Web Development + Follow

Hey hey, these “chronicle” posts are little roundups of news that I haven’t gotten a chance to link up yet. They are often things that I’ve done off-site, like be a guest on a podcast or online conference. Or it’s news from other projects I work on. Or some other thing I’ve been meaning to …

The idea came while watching a mandatory training video on bullying in the workplace. I can just hear High School Geoff LOL-ing about a wimp like me have to watch that thing. But here we are. The video UI was actually lovely, but it was the progress bar that really caught my attention – or …

Harry Roberts: The numbers so far show that the difference between no compression and Gzip are vast, whereas the difference between Gzip and Brotli are far more modest. This suggests that while the nothing to Gzip gains will be noticeable, the upgrade from Gzip to Brotli might perhaps be less impressive.

Early congratulations, A Book Apart! That’s a hell of a milestone. I’m quite sure I’ve read more A Book Apart books than any other tech book publisher. Katel LeDu runs the ship over there, and she’s given me very special pack of discount codes that will get you my book, Practical SVG, for free. So …

A bonafide CSS trick from Will Boyd! Force all the content of an element to be selected when clicked with user-select: all; If you click a second time, let the user select just parts of the text as normal. Second click? Well, it’s a trick. You’re really using a time-delayed forwards-ending @keyframes animation when the …

That’s the title of a public post from David Baron, a Principal Engineer at Firefox, with thoughts toward container queries. I know a lot of people have been holding their breath waiting for David’s ideas, as he’s one of few uniquely qualified to understand the ins and outs of this and speak to implementation possibility. …

We have big JavaScript frameworks that tons of people already use and like, including React, Vue, Angular, and Svelte. Do we need another JavaScript library? Let’s take a look at Alpine.js and you can decide for yourself. Alpine.js is for developers who aren’t looking to build a single page application (SPA). It’s lightweight (~7kB gzipped) …

This is just a tiny little trick that might be helpful on a site where you don’t have the time or desire to build out a really good on-site search solution. Google.com itself can perform searches scoped to one particular site. The trick is getting people there using that special syntax without them even knowing …

There is no doubt that web forms play an integral role in our web site or applications. By default, they provide a useful set of elements and features — from legends and fieldsets to native validation and states — but they only get us so far when we start to consider the peculiarities of using …

A quick opinion piece by Kev Quirk: Why I Don’t Use A Static Site Generator. Kev uses WordPress: Want to blog on my iPad? I can. Want to do it on my phone? No problem. On a machine I don’t normally use? Not an issue, as long as it has a browser. First, it’s worth understanding that …

Marco Rogers asked a very good question on Twitter: I’ve been on both sides of the interview table for many years now, both searching for jobs and as a hiring manager. In my years of management, I’ve read though thousands of applications, this article is full of suggestions gleaned from that experience, should it be …

I expect this post from Tim Kadlec to be quoted in every performance conference talk for the next few years. There is a lot of data here, so please check it out for yourself, but the short story is that JavaScript-framework-powered sites are definitely heavier and more resource-intensive than non-JavaScript-framework-powered sites. Angular is the beefiest …

The @property is totally new to me, but I see it’s headed to Chrome, so I suppose it’s good to know about! There is a draft spec and an “intent to ship” document. The code from that document shows:

We mentioned a way to make a CSS-only carousel in a recent issue of the newsletter and I thought that a more detailed write up would be interesting and capture some of my thoughts on making one.

That title is from the opening tweet of a thread from Benjamin De Cock. I wouldn’t go that far, myself. What I like about the term is that ‘Front-End’ literally means the browser, and while the job has been changing quite a lot — and is perhaps fracturing before our eyes — the fact that …

There was just a bug late last year where system fonts (at least on Mac, I don’t know what the story was on other platforms) in Chrome appeared too thin and tracked-in at small sizes and too thick and tracked-out at larger sizes. That one was fixed, thankfully. But while it was a problem, it …

Favicons are the little icons you see in your browser tab. They help you understand which site is which when you’re scanning through your browser’s bookmarks and open tabs. They’re a neat part of internet history that are capable of performing some cool tricks. One very new trick is the ability to use SVG as …

As a follow-up to Jhey’s recent post on responsive motion paths, Michelle Barker notes that another approach could be to just transform: scale() the whole dang element. The trade-off there is that you’re scaling both the path and the element on the path at the same time; Jhey’s approach only makes path flexbile and the …

Not so long ago, we wrote about dark mode in CSS and I’ve been thinking about how white text on a black background is pretty much always harder to read than black text on a white background. After thinking about this for a while, I realized that we can fix that problem by making the …

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), an organization that defines standards for web content accessibility, does not specify a minimum font size for the web. But we know there’s such a thing as text that is too small to be legible, just as text that can be too large to consume. So, how can we …

I still think Coil is cool. I have it installed on CSS-Tricks as a publisher and money trickles in. I have a paid account and I trickle out money to other sites that use it. I wrote about all that last year. This’ll explode to something huge if we actually get the Web Monetization API …

In a previous article, we showed how to build a GraphQL API with FaunaDB. We’ve also written a series of articles 1, 2, 3, 4 explaining how traditional databases built for global scalability have to adopt eventual (vs. strong) consistency, and/or make compromises on relations and indexing possibilities. FaunaDB is different since it does not …

I did a little thing the other day that I didn’t know was possible until then. I had a project folder open in VS Code like I always do, and I added another different root folder to the window. I always assumed when you had a project open, it was one top level root folder …

Matthias Ott’s posted his VS Code setup. I find lists like this (I rounded up some recent updates of my own) irresistible, probably because, like y’all, I spend an awful lot of time in VS Code and wanna make sure I’m getting the most out of it. Things from the list that stood out to …

The Jamstack way of thinking and building websites is becoming more and more popular. Have you already tried Gatsby, Nuxt, or Gridsome (to cite only a few)? Chances are that your first contact was a “Wow!” moment — so many things are automatically set up and ready to use.  There are some challenges, though, one …

Bob Hoffman: Puzzles, Malcom Gladwell wrote, are problems for which there is not enough information. An example of a puzzle: Where is Jimmy Hoffa buried? If we had more information, we would know the answer. If someone told us “Jimmy Hoffa is buried in New Jersey,” we’d know a little more than we know now. …

Here’s a fun little idea from Knut Synstad. You give it the URL of a GitHub Gist and it converts the Gist into grayscale rounded blobs (SVG) that sorta look like code if you squint. Maybe fun for interesting dynamic backgrounds or for whatever you might use code-looking stock art for.

Maintaining a large-scale CSS project is hard. Over the years, we’ve witnessed different approaches aimed at easing the process of writing scalable CSS. In the end, we all try to meet the following two goals: Efficiency: we want to reduce the time spent thinking about how things should be done and increase the time doing …

Ain’t nothing wrong with max-width, but Ethan makes a point in the last sentence: Rather than simply defaulting to max-width as a constraint, I can use the empty space around my design, and treat it as a layout tool. If the space “around” your grid is actually part of the grid, it’s easier to use. Maybe you’d decide to …

I’ve been harping for a while that Jamstack doesn’t necessarily mean throwing away your old CMS. In fact, I’d argue that Jamstack is at it’s most powerful when paired with a system that you already know, are comfortable with, and perhaps even like. You’d call that decoupling the front end. Netlify has a webinar coming …