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Computed Values: More Than Meets the Eye
5.8.2020
Browser DevTools are indispensable for us front end developers. In this article, we’ll take a look at the Computed tab, a small corner of the DevTools panel that shows us big things, like how relative CSS values are resolved. We’ll also see how inheritance fits into the browser’s...
Dark Ages of the Web
30.7.2020
A very fun jaunt through the early days of front-end web development. They are open to pull requests, so submit one if you’re into this kind of fun chronicling of our weird history!
That CSS3 Button generator really hits home. 😬
Direct Link to Article — Permalink… Read...
Reactive jQuery for Spaghetti-fied Legacy Codebases (or When You Can’t Have Nice Things)
22.7.2020
I can hear you crying out now: “Why on Earth would you want to use jQuery when there are much better tools available? Madness! What sort of maniac are you?” These are reasonable questions, and I’ll answer them with a little bit of context.
In my current job, I am responsible for the care...
Introducing Headless WordPress with Gatsby Cloud (Live Preview, Incremental Builds, and more!)
13.7.2020
The Gatsby team shipped an update to its source plugin for WordPress, graduating it to a beta release. The new version brings a new set of features to Gatsby’s headless WordPress configuration, which brings together WPGraphQL and WPGatsby to power a Gatsby front-end that pulls in data from...
Stay DRY Using axios for API Requests
18.6.2020
HTTP requests are a crucial part of any web application that’s communicating with a back-end server. The front end needs some data, so it asks for it via a network HTTP request (or Ajax, as it tends to be called), and the server returns an answer. Almost every website these days does this in some...
Advice for Complex CSS Illustrations
17.6.2020
If you were to ask me what question I hear most about front-end development, I’d say it’s“How do I get better at CSS?” And that question usually comes up to some CSS illustration I made, which is something I love to do over on CodePen.
To many, CSS is this mythical beast that can’t...
Web Engine Diversity and Ecosystem Health
16.6.2020
As front-end developers, our job is working with browsers. Knowing how many we have and the health of them is always of great interest. As far as numbers go, we have fewer recently than we have in the past. It’s only this month that Edge is starting to auto-update browsers to the Chromium...
Increment Issue 13: Frontend
30.5.2020
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 always stuff about making websites in general, this issue is the first focused on front-end¹ development.
I’ve got...
Let’s Take a Deep Dive Into the CSS Contain Property
8.5.2020
Compared to the past, modern browsers have become really efficient at rendering the tangled web of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code a typical webpage provides. It takes a mere milliseconds to render the code we give it into something people can use.
What could we, as front-end developers, do...
“The title ‘Front-End Developer’ is obsolete.”
24.4.2020
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’ literally means the browser, and while the job has been changing quite a lot — and is perhaps fracturing before our eyes — the fact that...
Drupal to Jamstack
21.4.2020
I’ve been harping for a while that Jamstack doesn’t necessarily mean throwing away your old CMS. In fact, I’d argue that Jamstack is at it’s most powerful when paired with a system that you already know, are comfortable with, and perhaps even like. You’d call that...
The Contrast Triangle
21.4.2020
Chip Cullen:
Let’s say you’re building a site, and you’re working with a designer. They come to you with some solid designs, and you’re ready to go. You’re also a conscientious front end developer and you like to make sure the sites you build are accessible. The designs you’re working from have...
Front-End Challenges
17.4.2020
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 websites you make can help yourself or anyone else you care about, then that’s also great. In lieu of that, you can also make things...
CSS Findings From The New Facebook Design
7.4.2020
Ahmad Shadeed digs around the new Facebook’s front-end code.
One that stood out to me:
.element {
inset: 4px 0;
/* Which is equivalent to: top: 4px, bottom: 4px, left: 0, right: 0 */
}
Whaaat? This is the first I’ve heard of the inset property. Ahmad said he saw it working...
An Annotated Docker Config for Front-End Web Development
2.4.2020
Andrew Welch sings the praises of using Docker containers for local dev environments:
Here are the advantages of Docker for me:
• Each application has exactly the environment it needs to run, including specific versions of any of the plumbing needed to get it to work (PHP, MySQL...
Considerations When Choosing Fonts for a Multilingual Website
10.3.2020
As a front-end developer working for clients all over the world, I've always struggled to deal with multilingual websites — especially cases where both right-to-left (RTL) and left-to-right (LTR) are used. That said, I’ve learned a few things along the...
Same HTML, Different CSS
19.2.2020
Ahmad Shadeed covers the idea of a card component that has a fixed set of semantic HTML with some BEMy classes on it. There is a title, author, image, and tags. Then he redesigns the card into five totally different designs without touching any of the HTML just the CSS.
If this is an ah-ha moment...
2020 Stack
13.2.2020
In an article with the most clickbaity article ever, Joe Honton does a nice job of talking about the evolving landscape of web development. "Full-stack" perhaps had its day as a useful term, but since front-end development touches so many parts of the stack now, it's not a particularly useful term....
Getting Acquainted With Svelte, the New Framework on the Block
6.2.2020
For the last six years, Vue, Angular, and React have run the world of front-end component frameworks. Google and Facebook have their own sponsored frameworks, but they might leave a bitter taste for anyone who advocates for an open and unbiased web. Vue is another popular framework that...
Freezing User-Agent Strings
3.2.2020
There's been news about Chrome freezing their User-Agent string (and all other major browsers are on board). That means they'll still have a User-Agent (UA) string (that comes across in headers and is available in JavaScript as navigator.userAgent. By freezing it, it will be less useful over time...