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A little bit of plain Javascript can do a lot
8.7.2020
Julia Evans:
I decided to implement almost all of the UI by just adding & removing CSS classes, and using CSS transitions if I want to animate a transition.
An awful lot of the JavaScript on sites (that aren’t otherwise entirely constructed from JavaScript) is click the thing...
Displaying the Current Step with CSS Counters
8.7.2020
Say you have five buttons. Each button is a step. If you click on the fourth button, you’re on step 4 of 5, and you want to display that.
This kind of counting and displaying could be hard-coded, but that’s no fun. JavaScript could do this job as well. But CSS? Hmmmm. Can it? CSS...
A/B Testing Instant.Page With Netlify and Speedcurve
5.6.2020
Instant.Page does one special thing to make sites faster: it preloads the next page when it’s pretty sure you’re going to click a link (either by hovering over 65ms or mousedown on desktop, or touchstart on mobile), so when you do complete the click (probably a few hundred milliseconds...
Jetpack Scan
2.6.2020
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 malicious and lets you know, or literally fixes it for you with your one-click approval.
This kind of security scanning is very important to...
CSS Tips for New Devs
27.5.2020
Amber Wilson has some CSS Tips for New Devs, like:
It’s not a good idea to fix shortcomings in your HTML with CSS. Fix your HTML first!
And…
You can change CSS right in your browser’s DevTools (to open them, right-click the browser window and choose “inspect”...
prerender.js
9.5.2020
This is another player in the game of rendering the page of the link that you’re about to click on before you click it. It’s like getting a decent performance boost for extremely little effort.
Instant.page is another one, and I’ve been sufficiently convinced by its methodology...
Click Once, Select All; Click Again, Select Normally
29.4.2020
A bonafide CSS trick from Will Boyd!
Force all the content of an element to be selected when clicked with user-select: all;
If you click a second time, let the user select just parts of the text as normal.
Second click? Well, it’s a trick. You’re really using a time-delayed...
Static or Not?
27.4.2020
A quick opinion piece by Kev Quirk: Why I Don’t Use A Static Site Generator. Kev uses WordPress:
Want to blog on my iPad? I can. Want to do it on my phone? No problem. On a machine I don’t normally use? Not an issue, as long as it has a browser.
First, it’s worth understanding...
Rethinking Code Comments
2.4.2020
Justin Duke asks if treating code comments like footnotes could help us understand the code in a file better. In his mockup, all the comments are hidden by default and require a click to reveal:
What a neat idea! Justin’s design reminds me of the way that Instapaper treated inline...
How to build a bad design system
31.3.2020
I didn’t realize this until it was far too late, but one of the biggest mistakes that’s made on a design systems team is a common mismanagement issue: there are too many people in a meeting and they have too many dang opinions.
Is there a conversation about the color of your buttons that’s taking...
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...
Stop Using “Dropdown”
16.3.2020
Adrian Roselli notes that it might actually mean:
A <select> menu
An ARIA Listbox, Combobox, Menu, or Disclosure Widget
An input with a <datalist>
An input with autocomplete
A <details><summary> block
An accordion
Flyout navigation
In my own usage, I tend to mean...
Animated Matryoshka Dolls in CSS
27.2.2020
Here’s a fun one. How might we create a set of those cool Matryoshka dolls where they nest inside one another... but in CSS?
I toyed with this idea in my head for a little while. Then, I saw a tweet from CSS-Tricks and the article image had the dolls. I took that as a sign! It was time to...
Fixed Headers and Jump Links? The Solution is scroll-margin-top
21.2.2020
The problem: you click a jump link like <a href="#header-3">Jump</a> which links to something like <h3 id="header-3">Header</h3>. That's totally fine, until you have a position: fixed; header at the top of the page obscuring the header you're trying to link to!
Fixed...
Creating a Details Element That Opens But Never Closes
15.2.2020
The <details> and <summary> elements in HTML are useful for making content toggles for bits of text. By default, you see the <summary> element with a toggle triangle (▶︎) next to it. Click that to expand the rest of the text inside the <details> element.
But...
Torus Launches to Bring One-Click Login to Web 3.0
13.2.2020
Torus, a key-management startup offering one-click logins for the decentralized web, launched out of beta Thursday with a handful of big-name hosting partners
Apollo GraphQL without JavaScript
29.1.2020
It's cool to see progressive enhancement being done even while using the fanciest of the fancy front-end technologies.
This is a button in a JSX React component that has a click handler applied directly to it that fires a data mutation Ajax request through Apollo GraphQL. That is about the least...
Playwright
24.1.2020
So Microsoft launches a Node-based browser automation project called Playwright. It allows you to spin up a headless version of a browser and control it. Go here! Click something! Take a screenshot! That kind of stuff. Particularly useful for testing.
It's just like Google's Puppeteer, only...
Why every website wants you to accept its cookies
6.1.2020
I'm probably in the minority on this, but I've never ever built one of those "This site uses cookies, here's some kind of explanation of why, and please click this OK button to accept that" bars that feels like they are on half of the internet.
Emily Stewart:
Most of us just tediously click “yes”...
Mainstream Media’s Hit Piece on Hitmen Fails Miserably
28.12.2019
Mainstream media is probably one of the worst mediums for factual information because it’s typically filled with ignorance and propaganda. When it comes to cryptocurrencies, darknet markets, and encryption, conventional news outlets publish hit pieces that are beyond absurd. On December...