Link tags: element

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do you know your tags?

Test your knowledge of the original version of HTML—how many elements can you name?

A Modern CSS Reset - Andy Bell

Some very smart ideas in here for resetting default browser styles, like only resetting lists that have classes applied to them:

ul[class],
ol[class] {
  padding: 0;
}

I select only lists that do have a class attribute because if a plain ol’ <ul> or <ol> gets used, I want it to look like a list. A lot of resets, including my previous ones, aggressively remove that.

Initial thoughts on standardizing form controls | Greg Whitworth

Greg has done a lot of research into developer frustrations with customising form controls.

My current thinking in this space, and I know some folks will find this controversial, but I think we should completely standardize in-page form controls with no limitations on their styling capabilities. What do I mean by in-page controls? I am referring to any form control or component that is rendered within the content process. This standardization would include the sub-parts and their related states and how these are exposed (probably through CSS psuedo classes or HTML attributes). This will enable the shadow-dom to be encapsulated while providing web developers with a consistent experience to adjust to match their brand and needs of their site/application.

8 DOM features you didn’t know existed - LogRocket Blog

If you ignore the slightly insulting and condescending clickbaity title, this is a handy run-down of eight browser features with good support:

  1. extra arguments in addEventListener(),
  2. scrollTo(),
  3. extra arguments in setTimeout() and setInterval(),
  4. the defaultChecked property for checkboxes,
  5. normalize() and wholeText for strings of text,
  6. insertAdjacentElement() and insertAdjacentText(),
  7. event.detail, and
  8. scrollHeight and scrollWidth.

This page is a truly naked, brutalist html quine.

What you see really is what you get. I like this style!

The Lost tags of HTML

I’ll be in my bunk.

Web Components will replace your frontend framework

I’ve often said that the goal of a good library should be to make itself redundant. jQuery is the poster child for that, and this article points to web components as the way to standardise what’s already happening in JavaScript frameworks:

Remember when document.querySelector first got wide browser support and started to end jQuery’s ubiquity? It finally gave us a way to do natively what jQuery had been providing for years: easy selection of DOM elements. I believe the same is about to happen to frontend frameworks like Angular and React.

The article goes on to give a good technical overview of custom elements, templates, and the Shadow DOM, but I was surprised to see it making reference to the is syntax for extending existing HTML elements—I’m pretty sure that that is, sadly, dead in the water.

HTML periodical table (built with CSS grid)

This is a nifty visualisation by Hui Jing. It’s really handy to have elements categorised like this:

  • Root elements
  • Scripting
  • Interactive elements
  • Document metadata
  • Edits
  • Tabular data
  • Grouping content
  • Embedded content
  • Forms
  • Sections
  • Text-level semantics

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

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

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.

How do you figure? | CSS-Tricks

A good reminder from Chris—prompted by Scott O’Hara’s article—that the figcaption element and the alt attribute do different things. If you use an empty alt attribute on an img inside a figure, then your figcaption element is captioning nothing …and no, using the same text for both is not the solution.

Make Your ARIA Labels Sing on Key — Knowbility

A good look at the (over)use of the aria-label attribute that confirms the first rule of ARIA.

Elemental haiku

An ode for every element in the periodic table, in the form of a haiku.

HTML elements, unite! The Voltron-like powers of combining elements. | CSS-Tricks

This great post by Mandy ticks all my boxes! It’s a look at the combinatorial possibilities of some of the lesser-known HTML elements: abbr, cite, code, dfn, figure, figcaption, kbd, samp, and var.

Removing jQuery from GitHub.com frontend | GitHub Engineering

You really don’t need jQuery any more …and that’s thanks to jQuery.

Here, the Github team talk through their process of swapping out jQuery for vanilla JavaScript, as well as their forays into web components (or at least the custom elements bit).

Conversational Semantics · An A List Apart Article

I love, love, love all the little details of HTML that Aaron offers up here. And I really like how he positions non-visual user-agents like searchbots, screen readers, and voice assisants as headless UIs.

HTML is a truly robust and expressive language that is often overlooked and undervalued, but it has the incredible potential to nurture conversations with our users without requiring a lot of effort on our part. Simply taking the time to code web pages well will enable our sites to speak to our customers like they speak to each other. Thinking about how our sites are experienced as headless interfaces now will set the stage for more natural interactions between the real world and the digital one.

Accessibility: Start with the foundations | susan jean robertson

I encourage you to think about and make sure you are using the right elements at the right time. Sometimes I overthink this, but that’s because it’s that important to me - I want to make sure that the markup I use helps people understand the content, and doesn’t hinder them.

The Accessibility of Styled Form Controls & Friends | a11y_styled_form_controls

A great collection of styled and accessible form elements:

Form controls are necessary in many interfaces, but are often considered annoying, if not downright difficult, to style. Many of the markup patterns presented here can serve as a baseline for building more attractive form controls without having to exclude users who may rely on assistive technology to get things done.

Web Components in 2018 - Blog | SitePen

A good explanation of web components, complete with some code examples.

Web Components are not a single technology. Instead, they are series of browser standards defined by the W3C allowing developers to build components in a way the browser can natively understand. These standards include:

  • HTML Templates and Slots – Reusable HTML markup with entry points for user-specific markup
  • Shadow DOM – DOM encapsulation for markup and styles
  • Custom Elements – Defining named custom HTML elements with specific behaviour

Web Components Club – A journal about learning web components

Andy Bell is documenting is journey of getting to grips with web components. I think it’s so valuable to share like this as you’re learning, instead of waiting until you’ve learned it all—the fresh perspective is so useful!