Minding the "gap"
Read an updated article with an approach that uses modern CSS features.
Superpack: Pushing the limits of compression in Facebook’s mobile apps
Managing app size at Facebook is a unique challenge: Every day, developers check in large volumes of code, and each line of code translates into additional bits in the apps that people ultimately download onto their phones. Left unchecked, this added code would make the app bigger and bigger until eventually the time it takes […]
Orchestrating Complexity With Web Animations API — Smashing Magazine
There are way too many options in Web Animations API to pick them up that easily. There’s no middle ground between simple transitions and complex animations. You’re either fine with what CSS Transitions and Animations provide or you suddenly need all the power you can get. Learning how timing works and how to control the playback of several animations at once makes for a solid foundation on which
"Just in Time" CSS
I believe acss.io is the first usage of "Atomic CSS" where the point of it is to be a compiler. You write CSS like this:
Native Rust support on Cloudflare Workers
Introducing the Cloudflare Workers Rust SDK: write your entire Worker in Rust, no JavaScript required.
The Story Behind TryShape, a Showcase for the CSS clip-path property
I love shapes, especially colorful ones! Shapes on websites are in the same category of helpfulness as background colors, images, banners, section separators,
Developer Decisions For Building Flexible Components — Smashing Magazine
Being able to look past the apparent simplicity, break down a component into its constituent parts, ask key questions, and even consider future uses, are all skills that will serve any developer well when building websites In this article, we’ll walk through the process of taking a seemingly simple design for a text-and-media component and deciding how best to translate it into code, keeping in mi
New Smashing Online Workshops on Front-End & UX — Smashing Magazine
What’s the state of HTML Email, Vue.js and Next.js? What are new, smart interface design patterns we could use? Let’s figure it out. With our brand new online workshops on front-end & design. Now with **free workshops** for you to test the waters.
Fire SVG animations (SMIL) when the SVG is visible
When requirements read "when visible" your brain should go straight to IntersectionObserver. That's exactly what Zach is doing here to kick off an animation
Behind the Scenes of Slack’s Acquisition Announcement
On July 21st, 2021, Slack officially became a part of Salesforce at the price tag of $27.7 billion. This was undoubtedly Slack’s most significant event in the past year. As a frontend intern on Slack’s Customer Acquisition team this summer, I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be directly involved with announcing the closing of one…
What’s New With DevTools: Cross-Browser Edition — Smashing Magazine
Learn what’s new with developer tools in Firefox, Edge, Chrome and Safari. Discover new and powerful features that will help you be more comfortable and productive when testing and debugging across browsers. With this article, Patrick Brosset tries to make you want to try them out, and maybe will help you get more comfortable next time you need to debug a browser-specific issue.
Early Days for CSS Scoping
There is a working draft spec for CSS scoping now. Other than a weird period where <style scoped> shipped and then was subsequently removed from the
A Deep Dive Into The Wonderful World Of SVG Displacement Filtering — Smashing Magazine
What exactly is a displacement filter? In this article, Dirk Weber will be diving into one of the most spectacular filter effects: the SVG feDisplacementMap filter primitive. In order to make it all easier to digest, Dirk has divided the article into three parts in which you’ll be exploring how the feDisplacementMap works, methods to create fancy displacement maps in SVG, and methods to animate th
An Interactive Guide to Keyframe Animations
CSS keyframe animations are incredibly flexible and powerful, but they’re also a bit weird. In this deep-dive tutorial, we'll learn how CSS keyframes work from the ground up, and see how to use them to build high-quality animations.
State Management In Next.js — Smashing Magazine
By combining some React APIs, we can accurately manage “simple” states. With Next.js though, we can quickly find situations where we need to accommodate many other requirements. This article is intended to be used as a primer for managing complex states in a Next.js app. These strategies should fit the vast majority of apps around with little to no adjustments. Let’s have a look at some patterns t
Exploring the CSS Paint API: Blob Animation
After the fragmentation effect, I am going to tackle another interesting animation: the blob! We all agree that such effect is hard to achieve with CSS, so we
Compound Components In React — Smashing Magazine
A compound component is one of the advanced patterns of React which makes use of an interesting way to communicate the relationship between UI components and share implicit state by leveraging an explicit parent-child relationship. In this article, Ichoku Chinoso will show you one of the advanced patterns of React which is the compound component pattern. It’s an awesome method to build reusable co
How I Made a Generator for SVG Loaders With Sass and SMIL Options
While learning Vue.js, I started building free web tools that involved the exploration of SVG, with the goal of learning something about both! Let’s take a
Architecting With Next.js
Free event hosted by Netlify coming up next week (Wednesday, August 25th): Architecting with Next.js. It's just a little half-day thing. No brainer.
Detecting Media Query Support in CSS and JavaScript
You can't just do @media (prefers-reduced-data: no-preference) alone because, as Kilian Valkhof says:
Native JavaScript Routing?
We can update the URL in JavaScript. We've got the APIs pushState and replaceState:
Data protection controls with Cloudflare Browser Isolation
Starting today, your team can use Cloudflare’s Browser Isolation service to protect sensitive data inside the web browser. Administrators can define Zero Trust policies to control who can copy, paste, and print data in any web based application.
Creating An Interactive Gantt Chart Component With Vanilla JavaScript (Part 1) — Smashing Magazine
In this article, we will code a Gantt chart as a reusable Web component. We will focus on the architecture of the component, rendering the calendar with CSS Grid and managing the state of the draggable tasks with JavaScript Proxy Objects.
Free Open-Source Icons — Smashing Magazine
Your project is on a tight budget? We’ve collected some wonderful, free icons and goodies that we’ve discovered lately and that are bound to give your design the finishing touch. We’ve also just recently covered [Figma plugins](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2021/08/figma-tools-plugins-resources/), [SVG generators](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2021/03/svg-generators/), [accessible front-end
HTML is Not a Programming Language?
HTML is not a programming language.
Tabs in HTML?
Brian Kardell shares a bit about the progress of bringing "Tabs" to HTML. We kinda think we know what they are, but you have to be really specific when dealing with specs and defining them. It's tricky.
Wanna see a whiter white?
Heck of a CSS trick here from Dongsung Kim.
Open-sourcing a more precise time appliance
Facebook engineers have built and open-sourced an Open Compute Time Appliance, an important component of the modern timing infrastructure. To make this possible, we came up with the Time Card — a PCI Express (PCIe) card that can turn almost any commodity server into a time appliance. With the help of the OCP community, we […]
New Smashing Workshops on Front-End & Design — Smashing Magazine
How do we build and establish a successful, bulletproof design system? What’s the state of HTML Email? And what are new, smart interface design patterns we could use? Let’s find out. With our [brand new online workshops](https://smashingconf.com/online-workshops/) on front-end & design — to help us all boost skills online.
View Source (on Mobile)
Have you ever wished you could see the HTML source of a web page while on a mobile browser, which generally doesn't offer that feature? If you have a desktop
CSS Nesting, specificity, and you
Here’s Kilian Valkhof on CSS nesting which isn't available in browsers yet, but will be soon. There are a few differences he notes between CSS nesting and
Exploring the CSS Paint API: Image Fragmentation Effect
In my previous article, I created a fragmentation effect using CSS mask and custom properties. It was a neat effect but it has one drawback: it uses a lot of
Choice Words about the Upcoming Deprecation of JavaScript Dialogs
It might be the very first thing a lot of people learn in JavaScript:
The World of CSS Transforms
The “transform” property is such a powerful part of the CSS language! In this blog post, we'll take a deep look at this property and see some of the nifty things it can do.
Introducing Deploy Hooks for Cloudflare Pages
Today, we are proud to announce a new way to connect your Pages application with your headless CMSs and databases: introducing Deploy Hooks for Pages.
Efficient Infinite Utility Helpers Using Inline CSS Custom Properties and calc()
I recently wrote a very basic Sass loop that outputs several padding and margin utility classes. Nothing fancy, really, just a Sass map with 11 spacing
How To Build Resilient JavaScript UIs — Smashing Magazine
Embracing the fragility of the web empowers us to build UIs capable of adapting to the functionality they can offer, whilst still providing value to users. The User Experience (UX) doesn’t need to be all or nothing — just what is usable. This premise, known as graceful degradation allows a system to continue working when parts of it are dysfunctional — much like an electric bike becomes a regular
Refactoring CSS: Strategy, Regression Testing And Maintenance (Part 2) — Smashing Magazine
After analyzing CSS and its weaknesses, and management giving a green light to the refactoring project, it’s time to get to work. A team needs to agree on the internal code standards and best practices, plan out the refactoring strategy, and outline individual tasks. We need to set up a visual regression testing suite, and a maintenance plan to enforce the new standards and best practices in the f
How To Build An E-Commerce Site With Angular 11, Commerce Layer And Paypal — Smashing Magazine
Having an e-commerce store is crucial for any store owner as more and more customers are turning to online shopping. In this article, Zara Cooper will cover how to build an e-commerce store using Angular 11. You shall use Commerce Layer as our headless e-commerce API. Although there may be tonnes of ways to process payments, she’ll demonstrate how to use just one, Paypal.
There Is No Such Thing As A CSS Absolute Unit — Smashing Magazine
What are absolute units? What are the differences between relative and absolute units, and how do we create accurate sizes on the web? It’s important to note that there are still significant differences between relative and absolute units. CSS relative units are sized according to other style definitions defined by parent elements or are affected by the size of a parent container. As for absolute
Using Absolute Value, Sign, Rounding and Modulo in CSS Today
For quite a while now, the CSS spec has included a lot of really useful mathematical functions, such as trigonometric functions (sin(), cos(), tan(), asin(),
Creating An Accessible Dialog From Scratch — Smashing Magazine
Dialogs are everywhere in modern interface design (for good or for bad), and yet many of them are not accessible to assistive technologies. In this post, Kitty Giraudel is going to write a small JavaScript library for authoring accessible dialogs from the very beginning. The goal is to understand what goes into it. She’s not going to deal with styling too much, just the JavaScript part.
CSS Logical Properties and Values
Now that cross-browser support is at a tipping point, it's a good time to take a look at logical properties and values. If you're creating a website in
Global vs. Local Styling In Next.js — Smashing Magazine
Next.js has strong opinions about how to organize JavaScript but not CSS. How can we develop patterns that encourage best CSS practices while also following the framework’s logic? The answer is surprisingly simple — to write well-structured CSS that balances global and local styling concerns. In this article, Alexander Dubovoy will build a website (a tea shop!) to demonstrate these patterns.
Slinkity
Perhaps the #1 reason I love Astro is that it brings the JavaScript component authoring experience to the Static Site Generator world with zero JavaScript
Gatsby Serverless Functions And The International Space Station — Smashing Magazine
Gatsby recently announced the launch of “functions”. In this article, Paul Scanlon explains how to get the current location of the International Space Station (ISS) as it orbits the Earth in real-time using [Gatsby Functions](https://www.gatsbyjs.com/docs/reference/functions/) and then display it on a 3D interactive globe using [React Three Fibre](https://github.com/pmndrs/react-three-fiber).
Color Tools And Resources — Smashing Magazine
Do you need a little inspiration boost? We’ve collected some useful color tools and resources that we’ve discovered lately — to help you get the most out of your creativity. We’ve also just recently covered [CSS auditing tools](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2021/03/css-auditing-tools/), [CSS generators](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2021/03/css-generators/), [accessible front-end components]
Some Typography Links VI
Glitter text — whO (I learned a name for people who go by a one-word moniker like that: Mononymous) created a builder for fancy SVG-based type. It's a custom
WordPress Admin Warnings in the Block Editor
We sent out an email the other week that ultimately had a <video> in the HTML markup. We send the newsletter by creating it here in the WordPress block
Of Course We Can Make a CSS-Only Clock That Tells the Current Time!
Let’s build a fully functioning and settable “analog” clock with CSS custom properties and the calc() function. Then we’ll convert it into a “digital” clock
Perspectives on React Native from Three Shopify Developers - Shopify
We hope that by sharing our experiences learning React Native, we can help soothe your anxieties and empower you to explore this exciting technology.
Three Insights I Gained While Researching Vue.js Accessibility — Smashing Magazine
Web app accessibility appears difficult because it seems that there is little information on the subject available online. Let’s take a closer look at the accessible use of framework features, concrete Vue.js traits, as well as community initiatives and vetted patterns.
How to Get a Pixel-Perfect, Linearly Scaled UI
Dynamically scaling CSS values based on the viewport width is hardly a new topic. You can find plenty of in-depth coverage right here on CSS-Tricks in
Build Complex CSS Transitions using Custom Properties and cubic-bezier()
I recently illustrated how we can achieve complex CSS animations using cubic-bezier() and how to do the same when it comes to CSS transitions. I was able to
How To Migrate From jQuery To Next.js — Smashing Magazine
There are many scenarios where we don’t need to follow the architecture that frameworks like React or Next.js impose on us, and that is OK. However, jQuery is a library that contains a lot of code and features that are not needed anymore. In this article, Facundo Giuliani will take a closer look at different approaches and strategies on how you can migrate a web application that uses jQuery framew
Adding support for cross-cluster associations to Rails 7
At GitHub, we recently added a new feature to Rails that will be available in 7.0: support for handling associations across database clusters.
A Look at Building with Astro
Astro is a brand new framework for building websites. To me, the big thing is that it allows you to build a site like you're using a JavaScript framework (and
The Web’s Worst Default
There are a lot of great defaults when it comes to browsers and the web. Think about all the accessibility features that are baked into HTML so that you don’t
Using HSL Colors In CSS — Smashing Magazine
HSL colors are very powerful when we use them the right way. They can save us time and effort and even help us to explore options for how to apply color to design. In this article, Ahmad Shadeed explains what HSL is, how to use it, and shares some of the useful use-cases and examples that you can use right away in your current projects.
When a Click is Not Just a Click
The click event is quite simple and easy to use; you listen for the event and run code when the event is fired. It works on just about every HTML element
