Articles by

Chris Coyier

There are two opposing views on using non-polyfillable new web features that I find are both equally common in our industry:

1. Websites don't need to look the same in every browser. The concept of progressive enhancement helps with that. There are tools, even native language features, that help with this.
2. If browser support isn't where I want it to be, it's just exotic eye candy for demos and not to be used.

I'm not sure I'd say either one of these is more or less correct than the other.

(more…)

When you're putting together a build process for a site, it's so dang useful to look at other people's processes. I ran across Andrew Welch's "An Annotated webpack 4 Config for Frontend Web Development" the other day and was glad he blogged it. If I was kicking off a new site where I wanted a webpack build, then I'd almost certainly reference something like this rather than start from scratch. At the same time, it made me realize how build processes all have such different needs and how unique those needs are now from even a few years ago in the hay day of Grunt and Gulp build processes.

(more…)

Here are two ways to build a site (abstractly) that feel diametrically opposed to me:

1. Build a site as an SPA (Single Page App). The page loads a skeleton HTML page that executes JavaScript as quickly as it can. The JavaScript calls an API to get data, and then the page renders content. Navigation of the site is more API calls to get the data it needs and re-rendering.
2. Build a site as statically-generated. A build process runs in which the entire site is built out as static HTML files with all the content baked into them. JavaScript isn't required at all for the site to work.

That feels just about as different as can be. But weirdly, they kinda aren't:

1. They are both JAMstack. They can be hosted statically as neither of them needs backend languages running on the server they are hosted on.
2. They are both building content based on an API of data. It's more obvious in the first one, but you can think of a static site generator as hitting an API of data as it runs and builds itself. It's just that the API might be temporarily created from content files it finds on disk. Or it might be the exact same API used for the former site.

That's all.

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 is a fun series on Flutter over on the Bendworks blog in addition to a post we published earlier this year.) The idea being you get super high performance ,thanks to the framework, and you've theoretically built one app that runs both on the web and natively. I don't know of any real success stories I can point to, but it does seem like an awesome possibility.

Nicolas Gallagher has been a strong proponent of React Native for the web.

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% longer, so explicitly defining the width is technically faster for performance reason — but that is about the equivalent of not using punctuation in sentences because it saves HTML weight.

(more…)

Flickr announced not long ago that they are limiting free accounts to 1,000 photos. I don't particularly mind that (because it seems like sound business sense), although it is a bit sad that a ton of photos will be nuked from the internet. I imagine the Internet Archive will swoop in and get most of it. And oh hey, the Twitter account @FlickrJubilee is showcasing Flickr users that could really use a gifted pro account so their amazing photos are not lost, if you're feeling generous and want to contribute.

This change doesn't affect pro accounts. I've been pro forever on Flickr, so my photos were never at risk, but the big change has me thinking it's about time to spin down Flickr for myself. I've been keeping all my photos on iCloud/Photos for years now anyway so it seems kind redundant to keep Flickr around.

I went into the Flickr settings and exported all my photos, got a bunch of gigabytes of exported photos, and loaded them into Photos. Sadly, the exported photos have zero metadata, so there will forever be this obnoxious chunk of thousands upon thousands of photos in my Photos collection that all look like they were taken on the same day and with no location.

Anyway, that was way too long of an intro to say: I found a bunch of old website screenshots! Not a ton, but it looks like I used Flickr to store a handful of web designs I found interesting in some way a number of years back. What's interesting today is how dated they look when they were created not that long ago. Shows how fast things change.

Here they are.

(more…)

The way JavaScript works is we can do scripts as an inline block:

<script>
  let foo = "bar";
</script>

Or, if the script should be fetched from the network...

<script src="/js/global.js"></script>

With CSS, we can do an inline block of styles:

<style>
  .foo { color: red; }
</style>

So why not <style src=""></style>? Instead, we have <link href=""/>.

(more…)

I think it's kinda cool to see Google dropping repos of interesting web components. It demonstrates the possibilities of cool new web features and allows them to ship them in a way that's compatible with entirely web standards.

Here's one: <two-up>

I wanted to give it a try, so I linked up their example two-up-min.js script in a Pen and used the element by itself to see how it works. They expose the component's styling with custom properties, which I'd say is a darn nice use case for those.

See the Pen <two-up&rt; by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.