Article Archives

“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 …

Mat Marquis keeping us up to date on the responsive images hot drama. Good reminder at the end about not picking sides. …

With ol’ Mean Gene Crawford! We talk about crazy clients, responsive images, health, and all kinds of other shoptalk. Thanks to Mijingo for sponsoring this episode.…

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 …

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 …

Another RAPIDFIRE show where Dave and I answer as many listener questions as we possibly can. …

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 …

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 …

Dave and I were joined by Ian Stewart, a Theme Wrangler at Automattic for WordPress.com (he’s probably thinking about WordPress themes right this very minute). We talked about WordPress multisite, training clients in WordPress, database syncing, team productivity, and more.…

Jeremy Keith has a great article on his journey to allowing JavaScript to load in content based on the currently active media query. This allows you to keep media queries only in the CSS (DRY!).

The article was sans-demo, so …

If you’ve ever used CSS transitions on structural elements on your page, you may have noticed a case where you see that transition happen when the page loads and is laying itself out.

Quick video of the issue I was …

Dave and I were joined by Happy Cog front enders Jenn Lukas and Allison Wagner and we talk about coding styles, memorization, and the classic “what should we learn next?” This episode was sponsored by the online time tracking tool …

A series of inline-block elements with “normal” HTML formatting result in spaces between them when set on the same line. Here’s some techniques for fighting against the gap.

You probably already know you can make triangles with CSS. But what if you want to put a shadow behind it? Unfortunately the classic border trick doesn’t change the shape of the element, it’s just a visual trick. Let’s …

One little known feature of HTML5 is Scoped CSS. It’s an attribute for style blocks that may change the way we tackle certain styling challenges in the future.

Eugene Fedorenko talks about how Beanstalk refactored the whole app to use SASS. I’m sure a lot of folks are in this situation right now. You want to use SASS, but you have a big app and it’s a big …

Between now and the end of May 2012, code a small project using a language or environment that’s new to you or that you’ve only casually messed around with.…

The main trouble with the existing fancy methods for serving images responsively is manually generating the images and syntax needed to utilize it. Keir Whitaker show us how to use WordPress to handle all that hard stuff for us. …

Soak in a little An Event Apart without leaving your house. Dan Cederholm (you know, the other banjo playing CSS guy) with an hour talk on responsible and enhancement-based CSS3 use.…

Another RAPIDFIRE episode this week loaded with all Q&A. If you like the guest episodes, don’t worry, we have plenty coming up.…

It’s been about a year, so I redesigned and updated all the support information here. Added Android. Lots more green, but we’re still quite a ways off from using features like validation without fallbacks.…

The :target pseudo selector in CSS is both pretty cool and pretty limited in what it can do. In this article we discuss some things it can be helpful with, its limitations, and some work arounds.

Rapidfire show! No guest, no news, not hot drama, just all question on answer action.…

There are three ways we can go about dealing with responsive <img>s : 1) a new format 2) a new syntax 3) rely on existing hacks.

There are many such roundups. This one is mine.

Speaking of bandwidth media queries, this project by Adam D. Bradley looks promising:

Foresight.js gives webpages the ability to tell if the user’s device is capable of viewing high-resolution images (such as the 3rd generation iPad) before the image …

This week Dave and I are joined by Dave’s co-workers and amigo’s Trent Walton and Reagan Ray. We talk about cutting edge front end stuff, client services, topics for a graduate thesis, and more. Brought to you by LessMoney and …

If you feel like you have a decent understanding of JavaScript, what was your “Ah ha!” moment? Or are you still waiting for it?

They don’t exist. But wouldn’t that be nice?

Take for instance the markup being discussed for the
element:

<picture alt="A giant stone face at The Bayon temple in Angkor Thom, Cambodia">

<!-- Alternative if media …

Summer edition!

March 31 : BarCamp Harrisburg (Pennsylvania)
April 7 : MinneBar (Minneapolis, Minnesota)
April 14 : BarCamp Orlando (Florida)
April 26-27 : Front-Trends (Warsaw, Poland)
April 30-May 4 : Future Insights Live (Las Vegas, Nevada)
June 6-7 : Interlink…

In fluid width environments, the text that wraps around floated elements can get awkwardly narrow and trap bits of text orphaned away from the rest of the paragraph. This article explains that problem in more details and offers a few solutions.

This week Dave and I were joined by Jina Bolton. We talked all kinds of shop, touching on SASS usage and the new upcoming website, semantics, learning, workflow, and more. This weeks show brought to you by LessMoney and Hover…

A super hot responsive web design pattern by Jason Weaver. Don’t forget about the ol x-axis while designing for small screens. (via Paul Irish)…

I got to be on The East Wing podcast with Tim Smith.…

In which we interdigitate content in a responsive layout rather than just “push it to the bottom.”

All the popular ones are in there as options, as well as an “other” option in case you use something else (please share in comments). Or, vote “never tried,” “don’t like any of ‘em,” and “no preference” accordingly.

Clever idea by Joel Besada on using instant transition timing with really long transition delays (999999s) to maintain visual states in CSS. …

In this last poll, we asked:

In the next 10 years, will there be a serious alternative to CSS?

Of over 9,000 votes so far, the majority are of the opinion that there will not be:

Of course, it’s …

Good read from Nicolas Gallagher. Among the gems:

Class names cannot be “unsemantic”. Whatever names are being used: they have meaning, they have purpose.

When Twitter Bootstrap first came out, I rewrote the compiled CSS to better reflect how I …

Dave and I talk shop with Doug Neiner, whom I consider one of the smartest people I know. Doug is on the jQuery team and works for a company based around jQuery, so the topic of JavaScript comes up a …

Polyfill hero Scott Jehl has a new one for the theoretical <picture> element. The idea behind this new element is to solve the very real need to serve images of the appropriate size based on the browser window size. I’m …

One bizarre trend emerging in this new RWD era is desktop-browsing web designers resizing their browsers to watch the break-points change the layout. The average user never sits at their desk repetitively shrinking and expanding the browser window like a mad scientist. Yup, we’re all strange.

Just gonna clear up a little thing here that I’ve seen people struggle with a few times. There are two different kinds of conditional comments for Internet Explorer that have slightly different syntaxes: Downlevel Hidden and Downlevel Revealed (microsoft …

Dave and I were joined by Ethan Marcotte and I bet you can guess what we talked about. That’s right ShopTalkers, it’s a full episode of responsive web design goodness, from the basics to the newer challenges developers are facing …

I love Allan and Steve from LessEverything. I was just recently at my third trip to LessConf, which is a really fun web startup oriented conference. The fellas are at it again already, throwing a new conference called LessMoney. From …

Here’s the rub: when you load JavaScript from a third party you should do it asynchronously. You might want to load your own scripts asynchronously too, but for this article let’s focus on third parties.

There are two reasons for …

I joined the gentlemen from the new blog and podcast The Industry for a chat about loads of different web industry related stuff.…

Remember those three fellas from the last ShopTalk Show? Those guys are from the new(ish) podcast The Non-Breaking Space Show. Dave and I join them in this episode to talk about preprocessors, Git, and other stuff.…

I’m headed down to Austin in a few days here for my 2nd SXSW. Hope to see some of you folks there. I’m trying not too have much of a plan, but here’s a few things I’m doing:

There is …

This week Dave and I were joined by Christopher Schmitt, Chris Enns, and Dave McFarland, the fellas behind The Non-Breaking Space Show to do our second Cross-Over show. Brought to you by Hover and LessMoney.…