Jekyll doesn't do components? Liar!
I like the pushback from Katie Kodes here. I've said in the past that I don't think server-side languages haven't quite nailed "building in components" as
Building a Tennis Trivia App With Next.js and Netlify
Today we will be learning how to build a tennis trivia app using Next.js and Netlify. This technology stack has become my go-to on many projects. It allows
A Themeable React Data Grid With Great UX-Focused Features
KendoReact can save you boatloads of time because it offers pre-built componentry you can use in your app right away. They look nice, but more importantly,
The Options for Password Revealing Inputs
In HTML, there is a very clear input type for dealing with passwords:
Branching Strategies in Git
In this article I'm going to talk about branching strategies and different types of Git branches. I’m also going to introduce you to two common branching workflows: Git Flow and GitHub Flow.
Quickly Testing CSS Fallbacks
Dumb trick alert!
Animation Techniques for Adding and Removing Items From a Stack
Animating elements with CSS can either be quite easy or quite difficult depending on what you are trying to do. Changing the background color of a button when
ShopTalk Goes Video
Dave and I slapped up a little videos section of the ShopTalk website. Twelve so far! They are short-ish, between 10-20 minutes, each focused on one fairly
Links on React and JavaScript II
How To Use The Vite Build Tool with React — Vite is hot, in part, because it's based on esbuild and wickedly fast. It's from Evan You of Vue fame, but it's
Using the platform
I'm certainly not dogmatic about it, but I think if you can pull of a project with literally zero build process, it feels good while working on it and feels very good when you come back to it months/years later and can just pick up and go.
Working With Built-in GraphQL Directives
Directives are one of GraphQL’s best — and most unspoken — features.
Creating the Perfect Commit in Git
A commit can be something that helps us stay on top of things. It can be a container for related changes that belong to one and only one topic, and thereby make it easier for us to understand what happened. In this post, we’re talking about what it takes to produce the "perfect" commit.
Comparing HTML Preprocessor Features
Of the languages that browsers speak, I'd wager that the very first one that developers decided needed some additional processing was HTML. Every single CMS
The Self Provisioning Runtime
Big thoughts on where the industry is headed from Shawn Wang:
Our Learning Partner: Frontend Masters
Frontend Masters has been our learning partner for a couple of years now. I love it. If you need structured learning to up your web development skills,
What is Your Page Title on a Google Search Engine Results Page?
Whatever Google wants it to be. I always thought it was exactly what your <title> element was. Perhaps in lieu of that, what the first <h1> on the
Working With GraphQL Caching
If you’ve recently started working with GraphQL, or reviewed its pros and cons, you’ve no doubt heard things like “GraphQL doesn’t support caching” or
Learn How to Build True Edge Apps With Cloudflare Workers and Fauna
There is a lot of buzz around apps running on the edge instead of on a centralized server in web development. Running your app on the edge allows your code to
Container Units Should Be Pretty Handy
Container queries are going to solve this long-standing issue in web design where we want to make design choices based on the size of an element (the
Twitter's div Soup and Uglyfied CSS, Explained
When I came up in web development (2005-2010 were formative years for me), one of the first lessons I learned was to have a clean foundation of HTML. "What
How to Implement Logging in a Node.js Application With Pino-logger
Logging, on its own, is a key aspect of any application. Logging helps developers comprehend what it is that their code is doing. It also helps save
Proposal for CSS @when
CSS is on a tear lately. Again, I've heard of a brand new thing I've never seen before, and again it's via Miriam: CSS Conditionals.
An Event Apart Fall Summit 2021! (Use Coupon AEACSST21)
The web's premier conference is online this fall, October 11–13, 2021: An Event Apart Fall Summit. If you already know how good of a conference this is (i.e.
7 Practical Uses for the ::before and ::after Pseudo-Elements in CSS
CSS ::before and ::after pseudo-elements allow you to insert "content" before and after any non-replaced element (e.g. they work on a <div> but not
Exploring the CSS Paint API: Polygon Border
Nowadays, creating complex shapes is an easy task using clip-path, but adding a border to the shapes is always a pain. There is no robust CSS solution and we
Embracing Asymmetrical Design
I'll never forget one of Karen McGrane's great lessons to the world: truncation is not a content strategy. The idea is that just clipping off text
imba
It's not every day you see a new processor for building websites that reinvents the syntax for HTML and CSS and JavaScript. That's what imba is doing.
Designing Beautiful Shadows in CSS
My favorite kind of blog post is when someone takes a subject that I’ve spent all of five minutes considering and then says—no!—this is an enormous topic
Minding the "gap"
Read an updated article with an approach that uses modern CSS features.
Shadow Roots and Inheritance
There is a helluva gotcha with styling a <details> element, as documented here by Kitty Giraudel. It's obscure enough that you might never run into it,
Jamstack Conf 2021
What? Jamstack Conf! It's the best! Learn what's happening and what's next for this hot ecosystem.
Social Image Generator + Jetpack
I feel like my quest to make sure this site had pretty sweet (and automatically-generated) social media images (e.g. Open Graph) came to a close once I found
"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:
Fun Times Styling Checkbox States
We might leave a text input unstyled. We might leave a link unstyled. Even a button. But checkboxes… we don’t leave them alone. That’s why styling checkboxes
EyeDropper API Dropped
I had no idea this was coming but it's pretty neat! Chrome has shipped the EyeDropper API in v95 (Canary, as I write).
Frameworks Helping Image Usage
I recently blogged about how images are hard and it ended up being a big ol' checklist of things that you could/should think about and implement when placing
Improve Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) on Your Website With Ease
Optimizing the user experience you offer on your website is essential for the success of any online business. Google does use different user
Mars Theme: A Deep Look at Frontity’s Headless WordPress Theme
Frontity is a framework for creating de-coupled (or "headless") WordPress sites. In this article, we dive into the process of spinning up such a site, with a detailed overview of the building blocks provided by Frontity and its flagship theme, Mars.
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,
Can we have custom media queries, please?
Stefan Judis notes that there is a spec for custom media queries, but seemingly no momentum on it at the moment. That lack of movement is unfortunate, as it's
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
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
Some Typography Links VII
All-things-typography, from a hard-edged monospaced variable font to fonts in the "Twilight Zone" ... and much, much more.
Application-Specific Links
You know like https:? That's a URL Scheme. You're probably familiar with the concept, thanks to others that come up in front-end development, like mailto:.
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
Designing for the Unexpected
When I think about what front-end development really is and feels like, this is at the heart of it: designing around a huge set of unknowns, and really
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:
From a Single Repo, to Multi-Repos, to Monorepo, to Multi-Monorepo
I've been working on the same project for several years. Its initial version was a huge monolithic app containing thousands of files. It was poorly
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.
Cutouts
Ahmad Shadeed dug into shape "cutouts" the other day. Imagine a shape with another smaller shape carved out of it. In his typical comprehensive way, Ahmad
Building a Cool Front End Thing Generator
Whether you are just starting out on the front end, or you’ve been doing it for a long time, building a tool that can generate some cool front-end magic can
Stay alert
A few days ago, Chris wrote up his thoughts about how alert(), confirm(), and prompt() were being deprecated by Chrome and collected a bunch of thoughts from
Static vs. Dynamic vs. Jamstack: Where's The Line?
You'll often hear developers talking about “static” vs. “dynamic” sites, or you may have heard someone use the term Jamstack. What do these terms mean, and
Wanna see a whiter white?
Heck of a CSS trick here from Dongsung Kim.
Napkin
We took a surface level look at Pipedream the other day, which really does look cool. It's like a much more modern and fancy version of what Yahoo Pipes was.
WooCommerce With Apple Pay and Google Pay
Got a WooCommerce store? It behooves you to offer a variety of payment methods. Just anecdotally, I'm sure both you and me have been annoyed and even