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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 …

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 …