Chris Coyier

There are loads of analytics platforms to help you track visitor and usage data on your sites. Perhaps most notably Google Analytics, which is widely used (including on this site), probably due to it's ease of integration, feature-richness, and the fact that it's free (until you need to jump up to the enterprise tier which is some crazy six-figure jump).

I don't take any particular issue with Google Analytics. In fact I quite like it, especially as I've learned … Read article

With the wonderful world of JAMstack getting big, all the categories of services and tools that help it along are as important as ever. There are static site generators, headless CMSs, and static file hosts.

I think those classifications are handy, and help conversations along. But there is a point where nuance is necessary and these classification buckets get a little leaky. … Read article

There is an HTML attribute that does exactly what you think it should do:

<div>I'm visible</div>
<div hidden>I'm hidden</div>

It even has great browser support. Is it useful? Uhm. Maybe. Not really. … Read article

There are all these sites out there that want to help you with your images. They do things like optimize your images and help you serve them performantly.

That's a very good thing. By any metric, images are a major slice of the resources on websites, and we're notoriously bad at optimizing them and doing all the things we could to lower the performance hit from them. So you use some service to help you deliver images better. Smart. Many of them will make managing and optimizing images a lot easier. But I don't consider them a no-brainer. There is a lot to think about, like making choices that don't paint you into a corner.

At a recent conference talk (sorry, I forget which one), there was a quick example of poor web performance in the form of a third-party widget. The example showed a site that installed the widget in order to add a "email us" button fixed to the bottom right of the viewport. Not even a live-chat widget — just an email thing. It weighed in at something like 470KB, which is straight bananas.

Just in case you are someone who feels … Read article

Say you have page that has a bunch of transitions and animations on all sorts of elements. Some of them get triggered when the window is resized because they have to do with size of the page or position or padding or something. It doesn't really matter what it is, the fact that the transition or animation runs may contribute to a feeling of jankiness as you resize the window. If those transitions or animations don't deliver any benefit in … Read article

It was this: <tt></tt>

I say "was" because it's deprecated. It may still "work" (like everybody's favorite <marquee></marquee> in some browsers), but it could stop working anytime, they say. The whole purpose of it was to display text in a monospace font, like the way Teletype machines used to.

Dave used it jokingly the other day.… Read article

Third-party cookies are set on your computer from domains other than the one that you're actually on right now. For example, if I log into css-tricks.com, I'll get a cookie from css-tricks.com that handles my authentication. But css-tricks.com might also load an image from some other site. A common tactic in online advertising is to render a "tracking pixel" image (well named, right?) that is used to track advertising impressions. That request to another site for the image (say, ad.doubleclick.com) … Read article

Container queries are always on the top of the list of requested improvements to CSS. The general sentiment is that if we had container queries, we wouldn't write as many global media queries based on page size. That's because we're actually trying to control a more scoped container, and the only reason we use media queries for that now is because it's the best tool we have in CSS. I absolutely believe that. … Read article