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For some reason, I’ve lately been thinking a lot about what it takes to break into the web design industry and learn CSS. I reckon it has something to do with Keith Grant’s post earlier this month on a CSS mental model where he talks about a “common core for CSS”:

We need common core tricks like this for CSS. Not “tricks” in the old sense (like how to fake a gradient border), but mental patterns: ways to frame the

Let’s say there is a divide happening in front-end development. I feel it, but it's not just in my bones. Based on an awful lot of written developer sentiment, interviews Dave Rupert and I have done on ShopTalk, and in-person discussion, it’s, as they say... a thing.

The divide is between people who self-identify as a (or have the job title of) front-end developer, yet have divergent skill sets.

On one side, an army of developers whose interests, … Read article

Product teams from AirBnb and New York Times to Shopify and Artsy (among many others) are converging on a new set of best practices and technologies for building the web apps that their businesses depend on. This trend reflects core principles and solve underlying problems that we may share, so it is worth digging deeper.… Read article

I use Notion quite a bit, both personally and professionally.

In a sense, it's just an app for keeping documents in one place: little notes, to-do lists, basic spreadsheets, etc. I like the native macOS Notes app just fine. It's quick and easy, it's desktop and mobile, it syncs... but there are enough limitations that I wanted something better. Plus, I wanted something team-based and web-friendly (shared URLs!) and Notion hits those nails on the head.

Here's a bunch … Read article

We rolled out a new site design on January 1! This is the 17th version of CSS-Tricks if you can believe that. The versions tend to evolve a decent amount beyond the initial launch, but we archive screenshots on this design history page. Like I said in our 2018 thank you post:

This is easily the most time, effort, and money that's gone into a redesign since the big v10 design. There are a lot of aesthetic changes,

Tim Kadlec on the issues surrounding poor web performance and why it’s so important for us to care about making our sites as fast as possible:

Poor performance can, and does, lead to exclusion. This point is extremely well documented by now, but warrants repeating. Sites that use an excess of resources, whether on the network or on the device, don’t just cause slow experiences, but can leave entire groups of people out.

There is a growing gap between what

This confused me for a bit here so I'm writing it out while it's fresh in mind. Just because you're using a web component doesn't mean the styles of it are entirely isolated. You might have content within a web component that is styled normally along with the rest of your website. … Read article

As a young nerd, I loved to immerse myself in digital worlds, learning the ins and outs of the rules someone else had created for me (intentionally or not). But the older and crankier I get, the more I find myself losing patience when navigating these "delightful" experiences.

This fascination was great for my eventual career as a designer, but unfortunately, it was also like teaching someone kerning—once you learn how to quantify a bad user experience, you can’t … Read article

Last year, the team here at CSS-Tricks compiled a list of our favorite posts, trends, topics, and resources from around the world of front-end development. We had a blast doing it and found it to be a nice recap of the industry as we saw it over the course of the year. Well, we're doing it again this year!

With that, here's everything that Sarah, Robin, Chris and I saw and enjoyed over the past year.… Read article

I really enjoyed this post by Dan Abramov. He defines his work as a UI engineer and I especially like what he writes about his learning experience:

My biggest learning breakthroughs weren’t about a particular technology. Rather, I learned the most when I struggled to solve a particular UI problem. Sometimes, I would later discover libraries or patterns that helped me. In other cases, I’d come up with my own solutions (both good and bad ones).

It’s this combination of

We're in the future now so, of course, we're working on ways to speed up the web with fancy new tactics above and beyond the typical make-pages-slimmer-and-cached-like-crazy techniques.

One tactic, from years ago, was InstantClick:

Before visitors click on a link, they hover over that link. Between these two events, 200 ms to 300 ms usually pass by (test yourself here). InstantClick makes use of that time to preload the page, so that the page is already there when

You know how some sites and web apps have that neat native feel when transitioning between two pages or views? Sarah Drasner has shown some good examples and even a Vue library to boot.

These animations are the type of features that can turn a good user experience into a great one. But to achieve this in a React stack, it is necessary to couple crucial parts in your application: the routing logic and the animation tooling.

Let’s start with … Read article

Lots from Divya with the setup:

There are 2 kinds of problems that can arise when using webfonts; Flash of invisible text (FOIT) and Flash of Unstyled Text (FOUT) ... If we were to compare them, FOUT is of course the lesser of the two evils

If you wanna fight FOIT, the easiest tool is the font-display CSS property. I like the optional value because I generally dislike the look of fonts swapping.… Read article

The font-display descriptor in @font-face blocks is really great. It goes a long way, all by itself, for improving the perceived performance of web font loading. Loading web fonts is tricky stuff and having a tool like this that works as well as it does is a big deal for the web.

It's such a big deal that Google's own Pagespeed Insights / Lighthouse will ding you for not using it. A cruel irony, as their own Google Fonts (easily … Read article

It's all too easy to go crazy with the imports and end up with megabytes upon megabytes of JavaScript. It can be a problem as that weight burdens each and every visitor from our site, very possibly delaying or stopping them from doing what they came to do on the site. Bad for them, worse for you.

There is all sorts of ways to keep an eye on it.… Read article

Nicolas Gallagher:

At Twitter I used the approach described here to publish the company’s SVG icon library in several different formats: optimized SVGs, plain JavaScript modules, React DOM components, and React Native components.

There is no One True Way^© to make an SVG icon system. The only thing that SVG icon systems have in common is that, somehow, some way, SVG is used to show that icon. I gotta find some time to write up a post that goes … Read article

I admit I'm quite intrigued by frameworks that allow you write apps in web frameworks because they do magic to make them into native apps for you. There are loads of players here. You've got NativeScript, Cordova, PhoneGap, Tabris, React Native, and Flutter. For deskop apps, we've got Electron.

What's interesting now is to see what's important to these frameworks by honing in on their focus. Hummingbird is Flutter for the web. (There … Read article

Working with data in React is relatively easy because React is designed to handle data as state. The hassle begins when the amount of data you need to consume becomes massive. For example, say you have to handle a dataset which is between 500-1,000 records. This can result in massive loads and lead performance problems. Well, we’re going to look at how we can make use of virtualized lists in React to seamlessly render a long list of data in … Read article

There is a sentiment that leaving math calculations in your CSS is a good idea that I agree with. This is for math that you could calculate at authoring time, but specifically chose not to. For instance, if you needed a 7-column float-based grid (don't ask), it's cleaner and more intuitive:

.col {
  /* groan */
  width: 14.2857142857%;

  /* oh, I get it */
  width: calc(100% / 7);
}

You could probably prove that the calc() takes the computer 0.0000001% … Read article

There’s an interesting distinction that Jeremy Keith defines between prototype code and production code in this post and I’ve been thinking about it all week:

...every so often, we use the materials of front-end development—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—to produce something that isn’t intended for production. I’m talking about prototyping.

What’s interesting is that—when it comes to prototyping—our usual front-end priorities can and should go out the window. The priority now is speed. If that means sacrificing semantics or performance, then