Web Development + Follow

Rob Weychert: But I can’t host your site or even my own site. I didn’t build the CMS. Other people made the hardware and software I use to generate and optimize images. Other people made the fonts. Other people standardized the digital formats for those images and fonts. I didn’t write the HTML and CSS …

I love these little posts where some tricky-looking design is solved by a single line of CSS using a little-known property. In this case, the design is a frosted glass effect and the CSS property is backdrop-filter.

One easy way to improve the speed of a website is to only download images only when they’re needed, which would be when they enter the viewport. This “lazy loading” technique has been around a while and there are lots of great tutorials on how to implement it. But even with all the resources out …

Michelle Barker covers a situation where you need offset rectangles part of a clickable area. The tricky part is having just the rectangles be clickable. That rules out using some parent element and making the whole larger encompassing rectangle clickable, which is a common (but equally tricky) pattern. Kicking one rectangle outside the bounds of …

This is a masterclass from Dave: After you hit the wall of unremovable complexity, any “advances” are a shell game, making tradeoffs that get passed down to the user … you get “advances” by shifting where the complexity lives. You don’t get free reductions in complexity. In CSS land, you don’t get to pick some …

Cassie Evans made a lovely illustration of herself and then used Greensock to add a flourish of animations to polish it off. Cassie wrote a series of posts about how she did it: In this post we’ll cover how to get values from the mouse movement and plug them into an animation. This is my …

“Jamstack is slowwwww.” That’s not something you hear often, right? Especially, when one of the main selling points of Jamstack is performance. But yeah, it’s true that even a Jamstack site can suffer hits to performance just like any other site.  Don’t think that by choosing Jamstack you no longer have to think about performance. …

This is one of my favorite Netlify features. Say you’re working on a site and you change as asset like a CSS, JavaScript, or image file. Ya know, like do our job. On Netlify, you don’t have to think about how that’s going to play out with deployment, browsers, and cache. Netlify just handles it …

Hey quick! You’ve gotta create the navigation for the site and you start working on the mobile behavior. What pattern do you choose? If you’re like most folks, it’s probably the “hamburger” menu that, when clicked, uses a little JavaScript to expand a vertical list of navigation links. But that’s not the only option. Depending …

Like Kickstarter, but for Web Platform Features. That’s about the quickest way to sum up Open Prioritization from Igalia. Igalia is an independent company that works on browsers. They literally commit to all the different open source browsers to implement (and fix) features that we all use. Now they are asking: what browser features are …

I know this is a little outside the normal scope of CSS-Tricks stuff, but I find the whole concept of spot instances fascinating. Here’s the gist from a very-non-expert (me). You can just buy and pay for web servers, for example, Amazon EC2. You can save a bunch of money if you buy them as …

As a professional research biologist, my playground used to be science laboratories filled with microscopes, petri dishes, and biology tools. Curiosity leads many scientists on their journey to discoveries. Mine led me to web design. I used to try learning HTML on my lab desktop while centrifuging extraction samples or waiting for my samples to …

The Gatsby team shipped an update to its source plugin for WordPress, graduating it to a beta release. The new version brings a new set of features to Gatsby’s headless WordPress configuration, which brings together WPGraphQL and WPGatsby to power a Gatsby front-end that pulls in data from WordPress. If you haven’t encountered these plugins …

Lemme sum this up: CodePen has Embedded Pens. Build a Pen on CodePen, embed it on any other site. We also offer Prefill Embeds, which remove that first step. With Prefill Embeds, the Pen doesn’t need to exist on CodePen at all. You pass in the code and settings you want to appear in the …

When I decided to try to base my current personal website on Eleventy, I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel: I tested all the Eleventy starters built with Tailwind CSS that I could find in Starter Projects from the documentation. Many of the starters seemed to integrate Tailwind CSS in a contrived way. Also, some …

Scott Jehl argues that performance metrics such as First Contentful Paint and Largest Contentful Paint don’t really capture the full picture of everyone’s experience with websites: These metrics are often touted as measures of usability or meaning, but they are not necessarily meaningful for everyone. In particular, users relying on assistive technology (such as a …

Hakim El Hattab tweeted a really nice little UX enhancement for a static site that includes a scrollable sidebar of navigation.

In this article, we will use Next.js to build a static blog framework with the design and structure inspired by Jekyll. I’ve always been a big fan of how Jekyll makes it easier for beginners to setup a blog and at the same time also provides a great degree of control over every aspect of …

Some developers just prefer working in React. I don’t blame them really, because I like React too. Maybe that’s what they learned first. I’ve been using it long enough there is just some comfort to it. But mostly it is the strong component model that I like. There is just something nice about a codebase …

Julia Evans: I decided to implement almost all of the UI by just adding & removing CSS classes, and using CSS transitions if I want to animate a transition. An awful lot of the JavaScript on sites (that aren’t otherwise entirely constructed from JavaScript) is click the thing, toggle the class — which is why jQuery was …

I’ve been doing a bit of refactoring this week at Sentry and I noticed that we didn’t have a generic List component that we could use across projects and features. So, I started one, but here’s the rub: we style things at Sentry using Emotion, which I have only passing experience with and is described …

Nice tip from Chris Ferdinandi: My node_modules directories contained 50mb of stuff on the small side, and over 200mb of files in some cases. Over a few dozen projects, that really adds up! Two dozen projects with 200 MB worth of node_modules? That’s nearly 5 GB of space for a bunch of stuff you’ve probably forgotten is …

Say you have five buttons. Each button is a step. If you click on the fourth button, you’re on step 4 of 5, and you want to display that. This kind of counting and displaying could be hard-coded, but that’s no fun. JavaScript could do this job as well. But CSS? Hmmmm. Can it? CSS …

I always get all excited when I accomplish something, but I get extra excited when I get it done and think, “well, that was easy.” As much as I enjoy fiddling with technology, I enjoy reaping the benefit of well set-up technology even more. That’s why I still get so excited about WordPress — I …

This is exactly what I love to hear from any browser vendor: When it comes to browser compatibility, there are still too many missing features and edge-case bugs. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Things can and will get better, if browser vendors can understand what is causing the most pain, and take …

It’s always notable when the world biggest CSS framework goes up a major version (it’s in alpha now). It has dropped jQuery and IE, started using some CSS custom properties, gone fully customized with form elements, started to embrace utility classes, and includes a massive icon set you can use via SVG sprite. Sweet.

I’ve always wanted to build an API, but was scared away by just how complicated things looked. I’d read a lot of tutorials that start with “first, install this library and this library and this library” without explaining why that was important. I’m kind of a Luddite when it comes to these things. Well, I …

A couple of WordPress contributors are currently looking for folks to sponsor them to work on the documentation for the WordPress block editor (often referred to as “Gutenberg”) and this is your chance to support them.

Any time I chat with a fellow web person and CSS-Tricks comes up in conversation, there is a good chance they’ll say: oh yeah, that guide on CSS flexbox, I use that all the time! Indeed that page, and it’s cousin the CSS grid guide, are among our top trafficked pages. I try to take …

Lots of fun with gradients from Bennett Feely: stars, stripes, banners, bursts… I love being able to use nice patterns with either no image requests at all, or very little SVG. Reminder: Bennett does all sorts of cool stuff. I’ve probably used Clippy about a million times.