Articles by

Chris Coyier

Paraphrased question from email:

I just read your article Responsive Images: If you’re just changing resolutions, use srcset. In the age of "responsive websites," srcset does not help in certain situations. For example, I have a popular products slider. On mobile, I have one image per slide where the images are 320px wide. On desktop, I have six images per slide where each is 160px wide. So the desktop images are smaller on desktop, not bigger.

How do I handle this situation with srcset?

I tried to be careful with that post title: "If you’re just changing resolutions, use srcset." In this case, we're changing the size of the images not just at certain resolutions, but at specific breakpoints as well, which means we're also going to need to use the sizes attribute to get the most out of responsive images. The entire job of the sizes attribute is to tell the browser what size the image will be shown at, as per our CSS.

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I've recorded a decent number of videos lately, most of which are pairing with someone and digging into a topic as I glean as much information as I can! Several of these are sponsored, in that they are a part of an advertising package. Hopefully, you know me well enough that I don't work with companies I don't like or that sell something I don't think you'd be good buying, but hey, heads up.

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The path to becoming a front-end developer, as looked back upon by anyone who self-identifies that way, is likely a very windy one full of thorn bushes and band websites. Still, documenting a path, even if it's straighter and far cleaner than reality, is an interesting exercise and might just be valuable. Three different writer/developers have taken a crack at it this year and their results have been extraordinarily popular. Let's take a look.

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I remember seeing this Tom Dale tweet a while back. It's literally about the browser's ability to look at the HTML of the document you're looking at as it first arrived. Now the tweet is stirring up a new round of conversation.

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I tend to think of variable fonts as a font format in which a single font file is capable of displaying type at near-infinite variations of things like boldness, width, and slantyness. In my experience, that's a common use case. Just check out many of the interactive demos over at Axis-Praxis:

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I enjoyed Bruce Lawson's talk on this holiest of wars. It's funny and lighthearted while being well researched and fairly portraying the good arguments on both sides.

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You clever dog. You've rooted it out! It turns out when you build things with serverless technology you're still using servers. Pardon the patronizing tone there, I've seen one-too-many hot takes at this point where someone points this fact out and trots away triumphantly.

And yes, because serverless still involves servers, the term might be a bit disingenuous to some. You could be forgiven for thinking that serverless meant technologies like web workers, which use the client to do things you might have otherwise done on a server and is where the term serverless was headed. Alas, it is not.

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