Chris Coyier

This article was originally published on February 2, 2009 and is now being updated to clarify the concept and update the information for modern browsers.

RGBa is a way to declare a color in CSS that includes alpha transparency support. It looks like this:

div {
   background: rgba(200, 54, 54, 0.5); 
}

This allows us to fill areas with transparent color; the first thee numbers representing the color in RGB values and the fourth representing a transparency value between 0 … Read article

You can flip images with CSS! Possible scenario: having only one graphic for an "arrow", but flipping it around to point in different directions.

.flip-horizontally {
  transform: scaleX(-1);
}

See how one arrow is used to point both directions here:

See the Pen
Flip an Image by CSS-Tricks (@css-tricks)
on CodePen.

Rotation is another possibility, meaning our one arrow could go lots of directions:

See the Pen
Flip an Image by CSS-Tricks (@css-tricks)
on CodePen… Read article

Tonight is the next-to-last episode ever of LOST. I've been a fan since the start, watching the released seasons several times with different friends over the years. Even powering through the Season 3 slump =). Just for fun, Richard and I chucked together a little one page app we've called We Love LOST.

… Read article

The bloginfo() function in WordPress gives you access to lots of useful information about your site. See the complete list. To access all these values from inside Page/Post content itself, we can make a shortcode to return the values. Add this to your functions.php file in your theme:

function digwp_bloginfo_shortcode( $atts ) {
   extract(shortcode_atts(array(
       'key' => '',
   ), $atts));
   return get_bloginfo($key);
}
add_shortcode('bloginfo', 'digwp_bloginfo_shortcode');

Now you can output any of the values by calling that shortcode with "key". For … Read article

One of the articles I updated during "May is Maintenance Month" was an article about dynamic content. The idea was a simple website where clicking a link would fade out the existing content and fade in new content that it fetched via AJAX. The old article didn't encompass what I now consider to be best practices for this kind of thing. 1) Works fine with JavaScript disabled. 2) It is possible to "deep link" to specific content. 3) The browsers … Read article

I had the occasion come up recently where I needed to animate something in a circle. It never occurred to me until then that there wasn't an obvious solution to this already with jQuery. So I figured out a way, and made a plugin out of it.

This unicorn can fly friggin backwards with this plugin.

View Demo   Download Files… Read article

If you are having trouble with something while building a webpage, the most helpful thing you can possibly do is start building a reduced test case. "Trouble" could be anything: the CSS isn't doing what you think it should, the JavaScript isn't behaving right, there are cross-browser issues, etc. In the process of creating a reduced test case, you will either:

• Find out it was a mistake you made, help you isolate it, and fix it (or have a great

… Read article

This article was originally published on August 11, 2008. I am updating it now to fix some inaccuracies in how this concept was presented.

I've never specifically covered this subject before. (rimshot!)

The best way to explain it is to start with an example of where specificity gets confusing and perhaps doesn't behave like you would expect. Then we'll take a closer look at how to calculate the actual specificity value to determine which selector takes precedence.… Read article

This article is an update to this old article, which had an ugly demo and a variety of techniques in it no longer probably considered good practices. This new demo is much cleaner, up to date, and fuller featured. Because the old article was a bit of a different scope, I'll leave it alone, just refer to this one. Update January 2013: There are better practices now, detailed here.

Let's say you wanted to make a website where … Read article