Web Development + Follow

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 …

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 …