Articles

Over on Smashing, Adebiyi Adedotun Lukman covers all these styling methods. It’s in the context of Next.js, which is somewhat important as Next.js has some specific ways you work with these tools, is React and, thus, is a components-based architecture. But the styling methods talked about transcend Next.js, and can apply broadly to lots of websites.

Here are my hot takes on the whole table-of-contents of styling possibilities these days.… Read article “Comparing Styling Methods in 2020”

Many forms of assistive technology use keyboard navigation to understand and take action on screen content. One way of navigating is via the Tab key. You may already be familiar with this way of navigating if you use it to quickly jump from input to input on a form without having to reach for your mouse or trackpad.

Tab will jump to interactive elements in the order they show up in the DOM. This is one of the reasons why … Read article “Focus management and inert”

Always worth repeating: all interactive elements should have a focus style. That way, a keyboard user can tell when they have moved focus to that element.

But if you use :focus alone for this, it has a side effect that a lot of people don’t like. It means that when you click (with a mouse) on an interactive element, you’ll see the focus style. Arguably, you don’t need that feedback as a mouse user, because you just moved your cursor … Read article “The :focus-visible Trick”

Just the other day, Jeremy Keith wrote that problems with performance work isn’t only a matter of optimization and fixing code, but also tackling people problems:

It struck me that there’s a continuum of performance challenges. On one end of the continuum, you’ve got technical issues. These can be solved with technical solutions. On the other end of the continuum, you’ve got human issues. These can be solved with discussions, agreement, empathy, and conversations (often dreaded or awkward).

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We’ve covered techniques before for when you want a full-width element within a constrained-width column, like an edge-to-edge image within a narrower column of text. There are loads of techniques.

Perhaps my favorite is this little utility class:… Read article “Full Bleed”

Layoutit Grid is an interactive open source CSS Grid generator. It lets you draw your designs and see the code as you go. You can interact with the code, add or remove track lines and drag them around to change the sizing — and you get to see the CSS and HTML change in real time!… Read article “Layoutit Grid: Learning CSS Grid Visually With a Generator”

Before we delve into making a realistic motion blur in CSS, it’s worth doing a quick dive into what motion blur is, so we can have a better idea of what we’re trying to reproduce.

Have you ever taken a photo of something moving quickly, especially under low light, and it turned into a blurry streak? Or maybe the whole camera shook and the whole shot became a series of streaks? This is motion blur, and it’s a byproduct … Read article “How to Create a Realistic Motion Blur with CSS Transitions”

Authentication is one of the most challenging tasks for developers just starting with GraphQL. There are a lot of technical considerations, including what ORM would be easy to set up, how to generate secure tokens and hash passwords, and even what HTTP library to use and how to use it. 

In this article, we’ll focus on local authentication. It’s perhaps the most popular way of handling authentication in modern websites and does so by requesting the user’s email and password … Read article “Let’s Create Our Own Authentication API with Nodejs and GraphQL”