Web Development + Follow

Robin recently lamented the common complaint that CSS is frustrating. There are misconceptions about what it is and what it does. There are debates about what kind of language it is. There are even different views on where it should be written. Rachel Andrew has a new talk from An Event Apart DC 2019 available …

Even a simple Card component can be tricky to design an API around. What abstraction are you providing? How much control do you want to give? If you make it too flexible, you aren’t providing much value. If you make it to rigid, you also aren’t providing much value.

I was extremely excited when I first heard that clip-path: path() was coming to Firefox. Just imagine being able to easily code a breathing box like the one below with just one HTML element and very little CSS without needing SVG or a huge list of points inside the polygon function! Chris was excited about …

Have you ever found yourself either writing a CSS selector that winds up looking confusing as heck, or seen one while reading through someone’s code? That happened to me the other day. Here’s what I wrote: At the end of it, I honestly couldn’t even explain what it does to myself. LOL, that probably means …

<input type=”number”>, <input type=”date”>, <input type=”search”>, <select multiple>, <progress>, <meter>, <dialog>, <details><summary>, <video>, <div onclick>, <div aria-label>, <a href><div>Block Links</div></a>, aria-controls, role=”tablist” 😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬

Not long ago, I posted about PHP templating in just PHP (which is basically HEREDOC syntax). I’m literally using that technique for some super basic templating I needed to do on this very WordPress site. The main pushback was that this kind of thing can be an XSS vulnerability. In my case, it’s not, because …

A standard e-commerce site has a few common pages. There are product pages, shop pages that list products, and let’s not forget pages for the user account, checkout flow and cart. WooCommerce makes it a trivial task to set these up on a WordPress site because it provides templates for them and create the pages …

Over a decade ago, I did a little three-part video series on Designing for WordPress. Then I did other series with the same spirit, like videocasting the whole v10 redesign, a friend’s website, and even writing a book. Those are getting a little long in the tooth though. You might still learn from watching them …

Think of building sites with Gatsby as an hourglass shape. Gatsby itself is right in the middle. The wide funnel at the top represents the fact that Gatsby can take in data from all sorts of sources. The data could be in markdown files, from a headless CMS or some other API, from a hosted …

Here’s a great thread by Kevin Powell that’s making the rounds. He believes so many folks see CSS as a frustrating and annoying language:

Tim Kadlec: One particular pattern for loading non-critical CSS I’ve seen is the preload/polyfill pattern. With this approach, you load any stylesheets as preloads instead, and then use their onload events to change them back to a stylesheet once the browser has them ready. So you’re trying to make your stylesheet more async, but it causes two …

GraphQL is becoming popular and developers are constantly looking for frameworks that make it easy to set up a fast, secure and scalable GraphQL API. In this article, we will learn how to create a scalable and fast GraphQL API with authentication and fine-grained data-access control (authorization). As an example, we’ll build an API with …

Here’s a fun one. How might we create a set of those cool Matryoshka dolls where they nest inside one another… but in CSS? I toyed with this idea in my head for a little while. Then, I saw a tweet from CSS-Tricks and the article image had the dolls. I took that as a …

This is not that blog post. I’m saying let’s say you were. This is not a knock any other blog posts out there about Dark Mode. There are lots of good ones, and I’m a fan of any information-sharing blog post. This is more of a thought exercise on what I think it would take …

Nice demo from Sebastiano Guerriero. When a fixed-position header moves from overlapping differently-colored backgrounds, the colors flop out to be appropriate for that background. Sebastiano’s technique is very clever, involving multiple copies of the header within each section (where the copies are hidden from screenreaders) which are all positioned on top of each other and …

Earlier this year, I came across this demo by Florin Pop, which makes a line go either over or under the letters of a single line heading. I thought this was a cool idea, but there were a few little things about the implementation I felt I could simplify and improve at the same time.

Here’s a neat idea from Tim Kadlec. He uses the Modheader extension to toggle custom headers in his browser. It also lets him see when images are too big and need to be optimized in some way. This is a great way to catch issues like this in a local environment because browsers will throw …

I was recently working on a modern take of the blogroll. The idea was to offer readers a selection of latest posts from those blogs in a magazine-style layout, instead of just popping a list of our favorite blogs in the sidebar. The easy part was grabbing a list of posts with excerpts from our …

Learn how to create a custom CodePen block with a preview for Sanity Studio, inspired by Chris Coyier’s implementation for Wordpress’ Gutenberg editor.

I posted about parsing an RSS feed in JavaScript the other day. I also posted about my RSS setup talking about how Feedbin is at the heart of it. Dave discovered that Feedbin can also produce an RSS feed for all your likes. Likes is a feature of Feedbin, and fortunately also NetNewsWire, which syncs …

It’s been over a year since the big WordPress launch of Gutenberg, the new editor. It seems to me most of the controversy around it has died down. There has been enough time that the UX and accessibility of it have improved, and people are seeing the potential a lot more clearly. There ain’t no …

A big checklist of things you could/should be doing to make your website the best it can be. 80% of which is a good idea for any website, not just a WordPress website. I’m linking to it because I like how plain language it is, and because it’s a good example of how giving something …

The problem: you click a jump link like <a href=”#header-3″>Jump</a> which links to something like <h3 id=”header-3″>Header</h3>. That’s totally fine, until you have a position: fixed; header at the top of the page obscuring the header you’re trying to link to! Fixed headers have a nasty habit of hiding the element you’re trying to link …

Here’s a heartwarming post from Stephanie Stimac on her experience teaching kids the very basics of web development: … the response from that class of high school students delighted me and grounded me in a way I haven’t experienced before. What I view as a simple code was absolute magic to them. And for all …

Erik Kennedy wrote up a bunch of design advice for designing for the iPhone. Like Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, only illustrated and readable, says Erik. This is mostly for native iOS apps kinda stuff, but it makes me wonder how much of this is expected when doing a mobile Progressive Web App. On one hand, …

Every once in a while I’m motivated to attempt to draw some shapes with <path>, the all-powerful drawing syntax of SVG. I only understand a fragment of what it all can do, but I know enough to be dangerous. All the straight-line syntax commands (like L) are pretty straightforward and I find the curved Q …

The developer’s debugging console has been available in one form or another in web browsers for many years. Starting out as a means for errors to be reported to the developer, its capabilities have increased in many ways; such as automatically logging information like network requests, network responses, security errors or warnings. There is also …

The advantages of using SVGs in web development are well known. SVGs are small in size, can be made quite accessible, are scalable while maintaining their quality, and can be animated. Still, there is a learning curve. Things, like the syntax of SVG, can be a little tricky and having to hand-alter SVG code sometimes …

Are you looking for a tech job where you clock in, or for a career where you’ll be seen? Seen by Indeed is a matching service for software engineers, product managers and other tech pros that sorts through thousands of companies — like Twilio, Overstock, VRBO, and PayPal — and matches tech talent like you to …

There are special superset number characters that are sometimes perfect for footnotes. Here they are: ¹ ² ³ ⁴ ⁵ ⁶ ⁷ ⁸ ⁹ I generally prefer to superscript the number myself, like: