Tags: css

Who has the fastest website in F1? - JakeArchibald.com

I think I physically winced on more than one occassion as I read through Jake’s report here.

He makes an interesting observation at the end:

However, none of the teams used any of the big modern frameworks. They’re mostly Wordpress & Drupal, with a lot of jQuery. It makes me feel like I’ve been in a bubble in terms of the technologies that make up the bulk of the web.

Yes! This! Contrary to what you might think reading through the latest and greatest tips and tricks from the front-end community, the vast majority of sites out there on the web are not being built with React, Vue, webpack or any other “modern” tools.

All you need to know about hyphenation in CSS | Clagnut by Richard Rutter

Everything you need to know about hyphenation on the web today, from Rich’s galaxy brain.

Hyphenation is a perfect example of progressive enhancement, so you can start applying the above now if you think your readers will benefit from it – support among browsers will only increase.

I Used The Web For A Day On Internet Explorer 8 — Smashing Magazine

A fascinating look at the web today with IE8. And it’s worth remembering who might be experiencing the web like this:

Whoever they are, you can bet they’re not using an old browser just to annoy you. Nobody deliberately chooses a worse browsing experience.

The article also outlines two possible coping strategies:

1. Polyfilling Strive for feature parity for all by filling in the missing browser functionality.
2. Progressive Enhancement Start from a core experience, then use feature detection to layer on functionality.

Take a wild guess as to which strategy I support.

There’s a bigger point made at the end of all this:

IE8 is today’s scapegoat. Tomorrow it’ll be IE9, next year it’ll be Safari, a year later it might be Chrome. You can swap IE8 out for ‘old browser of choice’. The point is, there will always be some divide between what browsers developers build for, and what browsers people are using. We should stop scoffing at that and start investing in robust, inclusive engineering solutions. The side effects of these strategies tend to pay dividends in terms of accessibility, performance and network resilience, so there’s a bigger picture at play here.

The Lean Web video from Boston CSS | Go Make Things

A good talk from from Chris Ferdinandi, who says:

One of the central themes of my talk on The Lean Web is that we as developers repeatedly take all of the great things the web and browsers give us out-of-the-box, break them, and then re-implement them poorly with JavaScript.

BEM: 4 Hang-Ups & How It Will Help Your CSS Organization

A few common gotchas when using BEM, and how to deal with them.

if statements and for loops in CSS - QuirksBlog

Personally, I find ppk’s comparison here to be spot on. I think that CSS can be explained in terms of programming concepts like if statements and for loops, if you squint at it just right.

This is something I’ve written about before.

How to become a “Designer who Codes” – Medium

This is such excellent advice for anyone starting out in front-end development:

1. Get comfortable with the naked internet (sorry, not THAT naked internet)
2. Build yourself some nice little one-column websites
3. Learn about layout
4. Make it work on phones
5. Make it dynamic

(I would just love it if Meagan were posting this on her own incredibly beautiful website rather than on Ev’s blog.)

The “Backendification” of Frontend Development – Hacker Noon

Are many of the modern frontend tools and practices just technical debt in disguise?

Ooh, good question!

Content-based grid tracks and embracing flexibility

This is a really good explanation of the difference between context-aware layouts—that we’ve had up until now—and content-aware layouts, which are now possible with CSS grid:

With the min-content, max-content and auto keywords, we can size grid tracks based on their content. I think this is very cool. If we manage to embrace as much of the web’s flexibility as we can, we can get the most out of these tools, and let CSS help us with designing for the unknown.

The CSS mental model - QuirksBlog

PPK looks at the different mental models behind CSS and JavaScript. One is declarative and one is imperative.

There’s a lot here that ties in with what I was talking about at New Adventures around the rule of least power in technology choice.

I’m not sure if I agree with describing CSS as being state-based. The example that illustrates this—a :hover style—feels like an exception rather than a typical example of CSS.

GRID: A simple visual cheatsheet for CSS Grid Layout

This is a really nice glanceable reference for CSS grid.

Using CSS Grid the right way | hey it’s violet

CSS Grid is easy to use but difficult to learn. It’s a more intuitive paradigm than any other CSS layout technique, but it’s completely different from its predecessors.

Some great advice here on how to approach CSS grid:

• Use names, not numbers
• Use fr as your flexible unit
• Don’t use a grid system

A Simpler Web: I Concur

Tales of over-engineering, as experienced by Bridget. This resonates with me, and I think she’s right when she says that these things go in cycles. The pendulum always ends up swinging the other way eventually.

Weeknotes #5 — Paul Robert Lloyd

A nice counterpoint to the last time I linked to Paul’s weeknotes:

However, there’s another portion of the industry, primarily but not exclusively within the public sector, where traditional development approaches (progressive enhancement, server-side rendering) remain prevalent, or less likely to be dismissed, at least. Because accessibility isn’t optional when your audience is everyone, these organisations tend to attract those with a pragmatic outlook who like to work more diligently and deliberately.

Table Design Patterns On The Web — Smashing Magazine

Hui Jing runs through a whole bunch of options for displaying responsive tables, some of them using just CSS, some of them using a smidgen of JavaScript. There are some really clever techniques in here.

CodePen - Solar System 3D Animation (Pure CSS)

This orrery is really quite wonderful! Not only is it a great demonstration of what CSS can do, it’s a really accurate visualisation of the solar system.

Proper UI hierarchy · accssible

Bringing gradients back, baby!

This is going to be a handy reference to keep on hand whenever you want a button to actually look like a button.

CSS Remedy

This is a really interesting approach that isn’t quite a CSS reset or a normalisation. Instead, it’s an experiment to reimagine what a default browser stylesheet would be like if it were created today, without concerns about backwards compatibility:

Applies basic styling to form elements and controls, getting you started with custom styling. We want to find the balance between providing a base for implementing a custom design, and allowing OS-level control over how form inputs work (like how a number pad works on iOS).

Provides a very lightweight starter file, with generic visual styling that you will want to replace. This isn’t as robust or opinionated as a starter-theme or framework. We’ve leaned toward specifying less, so you have less to override. (We haven’t defined any font families, for example.)

You can contribute by adding issues.

Three ways to build Crouwel’s Hiroshima poster in CSS

Hidde takes one iconic design and shows how it could be recreated with CSS grid using either 4 columns, 9 columns, or 17 columns.

Weeknotes #4 — Paul Robert Lloyd

So far I’ve been drawn towards developer-orientated roles; working with HTML, CSS and JavaScript (in that order) to implement designs and ensure products are accessible and performant. However, it seems such work no longer exists. People talk about full-stack development, but nearly every job I’ve seen containing the words ‘front-end’ has React as a requirement. The gatekeeping is real.

Frustrating on a personal level, but also infuriating when you consider how such gatekeeping is limiting welcome attempts to diversify our industry.