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Getting JavaScript to Talk to CSS and Sass

JavaScript and CSS have lived beside one another for upwards of 20 years. And yet it’s been remarkably tough to share data between them. There have been large attempts, sure. But, I have something simple and intuitive in mind — something not involving a structural change, but rather putting CSS custom properties and even Sass …

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Google’s Technical Writing Guide

It’s good! I’ve written up my advice (sprinkled with great advice from others), but this is way more straightforward nuts-and-bolts training on technical writing. It’s structured like an actual course, with exercises along the way.

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Accessibility Links

Austin Gil has kicked off the first in a five-part series about “HTML Forms Right” and to starts with semantics. It’s talking to the “we build our front-ends with JavaScript” crowd. The first block of code is an example of an Ajax form submission where the data submitted is gathered through the JavaScript API FormData.

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typespecimens.io

If you’re looking for a new typeface for that side project of yours then here’s a great website by John D. Jameson that collects a bunch of the latest type specimen websites. Everything is on display here, from the daring and bold, to those that are a bit more professional and reserved.

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Why Do Some HTML Elements Become Deprecated?

The internet has been around for a long while, and over time we’ve changed the way we think about web design. Many old techniques and ways of doing things have gotten phased out as newer and better alternatives have been created, and we say that they have been deprecated. Deprecated. It’s a word we use …

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Rethinking Code Comments

Justin Duke asks if treating code comments like footnotes could help us understand the code in a file better. In his mockup, all the comments are hidden by default and require a click to reveal:

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Web Performance Checklist

The other day, I realized that web performance is an enormous topic covering so very much — from minimizing assets to using certain file formats, it can be an awful lot to keep in mind while building a website. It’s certainly far too much for me to remember! So I made a web performance checklist. …

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An Annotated Docker Config for Front-End Web Development

Andrew Welch sings the praises of using Docker containers for local dev environments: Here are the advan­tages of Dock­er for me: • Each appli­ca­tion has exact­ly the envi­ron­ment it needs to run, includ­ing spe­cif­ic ver­sions of any of the plumb­ing need­ed to get it to work (PHP, MySQL, Post­gres, whatever) • Onboard­ing oth­ers becomes triv­ial, all …

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Cloudinary Studio

I knew that Cloudinary worked with video as well as images but, the other day, I was curious if Cloudinary offered a video player embed just like other video hosts do (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, etc). Like an <iframe> that comes with a special player. I was curious because, as much as I appreciate the simplicity …

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Let a website be a worry stone

Ethan Marcotte just redesigned his website and wrote about how the process was a distraction from the difficult things that are going on right now. Adding new features to your blog or your portfolio, tidying up performance issues, and improving things bit by bit can certainly relieve a lot of stress. Also? It’s fun!

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How to build a bad design system

I didn’t realize this until it was far too late, but one of the biggest mistakes that’s made on a design systems team is a common mismanagement issue: there are too many people in a meeting and they have too many dang opinions. Is there a conversation about the color of your buttons that’s taking …

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Max Stoiber’s Strong Opinion About Margins

Going with that title instead of the classic developer clickbait version Max used. 😉 We should ban margin from our components. Don’t use margin?! This thing I’ve been doing my entire career and don’t have any particular problems with?! Well, that’s not exactly Max’s point. The point is that any particular component doesn’t necessarily know …

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APIs and Authentication on the Jamstack

The first “A” in the Jamstack stands for “APIs” and is a key contributor to what makes working with static sites so powerful. APIs give developers the freedom to offload complexity and provide avenues for including dynamic functionality to an otherwise static site. Often, accessing an API requires validating the authenticity of a request. This …

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RSS Stuff

Laura Kalbag wrote How to read RSS in 2020. This would be a nice place to send someone curious about RSS: what it is, what it’s for, and how you can start using it as a reader. I like this callout, too: Sometimes the content is just an excerpt, encouraging you to read the rest …

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gqless

This is so cool. I mean, GraphQL is already cool. It’s very satisfying to write an understandable-looking query for whatever you want and then use that data in templates. But what if you didn’t have to write the query at all? What if you just wrote the templates pretending you already had the data, and …

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Creating a Pencil Effect in SVG

Scott Turner, who has an entire blog “Exploring procedural generation and display of fantasy maps”, gets into why vector graphics seems on these surface why it would be bad for the look of a pencil stroke: Something like this pencil stroke would require many tens of thousands of different elements.  Basically each little blob of …

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How to use CSS Scroll Snap

Nada Rifki demonstrates the scroll-snap-type and scroll-snap-alignCSS properties. I like that the demo shows that the items in the scrolling container can be different sizes. It is the edges of those children that matter, not some fixed snapping distance. I like Max Kohler’s coverage as well, which includes a demo where the snapping can happen in multiple …

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Emergency Website Kit

Here’s an outstanding idea from Max Böck. He’s created a boilerplate project for building websites that fit within a single HTTP request. This is extremely important for websites that contain critical information for public safety. As Max writes: In cases of emergency, many organizations need a quick way to publish critical information. But exisiting (CMS) …

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Maintaining Performance

Real talk from Dave: I, Dave Rupert, a person who cares about web performance, a person who reads web performance blogs, a person who spends lots of hours trying to keep up on best practices, a person who co-hosts a weekly podcast about making websites and speak with web performance professionals… somehow goofed and added …

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Consistent Backends and UX: How Do New Algorithms Help?

In previous articles, we explained what consistency is, the difference between “strong” and “eventual” consistency, and why this distinction is more important than ever to modern application developers. We also introduced the notion of ‘consistency tax’: the extra time and effort that a development team needs to invest if they choose a system with only …

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Get Static

In this piece, Eric Meyer argues that performance is more important than ever right now — especially for websites that contain critical information for the public:

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Add Beautiful Images with the Unsplash API

Perhaps you know Unsplash? I’d wager it’s the most popular stock photography site out there for two big reasons: Every photo on there is pretty darn nice Every photo is entirely free even for commercial use. You don’t have to ask permission or even credit it (although that’s appreciated). Here’s something you might not know …

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Value Bubbles for Range Inputs

HTML5 range inputs, in supported browsers and by design, don’t show the user the actual value they are submitting. If you want to use the cool slider, but show the value, you’ll have to do that yourself. Here we use the output element and jQuery to show the current value in a bubble that hovers above the range input.

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How to Animate Text with SVG and CSS

The other day I was helping my pal Jez work Dept. of Enthusiasm, the site for his newsletter, and I had a thought. What if we made the word “enthusiasm” in the title animate a little bit? Like, what if each of the letters in the word bopped up and down enthusiastically?