May
16
2012
“Which CSS preprocessor language should I choose?” is a hot topic lately. I’ve been asked in person several times and an online debate has been popping up every few days it seems. It’s nice that the conversation has largely turned from whether or not preprocessing is a good idea to which one language is best. Let’s do this thing.
Really short answer: SASS
Slightly longer answer: SASS is better on a whole bunch of different fronts, but if you are …
May
11
2012
There are a bunch of techniques going around for dealing with responsive images lately. That is, solutions to help us serve the right image for the occasion (e.g. size of screen and bandwidth available). They all do things a bit differently. To keep track, Christopher Schmitt and I have created this spreadsheet of techniques.
The spreadsheet has the data, but let’s digest it through thinking about it through the lens of practical questions.…
May
7
2012
I recently heard Chris Eppstein give a talk (slides) about creating better stylesheets and using SASS to do it. There were a couple of surprising bits in there, one of which was about “opt-in typography.” The idea was that instead of setting global styles for typographic elements like p, ul, ol, h1, h2, etc that you would instead apply those styles as a class, perhaps .text. …
May
3
2012
Most address fields on web forms ask for city, state, and zip code (or city and post code, outside of the US). But as us nerds often lament, city and state are redundant with zip code. Or at least they can be inferred from a correctly entered zip code. That’s the kind of thing computers are good at. What we need is a proper API to cough up that information for us on demand. …
Apr
30
2012
CSS3 has some new values for sizing things relative to the current viewport size: vw, vh, and vmin. It is relevant to bring up now, because it’s shipping in Chrome 20 (canary at the time of this writing). And not behind a flag, it just works. Production usage isn’t quite there, but it will be soon enough.…
