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Innovating on Web Monetization: Coil and Firefox Reality
23.4.2020
I still think Coil is cool. I have it installed on CSS-Tricks as a publisher and money trickles in. I have a paid account and I trickle out money to other sites that use it. I wrote about all that last year.
This’ll explode to something huge if we actually get the Web Monetization API stuff....
Some Typography Links
3.4.2020
I just can’t stop bookmarking great links related to typography. I’m afraid I’m going to have to subject you, yet again, to a bunch of them all grouped up. So those of you that care about web type stuff, enjoy.
I know there are lots of good reasons to be excited about variable...
RSS Stuff
31.3.2020
Laura Kalbag wrote How to read RSS in 2020. This would be a nice place to send someone curious about RSS: what it is, what it’s for, and how you can start using it as a reader. I like this callout, too:
Sometimes the content is just an excerpt, encouraging you to read the rest of the content...
Emergency Website Kit
27.3.2020
Here’s an outstanding idea from Max Böck. He’s created a boilerplate project for building websites that fit within a single HTTP request. This is extremely important for websites that contain critical information for public safety. As Max writes:
In cases of emergency, many organizations need...
Maintaining Performance
27.3.2020
Real talk from Dave:
I, Dave Rupert, a person who cares about web performance, a person who reads web performance blogs, a person who spends lots of hours trying to keep up on best practices, a person who co-hosts a weekly podcast about making websites and speak with web performance professionals…...
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...
Geoff’s Redesign Posts
9.3.2020
I love it when people redesign "in the open" and write about it. I'd just like to shout out to our own Geoff who has been doing this for 3 months now. He started in late December last year. He's been sharing stuff like his dev tooling choices, considering performance, considering accessibility...
Animating CSS Width and Height Without the Squish Effect
6.3.2020
The first rule of animating on the web: don't animate width and height. It forces the browser to recalculate a bunch of stuff and it's slow (or "expensive" as they say). If you can get away with it, animating any transform property is faster (and "cheaper").
Butttt, transform can be tricky. Check...
Vue.js: The Documentary
3.3.2020
Hey how cool! A documentary about Vue! Good timing as it looks like VueConf is happening right now. (Reminder we have a site for conferences to tell you stuff like that).
Sarah appears in it (about 21:13) and talks about CSS-Tricks for a second, so we're officially super famous now and I have...
iOS 13 Design Guidelines, Templates, and Downloads
21.2.2020
Erik Kennedy wrote up a bunch of design advice for designing for the iPhone. Like Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, only illustrated and readable, says Erik.
This is mostly for native iOS apps kinda stuff, but it makes me wonder how much of this is expected when doing a mobile Progressive...
Animate SVG Path Changes in CSS
20.2.2020
Every once in a while I'm motivated to attempt to draw some shapes with <path>, the all-powerful drawing syntax of SVG. I only understand a fragment of what it all can do, but I know enough to be dangerous. All the straight-line syntax commands (like L) are pretty straightforward and I find...
Solving Sticky Hover States with @media (hover: hover)
18.2.2020
Mezo Istvan does a good job of covering the problem and a solution to it in a blog post on Medium¹.
If you tap on something that has a :hover state but you don't leave the page then, on a mobile device, there is a chance that :hover state "sticks." You'll see this with stuff like jump-links used...
Listen to your web pages
16.2.2020
A clever idea from Tom Hicks combining MutationObserver (which can "observe" changes to elements like when their attributes, text, or children change) and the Web Audio API for creating sounds. Plop this code into the console on a page where you'd like to listen to essentially any DOM change...
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...
Searching the Jamstack
22.1.2020
Here's Raymon Camden on adding site search functionality to a site that is statically hosted. A classic trick! Just shoot 'em to Google and scope the results to your site:
<form action="https://www.google.com/search" method="get"<input type="search" name="q"...
Getting Started with Front End Testing
20.1.2020
Amy Kapernick covers four types of testing that front-end devs could and should be doing:
Linting (There's ESLint for JavaScript and Stylelint or Prettier for CSS.)
Accessibility Testing (Amy recommends pa11y, and we've covered Axe.)
Visual Regression Testing (Amy recommends Backstop, and we've...
The Modern Lovers
20.1.2020
I love stuff like this.
The Modern Lovers, a rock band in the 70's, play a show in Boston, probably having some poster of their own for the show.
Mike Joyce is inspired by the music and combines his love of it with the design style of Swiss Modernism to create a new poster for it.
Pete Barr...
A Scandal in Bohemia
13.1.2020
I love that Paravel is so busy doing so much cool stuff they literally just forgot that they built this and are just now releasing it.
It's a Sherlock Holmes story, but designed to be more interesting and immersive (even audio!) than just words-on-a-screen.
Direct Link to Article —...
Why do we have different programming languages?
13.1.2020
"But why do I have to learn Python?" She wailed, "I like Scratch!"
"I know," I said, "But there are different programming languages for different sorts of tasks."
"That's stupid" she said
I can empathize with the little girl in Terence Eden's story. In high school, I got super into Turbo Pascal....
Things you can do with a browser in 2020
10.1.2020
I edit a good amount of technical articles about the web, and there is a tendency for authors to be super broad in their opening sentence, like "What we're able to do on the web has expanded greatly over the years."
I tend to remove stuff like that because it usually doesn't serve the article well...