Web Development + Follow

We are always looking to make the web more accessible. Color contrast is just math, so Sass can help cover edge cases that designers might have missed.

In the previous article, we explained what strong (vs. eventual) consistency is. This article is the second part of a series where we explain how a lack of strong consistency makes it harder to deliver a good end-user experience, can bring serious engineering overhead, and opens you up to exploits. This part is longer since …

It’s not every day you can feel CSS be slow at something. Reddit user jgbbrd discovered nesting grid containers that all have 100% height can cause many-seconds of rendering delay. Probably not something you’ll ever have to worry about, but still, interesting. From the comments: What a funny use of the NSFW tag! This is …

Line,  bar, and pie charts are the bread and butter of dashboards and are the basic components of any data visualization toolkit. Sure, you can use SVG or a JavaScript chart library like Chart.js or a complex tool like D3 to create those charts, but what if you don’t want to load yet another library …

This is a great blog post from Brad Frost where he walks us through an interesting example. Let’s say we’re making a theme and we have some Sass like this:

IN A WORLD of responsive and fluid layouts on the web, ONE MEDIA TYPE stands in the way of perfect harmony: video. There are lots of ways in which video can be displayed on your site. You might be self-hosting the video and presenting it via the HTML5 <video> tag. You might be using YouTube, Vimeo, or …

As we noted in our complete guide, you can put an <a href=””> link around whatever chunks of HTML you like. Let’s call that a “block link.” Like you are wanting to link up an entire “Card” of content because it makes a big clickable target.

As a front-end developer working for clients all over the world, I’ve always struggled to deal with multilingual websites — especially cases where both right-to-left (RTL) and left-to-right (LTR) are used. That said, I’ve learned a few things along the way and am going to share a few tips in this post. Let’s work in Arabic and English, not just because Arabic is my native language, but because it’s …

Here’s an example of a nice little use case for cloud functions. Glitch has this great package of friendly words. Say you wanted to randomly generate “happy-elephant” or “walking-tree”, and you need to do that on your website in JavaScript. Well, this package is pretty big (~200 KB), necessarily so, because it has big dictionaries …

PPK digs into the subject, which he found woefully undercovered in web tech documentation. Our entry doesn’t mention them at all, which I’ll aim to fix. Agree on this situation: This is by far the most common use case for negative margins. You give a container a padding so that its contents have some breathing …

This talk by Marcin Wichary is — beyond both enthusiastic and outstanding — all about the complexity of UI design, typography, and the lengths his team at Figma has gone to make sure that doing something as simple as selecting a font from a dropdown does what you expect it to.

Recently, I was asked to make some tweaks to a landing page and, among the things I found in the code, there were two semitransparent overlays — both with the same RGB values for the background-color — on top of an image. Something like this: <img src=’myImage.jpg’/> <div class=’over1′></div> <div class=’over2′></div> There was no purpose …

Evert Pot: Unfortunately, when setting a new color (e.g. a { color: #44F }) the ‘purple visited link’ feature also gets disabled. I think this is a shame, as there’s so many instances where you’re going through a list of links and want to see what you’ve seen before. The 2 examples I ran into …

I love it when people redesign “in the open” and write about it. I’d just like to shout out to our own Geoff who has been doing this for 3 months now. He started in late December last year. He’s been sharing stuff like his dev tooling choices, considering performance, considering accessibility, that moment where …

I see Google Fonts rolled out a new design (Tweet). Compared to the last big redesign, this feels much more iterative. I can barely tell the difference really, except it’s blue instead of red and this one pretty rad checkbox: Show only variable fonts.

You might reach for <input type=”number> when you’re, you know, trying to collect a number in a form. But it’s got all sorts of issues. For one, sometimes what you want kinda looks like a number, but isn’t one (like how a credit card number has spaces), because it’s really just a string of numbers. …

Funny timing on this I was just looking at the website for Utopia (which is a responsive type project which I hate to admit I don’t fully understand) and I came across some CSS they show off that looked like this: See anything weird there? That code is using mathematical operators, but there is no …

Have you ever clicked on an image on a webpage that opens up a larger version of the image with navigation to view other photos? Some folks call it a pop-up. Others call it a lightbox. Bootstrap calls it a modal. I mention Bootstrap because I want to use it to make the same sort …

Burke Holland thinks that to “build applications without thinking about servers” is a pretty good way to describe serverless, but… Nobody really thinks about servers when they are writing their code. I mean, I doubt any developer has ever thrown up their hands and said “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait just a minute. We’re not declaring …

The first rule of animating on the web: don’t animate width and height. It forces the browser to recalculate a bunch of stuff and it’s slow (or “expensive” as they say). If you can get away with it, animating any transform property is faster (and “cheaper”). Butttt, transform can be tricky. Check out how complex …

More than ever, new products aim to make an impact on a global scale, and user experience is rapidly becoming the determining factor for whether they are successful or not.

A fascinating new site called The Markup just launched. Tagline: Big Tech Is Watching You. We’re Watching Big Tech. Great work from Upstatement. The content looks amazing, but of course, around here we’re always interested in the design and tech as well. There is loads to adore, from the clean typography, interesting layout, and bold angled …

You know what the best thing is about building and running automated browser tests is? It means that the site you’re doing it on really matters. It means you’re trying to take care of that site by making sure it doesn’t break, and it’s worth the time to put guards in place against that breakages. …

Some commentary from Zack Bloom on the Cloudflare Blog, looking at requests to CDNJS for versions of jQuery. What we don’t see is a decline in our old versions which come close to the volume of growth of new versions when they’re released. In fact the release of 3.4.1, as popular as it quickly becomes, …

With a name as big as React, it’s bound to cause some Stream-Crossing Confusion, as I like to call it. How do you center a <div> in React? Dave Ceddia: React cares exactly zero about styling. Think of it as generating the barebones HTML. React will put elements on the page, but everything after that …

Tartan is a patterned cloth that’s typically associated with Scotland, particularly their fashionable kilts. On tartanify.com, we gathered over 5,000 tartan patterns (as SVG and PNG files), taking care to filter out any that have explicit usage restrictions. The idea was cooked up by Sylvain Guizard during our summer holidays in Scotland. At the very beginning, …

Nicholas C. Zakas: Eventually, I settled on a list of questions I would ask myself for each problem as it arose. I found that asking these questions, in order, helped me make the best decision possible: 1) Is this really a problem?2) Does the problem need to be solved?3) Does the problem need to be …

Let’s create a pure CSS effect that changes the color of a text link on hover… but slide that new color in instead of simply swapping colors.

I’ve had a bunch of tabs open that just so happen to all be related to typography, so I figured I’d give myself the mental release of closing them by blogging them. How’s that for a blog post format for ya: whatever random tabs you’ve had open for far too long.

Hey how cool! A documentary about Vue! Good timing as it looks like VueConf is happening right now. (Reminder we have a site for conferences to tell you stuff like that). Sarah appears in it (about 21:13) and talks about CSS-Tricks for a second, so we’re officially super famous now and I have already booked …