Link tags: grunt

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CSS { In Real Life } | Building a dependency-free site in 2019

I think we’re often guilty of assuming that because our tools are great solutions for some things, they’re automatically the solution for everything.

Angular, Autoprefixer, IE11, and CSS Grid Walk into a Bar… - daverupert.com

Dave on the opaqueness of toolchains:

As toolchains grow and become more complex, unless you are expertly familiar with them, it’s very unclear what transformations are happening in our code. Tracking the differences between the input and output and the processes that code underwent can be overwhelming. When there’s a problem, it’s increasingly difficult to hop into the assembly line and diagnose the issue.

There’s a connection here to one of the biggest issues with what’s currently being labelled “AI”:

In the same way AI needs some design to show its work in how it came to its final answer, I feel that our automated build tools could use some help as well.

I really like this suggestion for making the invisble visible:

I sometimes wonder if Webpack or Gulp or [Insert Your Build Tool Here] could benefit from a Scratch-like interface for buildchains.

I finally made sense of front end build tools. You can, too.

I still find the landscape of build tools completely overwhelming, but I found this distinction to be a useful way of categorising the different kinds of build tools:

Build tools do two things:

  1. Install things
  2. Do things

So bower, npm and yarn install things, whereas grunt, gulp, and webpack do things.

I think.

Mobile-first and IE8 Solution – Introducing grunt-legacssy (Updated) | Robin Plus

A handy way of automating the creation of old-IE stylesheets using Grunt. This follows on from Jake’s work in using preprocessors and conditional comments to send a different stylesheet to IE8 and below—one that doesn’t contain media queries. It’s a clever way of creating mobile-first responsive sites that still provide large-screen styles to older versions of IE.

asciidisco/grunt-patternprimer

This is handy: a version of my pattern primer that can be run with Grunt.