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Since the inception of CSS in 1994, the cascade and inheritance have defined how we design on the web. Both are powerful features but, as authors, we’ve had very little control over how they interact. Selector specificity and source order provide some minimal “layering” control, without a lot of nuance — and inheritance requires an …

I remember searching for tutorials for making seamless patterns in Photoshop¹ all the time back in the day. It’s fun to see this little website for building repeating patterns as its one job. It does everything you’d expect: pick a background, drag some decorations onto it and position them (overlapping an edge is fine, which …

The <canvas> element in HTML and Canvas API in JavaScript combine to form one of the main raster graphics and animation possibilities on the web. A common canvas use-case is programmatically generating images for websites, particularly games. That’s exactly what I’ve done in a website I built for playing Solitaire. The cards, including all their …

I’d say 85% of my grid usage is in one of these two categories… I just need some pretty basic (probably equal width) columns that ends up being something like like grid-template-columns: repeat(3, minmax(0, 1fr)); to be safe. Actually doing some real layout where five minutes in I realize I’d really like subgrid. Subgrid? It’s …

The question of how and where to learn HTML & CSS is a highly reasonable thing to ask. The answer depends on all sorts of things: how serious you are, your current foundation, what other resources are available to you, what you hope to do with what you learn, and how much time you have, …

HTTP requests are a crucial part of any web application that’s communicating with a back-end server. The front end needs some data, so it asks for it via a network HTTP request (or Ajax, as it tends to be called), and the server returns an answer. Almost every website these days does this in some …

I think of grids as arrangements of rectangles with vertical and horizontal lines running through. And they are, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still do clever things in how we place things on those grids and what we do with the elements afterwards. In this demo by Jesse Breneman, a grid of hexagons is …

If you were to ask me what question I hear most about front-end development, I’d say it’s“How do I get better at CSS?”. That question usually comes up after sharing a CSS illustration I have made. It’s something I love to do over on CodePen. To many, CSS is this mythical beast that can’t be …

I’ll sometimes search the web for something like “Small Text Generator” knowing there will be some website that will turn some dumb thing I want to type like: into something fun like… Important note about accessibility: This kind of altered text will read terribly with assistive technology like VoiceOver. Just “Uhm” will read as “modified …

As front-end developers, our job is working with browsers. Knowing how many we have and the health of them is always of great interest. As far as numbers go, we have fewer recently than we have in the past. It’s only this month that Edge is starting to auto-update browsers to the Chromium version, yet …

With a very recent Safari update, Web Animations API (WAAPI) is now supported without a flag in all modern browsers (except IE).  Here’s a handy Pen where you can check which features your browser supports. The WAAPI is a nice way to do animation (that needs to be done in JavaScript) because it’s native — …

Developer Experience¹ is a term² with a self-declaring meaning — the experience of developers — but it eludes definition in the sense that people invoke it at different times for different reasons referring to different things. For instance, our own Sarah Drasner’s current job title is “VP of Developer Experience” at Netlify, so it’s a …

Flywheel is my WordPress hosting partner here. I use Local every day for my WordPress local development environment and use their hosting for all my WordPress sites as part of my whole flow, so I’m glad they aren’t just a sponsor but a product I use and like. Last November some of their crew came …

I am creating a WordPress plugin and there is a slight learning curve when it comes to using it. I’d like to give users a primer on how to use the plugin, but I want to avoid diverting users to documentation on the plugin’s website since that takes them out of the experience. What would …

Here’s the plan! We’re going to build a styled select element. Not just the outside, but the inside too. Total styling control. Plus we’re going to make it accessible. We’re not going to try to replicate everything that the browser does by default with a native <select> element. We’re going to literally use a <select> …

There are some neat interactive demos in here from Thiru Manikandan. There are a couple of very tricky things with z-index that never fail to confuse. In addition to things like requiring positioning and source order, the trickiest are the stacking contexts and parent/child relationships. z-index isn’t a flat playing field. Even if you put …

A CSS methodology from Andy Bell: The most important part of this methodology is the language itself: CSS. It’s key to note its existence in the name because some alternative approaches, such as BEM—which I have enjoyed for many years—can veer very far away from Cascading Style Sheets. I love CSS, though and think that its core capabilities …

Here’s a two-second review. If an element has an ID, you can link to it with natural browser behavior. It’s great if headings have them, because it’s often useful to link directly to a specific section of content. Should I be so inclined, I could link right to this heading, be it from an URL, …

I needed a numbered list of blog posts to be listed with the last/high first and going down from there. Like this: But the above is just text. I wanted to do this with a semantic <ol> element.

You can create stripes in CSS. That’s all I thought about in terms of CSS background patterns for a long time. There’s nothing wrong with stripes; stripes are cool. They can be customized into wide and narrow bands, criss-crossed into a checked pattern, and played with in other ways using the idea of hard stops. …

Šime Vidas with the lowdown on what these pseudo-selectors are and why they will be useful: :is() is to reduce repetition¹ of parts of comma-separated selectors. :where() is the same, but nothing inside it affects specificity. The example of wrapping :where(:not()) is really great, as now there is a way to use :not() without bumping …

I discovered CSS about a decade ago while trying to modify the look of a blog I had created. Pretty soon, I was able to code cool things with more mathematical and, therefore, easier-to-understand features like transforms. However, other areas of CSS, such as layout, have remained a constant source of pain. This post is …

Let’s say you wanted to build a site with Eleventy as the generator. Popular choice these days! Eleventy doesn’t have some particularly blessed way of preprocessing your CSS, if that’s something you want to do. There are a variety of ways to do it and perhaps that freedom is part of the spirit of Eleventy. …

Jamstack isn’t necessarily new. The term was officially coined in 2016, but the technologies and architecture it describes have been around well before that. Jamstack has received a massive dose of attention recently, with articles about it appearing in major sites and publications and new Jamstack-focused events, newsletters, podcasts, and more. As someone who follows …

There’s some interesting CSS trickery in Jason Pamental’s latest Web Fonts & Typography News. Jason wanted to bring swipeable columns to his digital book experience on mobile. Which brings up an interesting question right away… how do you set full-width columns that add columns horizontally, as-needed ? Well that’s a good trick right there, and …

We can use JavaScript to get the value of a CSS custom property. Robin wrote up a detailed explanation about this in Get a CSS Custom Property Value with JavaScript. To review, let’s say we’ve declared a single custom property on the HTML element: In JavaScript, we can access the value with getComputedStyle and getPropertyValue: …

Here’s a fantastic case study where Ivan Akulov looks at the rather popular writing app Notion and how the team might improve the performance in a variety of ways; through code splitting, removing unused vendor code, module concatenation, and deferring JavaScript execution. Not so long ago, we made a list for getting started with web …

Hey gang, #BlackLivesMatter. One tiny way I thought we could help here on this site, aside from our efforts as individuals, is to highlight some design resources that are both excellent and feature Black people. Representation matters. Here’s one. You know Pablo Stanley? Pablo is a wonderful illustrator who combines his illustration work with modern …

This article is about my experience using Brotli at production scale. Despite being really expensive and a truly unfeasible method for on-the-fly compression, Brotli is actually very economical and saves cost on many fronts, especially when compared with gzip or lower compression levels of Brotli.

Instant.Page does one special thing to make sites faster: it preloads the next page when it’s pretty sure you’re going to click a link (either by hovering over 65ms or mousedown on desktop, or touchstart on mobile), so when you do complete the click (probably a few hundred milliseconds later), it loads that much faster. …