In 2020, I learned about the power of web development for organizations and nonprofits outside of tech. I learned that you can leverage your skills to affect change and build long-lasting partnerships. This year, I joined the Board of Directors of the League of Women Voters San Francisco (LWVSF), which, despite its name, welcomes people of all genders. This century-old organization has over 800 branches that span cities and states across the United States and the world. Before joining the …
The Web Performance Calendar just started up again this year. The first two posts so far are about, well, performance! First up, Rick Viscomi writes about the mythical “fast” web page:
How you approach measuring a web page’s performance can tell you whether it’s built for speed or whether it feels fast. We call them lab and field tools. Lab tools are the microscopes that inspect a page for all possible points of friction. Field tools are the binoculars
… Read article “Web Perform
Comment threads are one of those things that look really simple when executed right. When designing them yourself, you may find that they are rather deceptively simple. There is a lot that goes into designing nice and usable comment threads, and in this article, I will try my best to walk you through the steps to building a comment thread, that is great to look at, and a joy to use. What makes a good comment thread? Before diving into … Read article “Styling Comment Threads”
This is about a wildly specific combination of technologies — Eleventy, the static site generator, with pages with images on them that you ultimately want hosted by Cloudinary — but I just wanna document it as it sounds like a decent amount of people run into this situation. The deal:
Cloudinary has a fetch URL feature, meaning you don’t actually have to learn anything (nice!) to use their service. You have to have an account, but after that you
… Read article “Cloudinary
I had a unique requirement the other day: to build a layout with full-bleed elements while one element stays stuck to the top. This ended up being rather tricky to pull off so I’m documenting it here in case anyone needs to re-create this same effect. Part of the trickiness was dealing with logical positioning on small screens as well. It’s tough to describe the effect, so I recorded my screen to show what I mean. Pay special attention to … Read article “How to Get Sticky and Full-B
The Jamstack is a modern web development architecture based on client-side JavaScript, reusable APIs, and prebuilt Markup. The key aspects of a Jamstack application are the following:
The entire app runs on a CDN (or ADN). CDN stands for Content Delivery Network and an ADN is an Application Delivery Network. Everything lives in Git. Automated builds run with a workflow when developers push the code. There’s Automatic deployment of the prebuilt markup to the CDN/ADN. Reusable APIs make has
It’s kind of neat that we can do input:invalid {} in CSS to style an input when it’s in an invalid state. Yet, used exactly like that, the UX is pretty bad. Say you have . That’s immediately invalid before the user has done anything. That’s such a bummer UX that you never see it used in the wild. But if we could just avoid that one thing, that :invalid selector can do a ton of work … Read article “Happier HTML5 form validation in Vue”
The post Happier
Let’s take a look at how to combine the border-image property in CSS with animated SVGs that move around a border. In the process, we’ll cover how to hand-craft resizable, nine-slice animated SVGs that you can use not only re-create the effect, but to make it your own. Here’s what we’re making: Spooky skulls? Retro arcade? What’s not to like?! This is actually part of The Skull, a capture-the-flag riddle I’m working on that’s designed to explore the internals … Read article “How to
It’s sounding more and more likely that we’re actually going to get real container queries. Google is prototyping a syntax idea from David Baron and refined by Miriam Suzanne. Apparently, there has already been some prototyping done for a switch() syntax which is like container queries on values. Even now, there is stuff like the Raven technique which can do container query-esque values. This stuff will shake out over time. If you need solutions today, most of them involve JavaScript
State machines are typically expressed on the web in JavaScript and often through the popular XState library. But the concept of a state machine is adaptable to just about any language, including, amazingly, HTML and CSS. In this article, we’re going to do exactly that. I recently built a website that included a “no client JavaScript” constraint and I needed one particular unique interactive feature. The key to all this is using and elements to hold a … Read article “A Complete St