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CSS Can Influence Screenreaders
23.3.2020
Ben Myers covers some clear examples of where CSS totally changes what some screen readers announce. For example, some screenreader will see text-transform: uppercase; on a button label that says "Add" and read it like an abbreviation, "A.D.D."
These cases of CSS messing with our screenreader...
Client-Side Image Editing on Mobile
20.3.2020
Michael Scharnagl:
Ever wanted to easily convert an image to a grayscale image on your phone? I do sometimes, and that's why I build a demo using the Web Share Target API to achieve exactly that.
For this I used the Service Worker way to handle the data. Once the data is received on the client,...
15 Things to Improve Your Website Accessibility
17.3.2020
This is a really great list from Bruce. There is a lot of directly actionable stuff here. Send it around to your team and make it something that you all go through together.
Here's a little one that prodded me to finally fix...
Most screen readers allow the user to quickly see a list of links...
CSS X
17.3.2020
My name appears in an article from Bert Bos (co-author of the original CSS spec), so I'll consider that a life accomplishment. Berts makes the point that CSS has evolved and the working group versions things, but the working group hasn't been and doesn't really plan to be involved in these...
Using the HTML title attribute
15.3.2020
Steve Faulkner:
User groups not well served by use of the title attribute
• Mobile phone users.• Keyboard only users.• Screen magnifier users.• Screen reader users.• Users with fine motor skill impairments.• Users with cognitive impairments.
Sounds like in 2020, the only useful thing the title...
“weeds of specificity”
13.3.2020
Lara Schenck:
[...] with WordPress child themes, you are all but guaranteed to get into the weeds of specificity, hunting around theme stylesheets that you didn’t author, trying to figure out what existing declaration is preventing you from applying a new style, and then figuring out the least...
A Guide to Handling Browser Events
13.3.2020
In this post, Sarah Chima walks us through how we can work with browser events, such as clicking, using JavaScript. There’s a ton of great info in here! If JavaScript isn’t your strong suit, I think this is the best explanation of event handling that I’ve read in quite some time.
When an event...
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
12.3.2020
Brent Jackson says CSS utility libraries failed somewhat:
Eventually, you'll need to add one-off styles that just aren't covered by the library you're using, and there isn't always a clear way to extend what you're working with. Without a clear way to handle things like this, developers tend...
Block Links Are a Pain (and Maybe Just a Bad Idea)
10.3.2020
As we noted in our complete guide, you can put an <a href=""> link around whatever chunks of HTML you like. Let's call that a "block link." Like you are wanting to link up an entire "Card" of content because it makes a big clickable target.
<a href="/article/"<!-- display: block;...
Negative Margins
9.3.2020
PPK digs into the subject, which he found woefully undercovered in web tech documentation. Our entry doesn't mention them at all, which I'll aim to fix.
Agree on this situation:
This is by far the most common use case for negative margins. You give a container a padding so that its contents have...
Use a:visited in your CSS stylesheet
9.3.2020
Evert Pot:
Unfortunately, when setting a new color (e.g. a { color: #44F }) the ‘purple visited link’ feature also gets disabled. I think this is a shame, as there’s so many instances where you’re going through a list of links and want to see what you’ve seen before.
The 2 examples I ran into...
Bitcoin History: When DDoS Attacks Made BTC’s Price Drop
7.3.2020
As anyone who has read the Bitcoin History series (or lived through the period in question) will know, the Bitcointalk forum was the crucible of debate in the early days. What’s less known is that – to quote one poster – “DDoSing this forum coincided with dumps on the then...
The 3 Laws of Serverless
6.3.2020
Burke Holland thinks that to "build applications without thinking about servers" is a pretty good way to describe serverless, but...
Nobody really thinks about servers when they are writing their code. I mean, I doubt any developer has ever thrown up their hands and said “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait...
JavaScript Libraries Are Almost Never Updated Once Installed
5.3.2020
Some commentary from Zack Bloom on the Cloudflare Blog, looking at requests to CDNJS for versions of jQuery.
What we don’t see is a decline in our old versions which come close to the volume of growth of new versions when they’re released. In fact the release of 3.4.1, as popular as it quickly...
What React Does (and Doesn’t Do)
5.3.2020
With a name as big as React, it's bound to cause some Stream-Crossing Confusion, as I like to call it. How do you center a <div> in React? Dave Ceddia:
React cares exactly zero about styling. Think of it as generating the barebones HTML. React will put elements on the page, but everything...
How I think about solving problems
4.3.2020
Nicholas C. Zakas:
Eventually, I settled on a list of questions I would ask myself for each problem as it arose. I found that asking these questions, in order, helped me make the best decision possible:
1) Is this really a problem?2) Does the problem need to be solved?3) Does the problem need...
When CSS Blocks
28.2.2020
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...
Inspiring high school students with HTML and CSS
21.2.2020
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...
monica.css
20.2.2020
Monica Dinculescu:
I don’t want every possible padding and margin and colour and flexbox configuration in the world. I just want the ones that I know I end up using in every project. So here is monica.css: my very own CSS framework, which I copy paste at the beginning of every CSS file and take...
Centering a div That Maintains Aspect-Ratio When There’s Body Margin
18.2.2020
Andrew Welch had a little CSS challenge the other day to make an ordinary div:
• centered vertically + horizontally• scales to fit the viewport w/ a margin around it• maintains an arbitrary aspect ratio• No JS
There's a video in that tweet if it helps you visualize the challenge. I saw Paul...