Web Development + Follow

In this tutorial, I’ll show you step by step how to create a simple tool in Node.js to run Google Lighthouse audits via the command line, save the reports they generate in JSON format and then compare them so web performance can be monitored as the website grows and develops. I’m hopeful this can serve …

 Steve Faulkner: User groups not well served by use of the title attribute • Mobile phone users.• Keyboard only users.• Screen magnifier users.• Screen reader users.• Users with fine motor skill impairments.• Users with cognitive impairments. Sounds like in 2020, the only useful thing the title attribute can do is label an <iframe title=”Contact Form”></iframe>.

From Adam and Una at Google, a podcast just about CSS. I believe I’m contractually obliged to link to that! Just one episode out so far, a shorty about the box model. Last time I wrote up podcasts I like was 8 years ago most of them are dead now, except the biggies like This …

Lara Schenck: … with WordPress child themes, you are all but guaranteed to get into the weeds of specificity, hunting around theme stylesheets that you didn’t author, trying to figure out what existing declaration is preventing you from applying a new style, and then figuring out the least specificity you need to override it, and …

We all have a number of interests and passions. For example, I’m interested in JavaScript, 90’s indie rock and hip hop, obscure jazz, the city of Pittsburgh, pizza, coffee, and movies starring John Lurie. We also have family members, friends, acquaintances, classmates, and colleagues who also have their own social relationships, interests, and passions. Some …

In this post, Sarah Chima walks us through how we can work with browser events, such as clicking, using JavaScript. There’s a ton of great info in here! If JavaScript isn’t your strong suit, I think this is the best explanation of event handling that I’ve read in quite some time.

Brent Jackson says CSS utility libraries failed somewhat: Eventually, you’ll need to add one-off styles that just aren’t covered by the library you’re using, and there isn’t always a clear way to extend what you’re working with. Without a clear way to handle things like this, developers tend to add inconsistent hacks and append-only styles. …

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. …