Analyzing Notion app performance
Here’s a fantastic case study where Ivan Akulov looks at the rather popular writing app Notion and how the team might improve the performance in a variety of
The Best Design System Tool is Slack
There's a series of questions I’ve struggled with for as long as I can remember. The questions have to do with design systems work: Where should we document
A New Way to Delay Keyframes Animations
If you’ve ever wanted to add a pause between each iteration of your CSS @keyframes animation, you’ve probably been frustrated to find there’s no built-in way
Jetpack Scan
Fresh from the Jetpack team at Automattic, today, comes Jetpack Scan. Jetpack Scan scans all the files on your site looking for anything suspicious or
Overlapping Header with CSS Grid
Snook shows off a classic design with an oversized header up top, and a content area that is "pulled up" into that header area. My mind goes to the same place:
Rotated Table Column Headers… Now With Fewer Magic Numbers!
Rotated <table> column headers is something that’s been covered before right here on CSS-Tricks, so shout-out to that for getting me started and helping
Increment Issue 13: Frontend
Increment is a beautiful quarterly magazine (print and web) published by Stripe "about how teams build and operate software systems at scale". While there is
The Many Bad (and Good!) Patterns for Close Buttons
Manuel Matuzović details 10 bad HTML patterns for a close button. You know, stuff like this:
Get Programmatic Control of your Builds with Netlify Build Plugins
Today at Jamstack_Conf, Netlify announced Build Plugins. What it does is allow you to have particular hooks for events within your build, like when the build
HTML Responsive Images Guide
This guide is about the HTML syntax for responsive images (and a little bit of CSS for good measure). We'll go over srcset and , plus a whole bunch of things to consider to help you get the best performance and design control from your images.
Framer Web
The prototyping app Framer just launched the web version of their design tool and it looks pretty darn neat. I particularly love the design of the marketing
Block Links: The Search for a Perfect Solution
I was reading this article by Chris where he talks about block links — you know, like wrapping an entire card element inside an anchor — being a bad idea.
How to Convert a Date String into a Human-Readable Format
I'll be the first to admit that I'm writing this article, in part, because it's something I look up often and want to be able to find it next time. Formatting
The Fastest Google Fonts
When you use font-display: swap;, which Google Fonts does when you use the default &display=swap part of the URL , you're already saying, "I'm cool with
Let's Make One of Those Fancy Scrolling Animations Used on Apple Product Pages
Apple is well-known for the sleek animations on their product pages. For example, as you scroll down the page products may slide into view, MacBooks fold open
Radio Buttons Are Like Selects; Checkboxes Are Like Multiple Selects
I was reading Anna Kaley's "Listboxes vs. Dropdown Lists" post the other day. It's a fairly straightforward comparison between different UI implementations of
Using BugHerd to Track Visual Feedback on Websites
BugHerd is about collecting visual feedback for websites.
How to Build a Chrome Extension
I made a Chrome extension this weekend because I found I was doing the same task over and over and wanted to automate it. Plus, I’m a nerd living through a
WordPress Block Transforms
This has been the year of Gutenberg for us here at CSS-Tricks. In fact, that's a goal we set at the end of last year. We're much further along that I thought
User agents
Jeremy beating the classic drum:
Unprefixed `appearance `
It's interesting how third-parties are sometimes super involved in pushing browser things forward. One big story there was how Bloomberg hired Igalia to
First Steps into a Possible CSS Masonry Layout
It's not at the level of demand as, say, container queries, but being able to make "masonry" layouts in CSS has been a big ask for CSS developers for a long
Tackling Authentication With Vue Using RESTful APIs
Authentication (logging in!) is a crucial part of many websites. Let’s look at how to go about it on a site using Vue, in the same way it can be done with any
How to Tame Line Height in CSS
In CSS, line-height is probably one of the most misunderstood, yet commonly-used attributes. As designers and developers, when we think about line-height, we
CSS fix for 100vh in mobile WebKit
A surprisingly common response when asking people about things they'd fix about anything in CSS, is to improve the handling of viewport units.
Equal Width Columns in CSS Grid are Kinda Weird
Everything is flexible these days. If you write grid-template-columns: 200px 200px 200px;, sure, you'd have equal-width columns, but that's a rare day. What
Using CSS Masks to Create Jagged Edges
I was working on a project that had this neat jagged edge along the bottom of a banner image.
React Single File Components Are Here
Shawn Wang is talking about RedwoodJS here:
Why does writing matter in remote work?
Talk to anyone who has an active blog and I bet they'll tell you it's been valuable to them. Maybe it's opened doors. Maybe it's got them a job. Maybe it's
Accepting Payments (including Recurring Payments) on WordPress.com
I'm a fan of building websites with the least amount of technical debt and things you have to be responsible for as possible for what you wanna do. Sometimes
Dealing With Stale Props and States in React’s Functional Components
There’s one aspect of JavaScript that always has me pulling my hair: closures. I work with React a lot, and the overlap there is that they can sometimes be
How I Put the Scroll Percentage in the Browser Title Bar
Some nice trickery from Knut Melvær.
min(), max(), and clamp() are CSS magic!
Nice video from Kevin Powell. Here are some notes, thoughts, and stuff I learned while watching it. Right when they came out, I was mostly obsessed with
How to Create Custom WordPress Editor Blocks in 2020
Peter Tasker on creating blocks right now:
Static Hoisting
The other day in "Static or not?" I said:
Angular + Jamstack! (Free Webinar)
It's easy to think that working with Jamstack means working with some specific set of technologies. That's how it's traditionally been packaged for us. Think
List Style Recipes
Lists are a fundamental part of HTML! They are useful in things like blog posts for listing out steps, recipes for listing ingredients, or items in a
CSS Functions Guide
Like any other programming language, CSS has functions. They can be inserted where you’d place a value, or in some cases, accompanying another value declaration.
No-Comma Color Functions in CSS
There have been a couple of viral tweets about this lately, one from Adam Argyle and one from Mathias Bynes. This is a nice change that makes CSS a bit more
Playing With (Fake) Container Queries With watched-box & resizeasaurus
Heydon's <watched-box> is a damn fantastic tool. It's a custom element that essentially does container queries by way of class names that get added to
React Integration Testing: Greater Coverage, Fewer Tests
Integration tests are a natural fit for interactive websites, like ones you might build with React. They validate how a user interacts with your app without
CSS-Tricks Chronicle XXXVIII
Hey hey, these "chronicle" posts are little roundups of news that I haven't gotten a chance to link up yet. They are often things that I've done off-site,
How to Redirect a Search Form to a Site-Scoped Google Search
This is just a tiny little trick that might be helpful on a site where you don't have the time or desire to build out a really good on-site search solution.
Using Formik to Handle Forms in React
There is no doubt that web forms play an integral role in our web site or applications. By default, they provide a useful set of elements and features — from
Static or Not?
A quick opinion piece by Kev Quirk: Why I Don’t Use A Static Site Generator. Kev uses WordPress:
The Cost of Javascript Frameworks
I expect this post from Tim Kadlec to be quoted in every performance conference talk for the next few years. There is a lot of data here, so please check it
@property
The @property is totally new to me, but I see it's headed to Chrome, so I suppose it's good to know about!
How to Make a CSS-Only Carousel
Editor's Note: Chrome is prototyping a new feature for creating carousels directly in CSS, including scroll buttons and scroll markers for navigating between
Chrome + System Fonts Snafu
There was just a bug late last year where system fonts (at least on Mac, I don't know what the story was on other platforms) in Chrome appeared too thin and
“The title ‘Front-End Developer’ is obsolete.”
That title is from the opening tweet of a thread from Benjamin De Cock. I wouldn't go that far, myself. What I like about the term is that ‘Front-End’
Rethinking Twitter as a Serverless App
In a previous article, we showed how to build a GraphQL API with FaunaDB. We've also written a series of articles explaining how traditional databases built
My Visual Studio Code Setup: Extensions and Themes
Matthias Ott's posted his VS Code setup. I find lists like this (I rounded up some recent updates of my own) irresistible, probably because, like y'all, I
Building a Scalable CSS Architecture With BEM and Utility Classes
Maintaining a large-scale CSS project is hard. Over the years, we've witnessed different approaches aimed at easing the process of writing scalable CSS. In
How (some) good corporate engineering blogs are written
Interesting research from Dan Luu¹:
Better Form Inputs for Better Mobile User Experiences
Here’s one simple, practical way to make apps perform better on mobile devices: always configure HTML input fields with the correct type, inputmode, and
Pseudo-Randomly Adding Illustrations with CSS
Between each post of Eric Meyer’s blog there’s this rather lovely illustration that can randomly be one of these five options:
Front-End Challenges
My favorite way to level up as a front-end developer is to do the work. Literally just build websites. If you can do it for money, great, you should. If the
Jetpack Instant Search!
Jetpack has had a search feature for a while. Flip it on, and it replaces your built-in WordPress search (which is functional, but not particularly good) with
Styling in the Shadow DOM With CSS Shadow Parts
Safari 13.1 just shipped support for CSS Shadow Parts. That means the ::part() selector is now supported in Chrome, Edge, Opera, Safari, and Firefox. We’ll
No-Class CSS Frameworks
I linked up Water.css not long ago as an interesting sort of CSS framework. No classes. No <h2 class="is-title">. You just use semantic HTML and get