In 2020, I rediscovered the enjoyment of building a website with plain ol’ HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — no transpilin’, no compilin’, no build tools other than my hands on the keyboard. Seeing as my personal brand could be summed up “so late to the game that the stadium has been demolished,” I decided to start a podcast in 2020. It’s the podcast of my agency, Clearleft, and it has been given the soaringly imaginative title of The Clearleft Podcast… Read article “npm ruin dev”
I found this Free Favicon Maker the other day. It’s a nice tool to make a favicon (true to its name), but unlike other favicon generators, this one lets you create one from scratch starting with a character or an emoji. Naturally, I was curious to look at the code to see how it works and, while I did, it got me thinking in different directions. I was reminded of something I read that says it is possible to dynamically… Read article “How to Create a Favicon That Changes Automatically
I’ve always enjoyed the CSS art people create, but I’ve never ventured into it much myself. I’m familiar with many of the tricks involved, but still find it surprising every time: the way people are able to make such fluid and beautiful images out of little boxes. I always end up digging around in dev tools to see how things are done, but I had never seen the process unfold. Any time CSS art starts getting attention, there is always … Read article “Very Extremely Practic
In our wide world of building for the web, we have every opportunity to talk about tools. We lunge to fill every gap we find in our projects with a definitive technological approach. Some of us are given “a seat at the table” feasting on even the most minuscule of technological debates. This marketplace of opinion is founded upon a desire to arrive, at least for the moment, at an optimum. We postulate about tooling so that we might achieve … Read article “TypeScript & Relevance̶
Spoiler alert: There is no support for it yet. But it is defined in the Media Queries Level 5 spec that includes other recent, but more familiar user preference features, like prefers-color-scheme and prefers-reduced-motion. The Polypane blog goes into incredible depth on prefers-reduced-data, especially for something that we have yet to see in the wild. That’s actually what makes the Polypane team an ideal voice on the subject. It’s product is a browser that is able to emulate ̷
As websites are becoming more and more dynamic when it comes to design, there is sometimes a need to incorporate complex, animated elements. There are many ways to do that from CSS transitions to 3D rendering on canvas, and animated SVG. But it is often easier to use a since they can be rather efficient and, with them, just about anything visual is possible. But what if you a need transparent background on that video, so that it could … Read article “Overlaying Video With Transpare
2020 brought another wave of logical property features to major browsers and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my investment into logical, rather than physical, web styling. I feel like I’ve learned a new way to speak about the box model that results in less written code with more global coverage. p { / 🚫 / text-align: left; / 👍 / text-align: start;
/ 🚫 / margin-top: 1rem; / 👍 / margin-block-start: 1rem; } Like I described in the web.dev article I linked &#
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”