Web Development + Follow

I’m a fan of building websites with the least amount of technical debt and things you have to be responsible for as possible for what you wanna do. Sometimes you take on this debt on purpose because you have to, but when you don’t, please don’t ;). Let’s say you need to build a site …

There’s one aspect of JavaScript that always has me pulling my hair: closures. I work with React a lot, and the overlap there is that they can sometimes be the cause of stale props and state. We’ll get into exactly what that means, but the trouble is that the data we use to build our …

Some nice trickery from Knut Melvær. Ultimately the trick boils down to figuring out how far you’ve scrolled on the page and changing the title to show it, like: Knut’s trick assumes React and installing an additional library. I’m sure that library does all kinds of smart stuff, but if you’re looking to do this …

If you’re going to build a multi-step CSS animation or transition, you have a particular conundrum. The second step needs a delay that is equal to the duration of the first step. And the third step is equal to the duration of the first two steps, plus any delay in between. It gets more and …

Nice video from Kevin Powell. Here are some notes, thoughts, and stuff I learned while watching it. Right when they came out, I was mostly obsessed with font-size usage, but they are just functions, so they can be used anywhere you’d use a number, like a length.

I was in a situation recently where I wanted to show an iPhone on a website. I wanted users to be able to interact with an application demo on this “mock” phone, so it had to be rendered in CSS, not an image. I found a great library called marvelapp/devices.css. The library implemented the device …

This is a hell of a series by Stephanie Eckles. It’s a real pleasure watching CSS evolve and solve problems in clear and elegant ways.

I mentioned this the other day via Michelle Barker’s coverage, but here I’ll link to the official announcement. The main thing is that we’ll be getting gap with flexbox, which means: That’s excellent, as putting space in between flex items has been tough in the past. We have justify-content: space-between, which is nice sometimes, but …

This is another player in the game of (pre)rendering the page of the link that you’re about to click on before you click it. The point of which is to get a performance boost for extremely little effort. You’re putting the browser to work getting that next page ready for, say, that half a second …

Compared to the past, modern browsers have become really efficient at rendering the tangled web of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code a typical webpage provides. It takes a mere milliseconds to render the code we give it into something people can use. What could we, as front-end developers, do to actually help the browser be …

It’s probably one part coronavirus, one part new-fancy-video setup, and one part “hey this is good for CodePen too,” but I’ve been doing more videos lately. It’s nice to be back in the swing of that for a minute. There’s something fun about coming back to an old familiar workflow.

Michelle Barker notes that it’s been a heck of a week for us CSS layout nerds. Firefox has long had the best DevTools for CSS Grid, but Chrome is about to catch up and go one bit better by visualizing grid line numbers and names. Firefox supports gap for display: flex, which is great, and …

The accessibility trick is using <input type=”range”> and wrestling it into shape with CSS rather than giving up and re-building it with divs or whatever and later forget about accessibility. The most clever example uses an angled linear-gradient background making the input look like a volume slider where left = low and right = high.

MDX is a killer feature for things like blogs, slide decks and component documentation. It allows you to write Markdown without worrying about HTML elements, their formatting and placement while sprinkling in the magic of custom React components when necessary. Let’s harness that magic and look at how we can customize MDX by replacing Markdown …

Building a dark theme switcher that takes care of users OS preferences.

The other day in “Static or not?” I said: … serving HTML from a CDN is some feat. What I meant is that serving resources like images, CSS, and JavaScript from a CDN is fairly straightforward. The industry at large has been doing that for many years. An asset with a URL can be moved …

WordPress 5.4 was released not so long ago and, along with other improvements and bug fixes, it introduced a feature called Block Variations. I had a chance to use it on one of my recent projects and am so pleasantly surprised with how smart this feature is. I actually think it hasn’t received the attention …

Peter Tasker on creating blocks right now: It’s fairly straightforward these days to get set up with the WP CLI ‘scaffold’ command. This command will set up a WordPress theme or plugin with a ‘blocks’ folder that contains the PHP and base CSS and JavaScript required to create a custom block. The only drawback that I noticed is …

There’s some new units I was totally unaware of from the Level 4 spec for CSS values! The lh unit is “equal to the computed value of line-height” and rlh is the same only of the root element (probably the <html> element) rather than the current element. Why would that be useful? Šime Vidas’ has …

If you follow the undercurrent of the JavaScript community, there seems to be a divide as of late. It goes back over a decade. Really, this sort of strife has always been. Perhaps it is human nature. Whenever a popular framework gains traction, you inevitably see people comparing it to rivals. I suppose that is …

Lists are a fundamental part of HTML! They are useful in things like blog posts for listing out steps, recipes for listing ingredients, or items in a navigation menu. Not only are they an opportunity for styling, but they have accessibility implications. For example, the number of items in a list is announced in a …

It’s easy to think that working with Jamstack means working with some specific set of technologies. That’s how it’s traditionally been packaged for us. Think LAMP stack, where Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP are explicit tools and languages. or MEAN or MERN or whatever. With Jamstack, the original JAM meant JavaScript, APIs, and Markup. That’s …

Heydon’s <watched-box> is a damn fantastic tool. It’s a custom element that essentially does container queries by way of class names that get added to the box based on size breakpoints that are calculated with ResizeObserver. It’s like a cleaner version of what Philip was talking about a few years ago. I’m sure I’d be …

Like any other programming language, CSS has functions. They can be inserted where you’d place a value, or in some cases, accompanying another value declaration.

There have been a couple of viral tweets about this lately, one from Adam Argyle and one from Mathias Bynes. This is a nice change that makes CSS a bit more clear. Before, every single color function actually needs two functions, one for transparency and one without, this eliminates that need and brings the syntax …

You should really look at everything Amelia does, but I get extra excited about her interactive blog posts. Her latest about creating a gauge with SVG in React is unreal. Just the stuff about understanding viewBox is amazing and that’s like 10% of it. Don’t miss her earlier posts like the one on CSS Cascade …

I keep running across these super useful one page sites, and they keep being by the same person! Like this one with over 100 vanilla JavaScript DOM manipulation recipes, this similar one full of one-liners, and this one with loads of layouts. For that last one, making 91 icons for all those design patterns is …

Integration tests are a natural fit for interactive websites, like ones you might build with React. They validate how a user interacts with your app without the overhead of end-to-end testing.  This article follows an exercise that starts with a simple website, validates behavior with unit and integration tests, and demonstrates how integration testing delivers …

The concept of an “incremental build” is that, when using some kind of generator that builds all the files that make for a website, rather than rebuilding 100% of those files every single time, it only changes the files that need to be changed since the last build. Seems like an obviously good idea, but …

Sarah: I’ve had to implement the same hero for several years now, so like a good lazy programmer, I figured I’d automate it.