November 30th, the official "Blue Beanie Day," has come and gone. I'm not sure I ever grokked the exact spirit of it, but I've written about what it means to me. Last year:
… Read articleWeb standards, as an overall idea, has entirely taken hold and won the day. That's worth celebrating, as the web would be kind of a joke without them. So now, our job is to uphold them. We need to cry foul when we see a
I think Adam's first prediction is his boldest, even beyond his Hail Mary prediction. CSS grid is awesome and gap is perhaps one of its best qualities, but gap superseding spacing things out in other ways (e.g. margin) is a bold prediction indeed, especially with Firefox being the only browser supporting it in flexbox.… Read article
Interesting idea for a "chat room" from Postlight:
- Create a Yap chat room.
- Invite others to join and talk.
- Share a URL of just about anything.
- Everyone gathering can comment on what you’ve shared.
- If you think your conversation deserves an audience, share the URL of your chat publicly.
- Only six people can join. Lots of people can observe if you invite them. But just six chatters.
A standard copy-and-paste YouTube embed lands on your page as an <iframe></iframe> which loads a big ol' pile of other stuff to play that video. But the UX of it is still essentially an image and a play button. Click the play button and the video plays. You can build essentially the same thing with an anchor link wrapping an image!
Not long ago, we covered a very clever "lazy load" technique doing exactly this from Arthur Corenzan that was … Read article
I don't see image sprites used that much anymore, but it's still a good technique for reducing downloaded decorative image assets when you have multiple on a page. The big idea is combining all the graphics into one and then shifting around the size and background-position to reveal one at a time.
Say you're site needs dozens or hundreds of country flags — that's a perfect opportunity for a sprite. Michael P. Cohen has built a generator site to help … Read article
Seemingly out of the blue, the Gulp processing I had set up for this site started to have a race condition. I'd run my watch command, change some CSS, and the processing would sometimes leave behind some extra files that were meant to be cleaned up during the processing. Like the cleanup tasks happened before the files landed in the file system (or something... I never really got to the bottom of it).
Nevermind about the specifics of that bug. … Read article
We just covered The Current State of Styling Selects in 2019, but we didn't get nearly as far and fancy as Julie Grundy gets here. There is a decent chunk of JavaScript that powers it, so I'm still very much eyeballing browsers' recent interest in giving us more powerful selects in (presumably) just HTML and CSS.
I tossed a fork on CodePen in case you just wanna see the final result.
See the Pen
Custom Select Input by … Read article
Facebook actually hides 'dummy' DOM nodes between the 'Sponsored' text. These values are entirely random characters, with a random number of DOM nodes between them. Invisible characters. At this point our CSS ad blocker is completely broken. There is no way for us to possibly code every possible value in CSS.
We've covered this before when Mike Pan noted it. Looks like it's evolved a bit since then, getting even a little tricker.
I just opened my … Read article
Brad has a long history in music outside of being a web designer, and draws some interesting parallels. One is that he had reached for more complex music in an effort to become a better musician — and developers can do the same thing. The other is that the composition of music can be seen from very large parts down to very tiny parts, just like atomic design.
I have two go-to connections between music and web design … Read article
Cassie Evans has a great intro to motion paths. That is, being able to animate an element along a path. Not just up/down/left/right, but whatever curvy/wiggly/weird path you want.
It's an interesting subject because there are so many different technologies helping to do it over time. SMIL, JavaScript-powered animation libraries, native JavaScript APIs, and even CSS via offset-path and friends. I think offset-path is funny - it was changed to that name from motion-path as you don't technically have… Read article