What Makes CSS Hard To Master
December 18th, 2020
Tim Severien: I feel we, the community, have to acknowledge that CSS is easy to get started with and hard to master. Let’s reflect on the language and find out what makes it hard. Tim’s reasons CSS is hard (in my own words): You can look at a matching Ruleset, and still not have the…
What’s Old is New
December 17th, 2020
This year, I learned a lot about how “old” tricks can solve a lot of modern problems if you use the right tools. Following the growth of Jamstack-style development has been both a learning experience, while also a nostalgic one. It’s been amazing to see how you can power plain ol’ HTML, CSS, and JavaScript…
Old is Solid; New Gets Talked About
December 15th, 2020
When Chris asked me to write about “one thing I learned about building websites this year” I admit my brain immediately went through a list of techniques and CSS properties I started using this year. But then I paused. Other people can write about that much better than I can. What’s something that I specifically…
Debugging CSS
December 14th, 2020
High five to Ahmad Shadeed for releasing his new book, Debugging CSS. I think that’s a neat angle for a book on CSS. There are a ton of books on the general subject of CSS already, so not that they can’t be fresh takes on that, but this feels equally important and less trodden territory….
Make it Personal
December 11th, 2020
One thing I noticed about building websites in 2020: despite all the social networks and publishing platforms craving our content, our stories, and our attention, people are somehow still building personal websites. Over the course of the year, many of you have launched or relaunched your website. It indeed feels like the personal website is…
Using CSS Custom Properties to Adjust Variable Font Weights in Dark Mode
December 10th, 2020
Black isn’t always slimming. All of my page text — headings and body copy — appeared to bulk up when I switched to dark mode. And it didn’t matter what fonts I used or which browsers I tried. The same thing happened with all of them. For example, here’s what happens with Adobe’s Source Sans…
Web Performance Calendar
December 7th, 2020
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…
Native CSS Masonry Layout In CSS Grid
November 30th, 2020
Rachel Andrew introducing the fact that masonry layout is going to be a thing in native CSS via CSS grid layout. The thing with masonry is that we can already do it for the most part, but there is just one thing that makes it hard: doing the vertical-staggering and having a left-to-right source order….
A Complete State Machine Made With HTML Checkboxes and CSS
November 27th, 2020
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…
DRY-ing up styled-components
November 23rd, 2020
I like working with styled-components. They allow you to write CSS in your JavaScript, keeping your CSS in very close proximity to your JavaScript for a single component. As a front-end developer who loves to dissect a web page and break it down into reusable components, the idea of styled-components brings me joy. The approach…