Comparing Various Ways to Hide Things in CSS

I still think the Google-devised Core Web Vitals are smart. When I first got into caring about performance, it was all: reduce requests! cache things! Make stuff smaller! And while those are all very related to web performance, they are abstractly related. Actual web performance to users are things like how long did I have to wait to see the content on the page? How long until I can actually interact with the page, like type in a form or … Read article “Core Web Vital Tooling”

I recently moderated a panel at Netlify’s virtual Jamstack Conf that included Netlify CEO Matt Biilman and Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg. The whole thing was built up — at least to some — as a “Jamstack vs. WordPress” showdown.

I have lots of thoughts of my own on this and think I’m more useful as a pundit than a moderator. This is one of my favorite conversations in tech right now! So allow me to blog.… Read article “WordPress and Jamstack”

CSS Shapes is a standard that lets us create geometric shapes over floated elements that cause the inline contents — usually text — around those elements to wrap along the specified shapes.

Such a shaped flow of text looks good in editorial designs or designs that work with text-heavy contents to add some visual relief from the chunks of text.… Read article “Creating CSS Shapes with Emoji”

My path to learning CSS was a little unorthodox. I didn’t start as a front-end developer. I was a Java developer. In fact, my earliest recollections of CSS were picking colors for things in Visual Studio.

It wasn’t until later that I got to tackle and find my love for the front end. And exploring CSS came later. When it did, it was around the time CSS3 was taking off. 3D and animation were the cool kids on the block. … Read article “CSS in 3D: Learning to Think in Cubes Instead of Boxes”

In back-end development, storage is a common part of the job. Application data is stored in databases, files in object storage, transient data in caches… there are seemingly endless possibilities for storing any sort of data. But data storage isn’t limited only to the back end. The front end (the browser) is equipped with many options to store data as well. We can boost our application performance, save user preferences, keep the application state across multiple sessions, or even different … Read article “A Primer on the Different Types of Browser Storage”

This is a neat little HTML preprocessor from Giuseppe Gurgone. It has very few features, but one of them is HTML includes, which is something I continue to be baffled that HTML doesn’t support natively. There are loads of ways to handle it. I think it’s silly that it’s been consistently needed for decades and HTML could evolve to support it but hasn’t. So anyway, enter another option for handling it.… Read article “xm”

The topical idea of “how to think like a front-end developer” began for me as a series of podcast interviews on ShopTalk Show. That was in preparation for a talk I was preparing (and gave) of the same name. That talk evolved into my essay The Great Divide, which evolved into the essay The Widening Responsibility for Front-End Developers. … Read article “How to Think Like a Front-End Developer”

A look at using HTML preprocessors to generate HTML, particularly deeply nested HTML, which is useful for a variety of interesting browser art and experimentation.