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Meltem Demirors on Government Digital Currencies and Why ‘The Halvening’ Gets Weird
24.12.2019
Why the narrative of 2019 was the emergencies of Central Bank Digital Currencies and why the halvening won’t go as people expect
MARKETS DAILY: Weird News Out of Canada and a Predicted Bull Run
16.12.2019
Blockchain goes to court in China and we get expert predictions for 2020. It's CoinDesk's Markets Daily
Motion Paths – Past, Present and Future
6.12.2019
Cassie Evans has a great intro to motion paths. That is, being able to animate an element along a path. Not just up/down/left/right, but whatever curvy/wiggly/weird path you want.
It's an interesting subject because there are so many different technologies helping to do it over time. SMIL...
Techniques for Rendering Text with WebGL
6.12.2019
As is the rule in WebGL, anything that seems like it should be simple is actually quite complicated. Drawing lines, debugging shaders, text rendering… they are all damn hard to do well in WebGL.
Isn’t that weird? WebGL doesn't have a built-in function for rendering text. Although text seems like...
The Best Cocktail in Town
18.11.2019
I admit I've held in a lot of pent-up frustration about the direction web development has taken the past few years. There is the complexity. It requires a steep learning curve. It focuses more on more configuration than it does development.
That's not exactly great news for folks like me...
Oh Hey, Padding Percentage is Based on the Parent Element’s Width
13.11.2019
I learned something about percentage-based (%) padding today that I had totally wrong in my head! I always thought that percentage padding was based on the element itself. So if an element is 1,000 pixels wide with padding-top: 50%, that padding is 500 pixels. It's weird having top padding based...
A Super Weird CSS Bug That Affects Text Selection
12.11.2019
You know how you can style (to some degree) selected text with ::selection? Well, Jeff Starr uncovered a heck of a weird CSS bug.
If you:
Leave that selector empty
Link it from an external stylesheet (rather than <style> block)
Selecting text will have no style at all....
(Why) Some HTML is “optional”
16.9.2019
Remy Sharp digs into the history of the web and describes why the <p> tag doesn’t need to be closed like this:
<p>Paragraphs don’t need to be closed
<p>Pretty weird, huh?
Remy writes:
Pre-DOM, pre-browsers, the world's first browser was being written by Sir...
Some HTML is “Optional”
11.9.2019
There is a variety of HTML that you can just leave out of the source HTML and it's still valid markup.
Doesn't this look weird?
<p>Paragraph one.
<p>Paragraph two.
<p>Paragraph three.
It does to me, but the closing </p> tags are optional. The browser will detect...
Working with Attributes on DOM Elements
30.8.2019
The DOM is just a little weird about some things, and the way you deal with attributes is no exception. There are a number of ways to deal with the attributes on elements. By attributes, I mean things like the id in <div id="cool"></div>. Sometimes you need to set them. Sometimes...
How much specificity do @rules have, like @keyframes and @media?
31.7.2019
I got this question the other day. My first thought is: weird question! Specificity is about selectors, and at-rules are not selectors, so... irrelevant?
To prove that, we can use the same selector inside and outside of an at-rule and see if it seems to affect specificity.
body {
background:...
Position Sticky and Table Headers
13.7.2019
You can't position: sticky; a <thead>. Nor a <tr>. But you can sticky a <th>, which means you can make sticky headers inside a regular ol' <table>. This is tricky stuff, because if you didn't know this weird quirk, it would be hard to blame you. It makes way more...
Drawing Realistic Clouds with SVG and CSS
13.6.2019
Greek mythology tells the story of Zeus creating the cloud nymph, Nephele. Like other Greek myths, this tale gets pretty bizarre and X-rated. Here’s a very abridged, polite version.
Nephele, we are told, was created by Zeus in the image of his own beautiful wife. A mortal meets Nephele, falls...
Everything You Need to Know About Date in JavaScript
11.6.2019
Date is weird in JavaScript. It gets on our nerves so much that we reach for libraries (like Date-fns and Moment) the moment (ha!) we need to work with date and time.
But we don't always need to use libraries. Date can actually be quite simple if you know what to watch out for. In this article...
Naming things to improve accessibility
2.5.2019
I like the this wrap-up statement from Hidde de Vries:
In modern browsers, our markup becomes an accessibility tree that ultimately informs what our interface looks like to assistive technologies. It doesn’t matter as much whether you’ve written this markup:
in a .html file
in Twig, Handlebars...
Blobs!
21.2.2019
I was recently a guest editor for an issue of Bizarro Devs. It's a great newsletter! Go sign up! I put in a bunch of links around blobs. Like those weird squishy random shapes that are so "in" right now. Here are those links as well. I'm always a fan of publishing stuff I write ;)
Blobs! Blobs...
More Like position: tricky;
4.2.2019
I rather like position: sticky;. It has practical use cases. I think of things like keeping a table of contents in a sidebar of a long article, but as a fairly simple implementation and without risk of overlapping things in awkward ways. But Elad Shechter is right here: it's not used that much...
Git Checkout at Previous Timeframe
9.1.2019
In the past I’ve blogged about checking out branches created on a specific date as well as sorting git branches by date, but one frequent usage of git and dates is checking out a commit at a given time in the past. For example, I often say “Weird, this feature was working a month...
Stuff you can do with CSS pointer events
27.7.2018
Martijn Cuppens (the same fella with the very weird div!) has some more irresistible CSS trickery. Three of the examples are about making a child element trigger an event on a parent element (almost like the magic that is :focus-within).
Here's how I reasoned it out to myself:
You know how if...
Collective #436
26.7.2018
Page Lifecycle API * Keyframes * Rockstar * Terminalizer * Malvid * Callback Exercises * DOM-wait * Pure CSS Stack * Weird things variable fonts can do
Collective #436 was written by Pedro Botelho and published on Codrops