Web Development + Follow

It’s useful when DevTools tells you that a declaration is invalid. For example, colr: red; isn’t valid because colr isn’t a valid property. Likewise color: rd; isn’t valid because rd isn’t a valid value. For the most part, a browser’s DevTools shows the declaration as crossed out with a warning () icon. It would be …

A lot of websites (this one included) rely on advertising as an important revenue source. Those ad placements directly impact the interfaces we build and interact with every day. Building layouts with ads in them is a dance of handling them in fluid environments, and also balancing the need to showcase our content and highlight …

There’s a series of questions I’ve struggled with for as long as I can remember. The questions have to do with design systems work: Where should we document things? Do we make a separate app? Do we use a third-party tool to document our components? How should that tie into Figma or Sketch? What about …

Only Firefox supports it, but if you return a request with a header like this: …that will link to that stylesheet without you having to do it in the HTML. Louis Lazaris digs into it: … the only thing I can think of that could justify use for this in production is as a way …

Webmention is a W3C recommendation last published on January 12, 2017. And what exactly is a Webmention? It’s described as… … a simple way to notify any URL when you mention it on your site. From the receiver’s perspective, it’s a way to request notifications when other sites mention it. In a nutshell, it’s a …

After just playing with apsect-ratio and being pleasantly surprised at how intuitive it is, here’s an example of CSS acting unintuitively: If you have a fixed element on your page, which means it doesn’t move when you scroll, you might realise that it no longer acts fixed if you apply a CSS filter on its …

I feel like the tech industry takes itself far too seriously sometimes. I get frustrated by all the posturing and gatekeeping – “You’re not a real developer unless you use x framework”, “CSS isn’t a real programming language”. I think this kind of rhetoric often puts new developers off, and the ones that don’t get …

There have been some aesthetic changes to what form elements look like as of Chrome 83. Anything with gradient colorization is gone (notably the extra-shiny <meter> stuff). The consistency across the board is nice, particularly between inputs and textareas. Not a big fan of the new <select> styling, but I hear a lot of accessibility …

If you’ve ever wanted to add a pause between each iteration of your CSS @keyframes animation, you’ve probably been frustrated to find there’s no built-in way to do it in CSS. Sure, we can delay the start of a set of @keyframes with animation-delay, but there’s no way to add time between the first iteration …

Fresh from the Jetpack team at Automattic, today, comes Jetpack Scan. Jetpack Scan scans all the files on your site looking for anything suspicious or malicious and lets you know, or literally fixes it for you with your one-click approval. This kind of security scanning is very important to me. It’s one of those sleep …

Rotated <table> column headers is something that’s been covered before right here on CSS-Tricks, so shout-out to that for getting me started and helping me achieve this effect. As the article points out, if you aren’t using trigonometry to calculate your table styles, you’ll have to rely on magic numbers and your table will be …

Snook shows off a classic design with an oversized header up top, and a content area that is “pulled up” into that header area. My mind goes to the same place: Historically, I’ve done this with negative margins. The header has a height that adds a bunch of padding to the bottom and then the …

Increment is a beautiful quarterly magazine (print and web) published by Stripe “about how teams build and operate software systems at scale”. While there is always stuff about making websites in general, this issue is the first focused on front-end¹ development. I’ve got an article in there: When frontend means full stack. I’ll probably someday …

With a preprocessor, like Sass, building a logical “do this or don’t” setting is fairly straightforward: Can we do that in native CSS with custom properties? Mark Otto shows that we can. It’s just a smidge different.

Many developers are at least marginally familiar with AWS Lambda functions. They’re reasonably straightforward to set up, but the vast AWS landscape can make it hard to see the big picture. With so many different pieces it can be daunting, and frustratingly hard to see how they fit seamlessly into a normal web application. The …

I totally forgot that the Jamstack Conf was this week but thankfully they’ve already published the talks on the Jamstack YouTube channel. I’m really looking forward to sitting down with these over a coffee while I also check out Netlify’s other big release today: Build Plugins.

Core Web Vitals is what Google is calling a a new collection of three web performance metrics: LCP: Largest Contentful Paint FID: First Input Delay CLS: Cumulative Layout Shift These are all measurable. They aren’t in Lighthouse (e.g. the Audits tab in Chrome DevTools) just yet, but sounds like that’s coming up soon. For now, …

Oh hey! A brand new property that affects how a box is sized! That’s a big deal. There are lots of ways already to make an aspect-ratio sized box (and I’d say this custom properties based solution is the best), but none of them are particularly intuitive and certainly not as straightforward as declaring a …

Too funny: After careful consideration, we settled on rearchitecting our platform to use $FLASHY_LANGUAGE and $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY. Not only is $FLASHY_LANGUAGE popular according to the Stack Overflow developer survey, it’s also cross platform; we’re using it to reimplement our mobile apps as well. Rewriting our core infrastructure was fairly straightforward: as we have more engineers than …

Diana Smith with another mind-bending all HTML & CSS painting. I love that these occupy a special place on the “Should I draw this in CSS?” curve. Things like simple shapes are definitely on the “yes” side of the curve. Then there’s a large valley where things get a little too impractical to draw that …

For those who have missed the big news, Firefox now supports conic gradients! Starting with Firefox 75, released on the April 7, we can go to about:config, look for the layout.css.conic-gradient.enabled flag and set its value to true (it’s false by default and all it takes to switch is double-clicking it). With that enabled, now …

CSS was introduced to the web all the way back in 1996. At the time, most computer monitors were pretty terrible. The colors of CSS — whether defined with the RGB, HSL, or hexadecimal format — catered to the monitors of the time, all within the sRGB colorspace. Most newer devices have a wide-gamut display. …

Manuel Matuzović details 10 bad HTML patterns for a close button. You know, stuff like this: Why is that bad? There is no href there, so it really isn’t a link (close buttons aren’t links). Not to mention the missing href makes this “placeholder link” unfocusable. Plus, that symbol will be read as “multiplication” or …

Today at Jamstack_Conf, Netlify announced Build Plugins. What it does is allow you to have particular hooks for events within your build, like when the build starts or ends. What’s nice about them is that they’re just a plain ‘ol JavaScript object, so you can insert some logic or kick off a library just the …

Ethan on the thinking and research that inspired the term: Around that time, my partner Elizabeth visited the High Line in New York City shortly after it opened. When she got back, she told me about these wheeled lounge chairs she saw in one section, and how people would move them apart for a bit of solitude, or push a few …

This guide is about the HTML syntax for responsive images (and a little bit of CSS for good measure). We’ll go over srcset and , plus a whole bunch of things to consider to help you get the best performance and design control from your images.

Amber Wilson has some CSS Tips for New Devs, like: It’s not a good idea to fix shortcomings in your HTML with CSS. Fix your HTML first! And… You can change CSS right in your browser’s DevTools (to open them, right-click the browser window and choose “inspect” or “inspect element”). The great thing is, none …

SEO is often considered the snake oil of the web. How many times have you scrolled through attention-grabbing headlines on know how to improve your SEO? Everyone and their uncle seems to have some “magic” cure to land high in search results and turn impressions into conversions. Sifting through so much noise on the topic …

The prototyping app Framer just launched the web version of their design tool and it looks pretty darn neat. I particularly love the design of the marketing site that explains how to use Framer and what sets it apart from other design tools. They have a ton of examples that you can pop open to …

I was reading this article by Chris where he talks about block links — you know, like wrapping an entire card element inside an anchor — being a bad idea. It’s bad accessibility because of how it affects screen readers. And it’s bad UX because it prevents simple user tasks, like selecting text. But maybe …