Web Development + Follow

No, not really. My first guess was that this was intentionally not exposed in browsers because browsers intentionally don’t want us fighting it — or making well-intentioned but bad-outcome decisions based on that info. But I don’t see any evidence of that. StackOverflow answers paint how weird cross-browser it can be. This script from 2013 …

Chip Cullen: Let’s say you’re building a site, and you’re working with a designer. They come to you with some solid designs, and you’re ready to go. You’re also a conscientious front end developer and you like to make sure the sites you build are accessible. The designs you’re working from have some body copy, …

Let’s have a look at how we can use the CSS text-shadow property to create truly 3D-looking text. You might think of text-shadow as being able to apply blurred, gradient-looking color behind text, and you would be right! But just like box-shadow, you can control how blurred the shadow is, including taking it all the …

Interesting research from Dan Luu¹: … it’s pretty common for my personal blog to get more traffic than the entire corp eng blog for a company with a nine to ten figure valuation and it’s not uncommon for my blog to get an order of magnitude more traffic. I think this is odd because tech …

My favorite way to level up as a front-end developer is to do the work. Literally just build websites. If you can do it for money, great, you should. If the websites you make can help yourself or anyone else you care about, then that’s also great. In lieu of that, you can also make …

Between each post of Eric Meyer’s blog there’s this rather lovely illustration that can randomly be one of these five options:

Here’s one simple, practical way to make apps perform better on mobile devices: always configure HTML input fields with the correct type, inputmode, and autocomplete attributes. While these three attributes are often discussed in isolation, they make the most sense in the context of mobile user experience when you think of them as a team.  …

It’s incredibly sad that Christopher Schmitt passed away last week¹. I keep thinking about how Christopher was one of the best dudes I knew. Just incredibly kind and thoughtful all the way through. I know everyone says that about people after they pass, but I really mean it here. I’m sure we all know people …

Before the advent of CSS custom properties (we might call them “variables” in this article as that’s the spirit of them), implementing multiple color schemes on the same website usually meant writing separate stylesheets. Definitely not the most maintainable thing in the world. Nowadays, though, we can define variables in a single stylesheet and let …

Jetpack has had a search feature for a while. Flip it on, and it replaces your built-in WordPress search (which is functional, but not particularly good) with an Elasticsearch-powered solution that is faster and has better results. I’ve been using that for quite a while here on CSS-Tricks, which was an upgrade from using a …

Scrollbars are natural progress meters. How far the scrollbar is down or across is how much progress has been made scrolling through that element (often the entire page). But, they are more like progress indicators than meters, if you think of a meter as something that “fills up” as you go. We can use some …

There was a discussion recently on the Animation at Work Slack: how could you make a CSS motion path responsive? What techniques would be work? This got me thinking. A CSS motion path allows us to animate elements along custom user-defined paths. Those paths follow the same structure as SVG paths. We define a path …

Looking to share code between your Vue components? If you’re familiar with Vue 2, you’ve probably used a mixin for this purpose. But the new Composition API, which is available now as a plugin for Vue 2 and an upcoming feature of Vue 3, provides a much better solution. In this article, we’ll take a …

You want to set some text inside the shape of a circle with HTML and CSS? That’s crazy talk, right? Not really! Thanks to shape-outside and some pure CSS trickery it is possible to do exactly that. 

I linked up Water.css not long ago as an interesting sort of CSS framework. No classes. No <h2 class=”is-title”>. You just use semantic HTML and get styles. Is that going to “scale” very far? Probably not, but it sure is handy for styling things quickly, where — of course — you’re writing semantic HTML but …

Safari 13.1 just shipped support for CSS Shadow Parts. That means the ::part() selector is now supported in Chrome, Edge, Opera, Safari, and Firefox. We’ll see why it’s useful, but first a recap on shadow DOM encapsulation…

Julia Evans: I was debugging some CSS last week, and I think that post is missing something important: your attitude. Now – I’m not a very good CSS developer yet. I’ve never written CSS professionally and I don’t understand a lot of basic CSS concepts (I think I finally understood for the first time recently …

Chase McCoy wrote a nifty post about the “gap problem” when making a grid of items. His argument might be summarized like this: how should we space elements with margins in CSS? He notes that the gap property isn’t quite ready for prime time when it comes to using it with flexbox, like this:

I’ve been coding web animations and helping others do the same for years now. However, I have yet to see a concise list of tips focused on how to efficiently build animations, so here you go! I will be using the GreenSock Animation Platform (GSAP). It provides a simple, readable API and solves cross-browser inconsistencies …

Foldable phones are starting to be a thing. Early days, for sure, but some are already shipping, and they definitely have web browsers on them. Stands to reason that, as web designers, we are going to want to know where that fold is so we can design screens that fit onto the top half and …

Nils Binder covers the ways: 1. Use an SVG in the form of a triangle. This technique is nicely described by Erik Kennedy on CSS-Tricks. 2. Hide part of your section using clip-path. Read Diagonal Containers in CSS by Sebastiano Guerriero or Sloped edges with consistent angle in CSS by Kilian Valkhof. 3. Using CSS Transforms I would normally be …

Scheduled is the key word there — that’s a fairly new thing! When a push notification is scheduled (i.e. “Take your pill” or “You’ve got a flight in 3 hours”) that means it can be shown to the user even if they’ve gone offline. That’s an improvement from the past where push notification required the …

This report made a big splash last year. It’s a large chunk of research that shows just how terribly the web does with accessibility. It’s been updated this year and (drumroll…) we got a little worse. I’ll use their blockquote: The number of errors increased 2.1% between February 2019 and February 2020.

The latest edition of Andy Bell’s Piccalilli landed in my inbox this morning with a sweet offer: preorder Andy’s course on learning Eleventy from scratch at a third of the price. Why the plug? No, not sponsorships or anything like that. I just happen to hear a heckuva lot about Eleventy these days. Like how …

The design for Netflix’s browse page has remained pretty similar for a few years now. One mainstay component is the preview slider that allows users to scroll through content and hover on items to see a preview. One unique characteristic of the UI is its hover behavior. When a show preview expands on hover, the …

Ahmad Shadeed digs around the new Facebook’s front-end code. One that stood out to me: Whaaat? This is the first I’ve heard of the inset property. Ahmad said he saw it working in Chrome 80, but it definitely isn’t for me (nor Safari). It does in Firefox though.

Let’s build a literal grid of squares, and we’ll put the logos of some magazines centered inside each square. I imagine plenty of you have had to build a logo grid before. You can probably already picture it: an area of a site that lists the donors, sponsors, or that is showing off all the …

Continuous Integration (CI) workflows are considered a best practice these days. As in, you work with your version control system (Git), and as you do, CI is doing work for you like running tests, sending notifications, and deploying code. That last part is called Continuous Deployment (CD). But shipping code to a production server often …

You make sure the text is more than twice the width of the screen, then use negative translate animations to do the marquee movement. You’ll probably want to aria-hidden all but one of them if you need to duplicate the text. Or, you could use a very clever CSS trick to “duplicate” the text using …

I just can’t stop bookmarking great links related to typography. I’m afraid I’m going to have to subject you, yet again, to a bunch of them all grouped up. So those of you that care about web type stuff, enjoy.