the font-weight of a font, the text will typically cause a bit of a layout shift. That’s because bold text is often larger and takes up more space. Sometimes that doesn’t matter, like a vertical stack of links where the wider/bolder text doesn’t push anything anyway. Sometimes it does matter, like a …

Why? Fingerprinting. Rather than these APIs being used for what they are meant for, they end up being used for gross ad tech. As in, “hey, we don’t know exactly who you are, but wait, through a script we can tell your phone stopped being idle from 8:00 am to 8:13 am and were near …

Managing a custom collection of icons in a Vue app can be challenging at times. An icon font is easy to use, but for customization, you have to rely on third-party font generators, and merge conflicts can be painful to resolve since fonts are binary files. Using SVG files instead can eliminate those pain points, …

Heydon’s Holy Albatross is a technique to have a row of elements break into a column of elements at a specific width. A specified parent width, not a screen width like a media query would have. So, like a container query (ya know, those things that don’t exist yet that we all want). I’ve used …

I’m speaking at The Official WordPress.com Growth Summit coming up in August. “Learn how to build and grow your site, from start to scale”, as they say. Lovely, thick, diverse set of speakers. It’s a little bit outside my normal spheres which makes it extra exciting for me. Selena Jackson: The goal of this event is to inspire, connect …

I’d bet grid-template-columns is used about 10× more than grid-template-rows, but maybe everyone has just been missing out. Eric Meyer chucks a bunch of row lines onto his main site layout grid like this: That way, if you need to use them they are they for you: I like this pattern. It feels good to me, having …

Vue is in the process of a complete overhaul that rebuilds the popular JavaScript framework from the ground up. This has been going on the last couple of years and, at long last, the API and implementation of Vue 3 core are now stabilize. This is exciting for a number of reasons: Vue 3 promises …

Version control with Git has become a “commodity” by now: virtually every software project today uses Git, and virtually every developer knows Git to some extent. This explains why I sometimes hear the following question when I talk about what I do for a living: “A desktop client for Git? Why would I need that? …

Fair warning: I can’t say I recommend this in general because it breaks a very strong expectation of where scrollbars are, which are useful for a lots of folks, not to mention, a core accessibility feature for many. But it is a fascinating CSS trick and the web is a big place with an unknowable …

What if you have some content on one site and want to display that content on another site? We can do this in the browser no problem. We can fetch it, and plunk it onto the page. Ajax, right? Ugh. Now we’re in client-side rendered site territory, which isn’t great for performance, speed, or resiliency. …

Steve Faulkner has a clever idea here. You can show an (animated) GIF and overlay a pause/play button on top of it — which is really a <details>/<summary> element. When toggled, a (non-animated) JPG inside covers the GIF, effectively “pausing” it.

I can hear you crying out now: “Why on Earth would you want to use jQuery when there are much better tools available? Madness! What sort of maniac are you?” These are reasonable questions, and I’ll answer them with a little bit of context.

I had a fella write in to me the other day. He had some HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and it just wasn’t behaving like he thought it ought to. The HTML had some placeholders in it and the JavaScript had some data in it, and the assumption was that the data would fill the placeholders. …

You can truncate a single line of text with an ellipsis (…) fairly easily with text-overflow and a few friends. But, as you might expect, that truncation happens at the end of the line of text. What if you want to truncate content in the middle? Leonardo Faria details good use cases for this, like …

Have you ever seen a calendar on a webpage and thought, how the heck did they did that? For something like that, it might be natural to reach for a plugin, or even an embedded Google Calendar, but it’s actually a lot more straightforward to make one than you might think and only requires the …

I like the apilayer company tagline: “Automate What Should Be Automated.” They have this thick suite of products that are all APIs with clear documentation. They all have usable free tiers to develop against and prove out an idea, and then paid plans if you need to start using the APIs more aggressively. They have …

The inline-block value for display is a classic! It’s not new and browser support is certainly not something you need to worry about. I’m sure many of us reach for it intuitively. But let’s put a point on it. What is it actually useful for? When do you pick it over other, perhaps similar, options?

On the web, we have the opportunity to do work that fixes things for people. It’s fascinating to me how different the scope of those fixes can be.

In my previous article last week, I mentioned creating a partially ported WordPress-Gatsby site. This article is a continuation with a step-by-step walkthrough under the hood. Gatsby, a React-based framework for static sites, is attracting attention not only from JavaScript developers but also from the WordPress developers and users. Many WordPress users find its features …

HTML and CSS offer us the ability to italicize text. I’m talking about text like this. Let’s cover everything you’ll need to know.

Usually, when I see terms like “painting order” or “stacking context” my brain will start to shut off and my eyes will gloss over. Not that my brain doesn’t normally shut off more often than not, but that’s another topic for another time. Martin Robinson over at Igalia touches on these concepts using an example …

Guillermo: I want to make the case that prioritizing end-to-end (E2E) testing for the critical parts of your app will reduce risk and give you the best return. Further, I’ll show how you can adopt this methodology in mere minutes. His test is: Spin up Puppeteer (Headless Chrome) and Chai Go to the homepage Test if the …