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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 …

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.

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.

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.

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 …

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:

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. …

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 …

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 …

Animations have come a long way, continuously providing developers with better tools. CSS Animations, in particular, have defined the ground floor to solve the majority of uses cases. However, there are some animations that require a little bit more work.

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!

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 …

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 …

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 …

Here’s something I’d never heard of before: Display-P3 support in CSS Color Module Level 4 spec. This is a new color profile supported by certain displays and it introduces a much wider range of colors that we can choose from.

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 …

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 …

CSS Grid provides us with a powerful layout system for websites. The CSS-Tricks guide gives you a comprehensive overview of Grid’s properties with layout examples. What we’re going to do here is a reverse approach to show you the smallest possible set of grid properties you need to know to meet most of your layout …

Firefox 72 was first out of the gate with “independent transforms.” That is, instead of having to combine transforms together, like: …we can do: That’s extremely useful, as having to repeat other transforms when you change a single one, lest remove them, is tedious and prone to error. But there is some nuance to know …

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 …

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 …

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) …

Remember Tabletop.js? We just covered it a little bit ago in this same exact context: building editable websites. It’s a tool that turns a Google Sheet into an API, that you as a developer can hit for data when building a website. In that last article, we used that API on the client side, meaning …

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 …

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 …

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:

There’s a design trend I’ve seen popping up all over the place. Maybe you’ve seen it too. It’s this sort of thing where text is repeated over and over. A good example is the price comparison website, GoCompare, who used it in a major multi-channel advertising campaign.

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 …

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.

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?