Web Development + Follow

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m writing this article, in part, because it’s something I look up often and want to be able to find it next time. Formatting a date string that you get from an API in JavaScript can take many shapes — anything from loading all of Moment.js to have …

A couple of interesting articles making the rounds: Tom MacWrite: Second-guessing the modern web Rich Harris: In defense of the modern web

Apple is well-known for the sleek animations on their product pages. For example, as you scroll down the page products may slide into view, MacBooks fold open and iPhones spin, all while showing off the hardware, demonstrating the software and telling interactive stories of how the products are used.

When you use font-display: swap;, which Google Fonts does when you use the default &display=swap part of the URL , you’re already saying, “I’m cool with FOUT,” which is another way of saying web text is displayed right away, and when the web font is ready, “swap” to it. There is already an async nature …

You know those times you get a horizontal scrollbar when accidentally placing an element off the right edge of the browser window? It might be a menu that slides in or the like. Sometimes we to overflow-x: hidden; on the body to fix that, but that can sometimes wreck stuff like position: sticky;. Well, you …

It occurred to me while we were talking about flexbox and gap that one reason we sometimes reach for flexbox is to chuck some boxes in a row and space them out a little. My brain still reaches for flexbox in that situation, and with gap, it probably will continue to do so. It’s worth …

Learn how to make category pages with Gatsby and structured content from Sanity.io.

If you haven’t used Gatsby before have a read about why it’s fast in every way that matters, and if you haven’t used FaunaDB before you’re in for a treat. If you’re looking to make your static sites full blown Jamstack applications this is the back end solution for you! This tutorial will only focus on the operations …

It’s hard to imagine writing production-ready JavaScript without a tool like Babel. It’s been an undisputed game-changer in making modern code accessible to a wide range of users. With this challenge largely out of the way, there’s not much holding us back from really leaning into the features that modern specifications have to offer. But …

I was reading Anna Kaley’s “Listboxes vs. Dropdown Lists” post the other day. It’s a fairly straightforward comparison between different UI implementations of selecting options. There is lots of good advice there. Classics like that you should use radio buttons (single select) or checkboxes (multiple select) if you’re showing five or fewer options, and the …

This has been the year of Gutenberg for us here at CSS-Tricks. In fact, that’s a goal we set at the end of last year. We’re much further along that I thought we’d be, authoring all new content in the block editor¹, enabling the block editor for all content now. That means when we open …

I made a Chrome extension this weekend because I found I was doing the same task over and over and wanted to automate it. Plus, I’m a nerd living through a pandemic, so I spend my pent-up energy building things. I’ve made a few Chrome Extensions over the years, hope this post helps you get …

Jeremy beating the classic drum: For web development, start with HTML, then CSS, then JavaScript (and don’t move on to JavaScript too quickly—really get to grips with HTML and CSS first). And then… That’s assuming you want to be a good well-rounded web developer. But it might be that you need to get a job …

BugHerd is about collecting visual feedback for websites. If you’re like me, you’re constantly looking at your own websites and you’re constantly critiquing them. I think that’s healthy. Nothing gets better if you look at your own work and consider it perfectly finished. This is where BugHerd shines. With BugHerd, anytime you have one of …

It’s not at the level of demand as, say, container queries, but being able to make “masonry” layouts in CSS has been a big ask for CSS developers for a long time. Masonry being that kind of layout where unevenly-sized elements are layed out in ragged rows. Sorta like a typical brick wall turned sideways. …

It’s interesting how third-parties are sometimes super involved in pushing browser things forward. One big story there was how Bloomberg hired Igalia to implement CSS grid across the browsers. Here’s another story of Bocoup doing that, this time for the appearance property. The story is told in a Twitter thread, but the thread is broken …

Authentication (logging in!) is a crucial part of many websites. Let’s look at how to go about it on a site using Vue, in the same way it can be done with any custom back end. Vue can’t actually do authentication all by itself, —we’ll need another service for that, so we’ll be using another …

A surprisingly common response when asking people about things they’d fix about anything in CSS, is to improve the handling of viewport units. One thing that comes up often is how they relate to scrollbars. For example, if an element is sized to 100vw and stretches edge-to-edge, that’s fine so long as the page doesn’t …

As a little experiment, I shared a development tip on three different social networks. I also tried to post it in a format that was most suitable for that particular social network: On Twitter, I made it a thread. On Instagram, I made it a series of images. On YouTube, I made it a video. …

In CSS, line-height is probably one of the most misunderstood, yet commonly-used attributes. As designers and developers, when we think about line-height, we might think about the concept of leading from print design — a term, interestingly enough, that comes from literally putting pieces of lead between lines of type.  Leading and line-height, however similar, …

Just like there is a movement to make more websites (and more of websites) from pre-rendered static files (Jamstack), so to might we consider moving content-based APIs to be static. Sean C Davis: A static API is simply a collection of flat JSON files that live on a content delivery network (CDN). It doesn’t perform any action …

I’m a big fan of Notion, as you likely know from previous coverage and recent video. It’s always interesting to see what other people do with Notion, and even how Notion uses Notion. I’d say most usage of Notion is private and internal, but any page on Notion can be totally public with the flip …

Let’s build ourselves a CMS. But rather than build out a UI, we’re going to get that UI for free in the form of GitHub itself! We’ll be leveraging GitHub as the way to manage the content for our static site generator (it could be any static site generator). Here’s the gist of it: GitHub …

An Event Apart: Online Together is a single-day online conference with an intense focus on digital design, UX, content, code, and more, giving you deep insights into where we are now and where things are going next. AEA! With a brand new online version of their conference! That’s awesome. AEA is a best-in-class web conference, so …

Everything is flexible these days. If you write grid-template-columns: 200px 200px 200px;, sure, you’d have equal-width columns, but that’s a rare day. What you usually mean is three columns of equal fluid width. We’ve got fractional units for that, like grid-template-columns: 1fr 1fr fr;. That’s usually fine, but they aren’t very sturdy like pixels. A …

To use the Web Animations API (e.g. el.animate()) you need a reference to a DOM element to target. So, how do you use it on pseudo-elements, which don’t really offer a direct reference? Dan Wilson covers a (newish?) part of the API itself:

Shawn Wang is talking about RedwoodJS here: …  it is the first time React components are being expressed in a single file format with explicit conventions. Which is the RedwoodJS idea of Cells. To me, it feels like a slightly cleaner version of how Apollo wants you to do it with useQuery. Shawn makes that …

I was working on a project that had this neat jagged edge along the bottom of a banner image. It’s something that made me think for a second and I learned something in the process! I thought I’d write up how I approached it so you can use it on your own projects.

There is a super cool new Podcast block for WordPress Gutenberg you use Jetpack (released in 8.5). I wanted to try it out, so below you’ll see recent episodes from ShopTalk Show. I’d tell you all about the recent episodes, except then this blog post wouldn’t age very well, because the point of this blog …

Talk to anyone who has an active blog and I bet they’ll tell you it’s been valuable to them. Maybe it’s opened doors. Maybe it’s got them a job. Maybe it’s got them a conference invite. Maybe they just like the thrill of knowing people have read and responded to it. Maybe they learned a …