Now that all modern browsers support SVG favicons, here’s how to turn any emoji into a favicon.svg:
<svg xmlns="http://w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 100 100"> <text y=".9em" font-size="90"> 💩 </text> </svg>Useful for quick apps when you can’t be bothered to design a favicon!
This is superbly in-depth and easy-to-follow article from Cassie—everything you need to know about motion paths in SVG and CSS! It’s worth reading just for the wonderful examples.
Cassie’s excellent talk on SVG animation is well worth your time.
A handy tool for tweaking the animations in your SVGs.
What a wonderfully in-depth and clear tutorial from Cassie on how she created the animation for her nifty SVG logo!
Also: Cassie is on the indie web now, writing on her own website—yay!
Don’t miss this—a masterclass in SVG animation with Cassie (I refuse to use the W word). Mark your calendar: August 20th.
Impressively lightweight and smooth!
Sara runs through the many ways of providing an accessible name to an icon button, backed up with Scott’s testing.
Isn’t this just lovely?
Cassie made a visualisation of the power we’re getting from the solar panels we installed on the roof of the Clearleft building.
I highly recommend reading her blog post about the process too. She does such a great job of explaining how she made API calls, created SVGs, and calculated animations.
Here’s a tiny lesson that I picked up from Trys that I’d like to share with you…
I was working on some upcoming changes to the Clearleft site recently. One particular component needed some SVG background images. I decided I’d inline the SVGs in the CSS to avoid extra network requests. It’s pretty straightforward:
.myComponent {
background-image: url('data:image/svg+xml;utf8,<svg> ... </svg>');
}
You can basically paste your SVG in there, although you need to a little bit of URL encoding: I found that converting # to %23 to was enough for my needs.
But here’s the thing. My component had some variations. One of the variations had multiple background images. There was a second background image in addition to the first. There’s no way in CSS to add an additional background image without writing a whole background-image declaration:
.myComponent--variant {
background-image: url('data:image/svg+xml;utf8,<svg> ... </svg>'), url('data:image/svg+xml;utf8,<svg> ... </svg>');
}
So now I’ve got the same SVG source inlined in two places. That negates any performance benefits I was getting from inlining in the first place.
That’s where Trys comes in. He shared a nifty technique he uses in this exact situation: put the SVG source into a custom property!
:root {
--firstSVG: url('data:image/svg+xml;utf8,<svg> ... </svg>');
--secondSVG: url('data:image/svg+xml;utf8,<svg> ... </svg>');
}
Then you can reference those in your background-image declarations:
.myComponent {
background-image: var(--firstSVG);
}
.myComponent--variant {
background-image: var(--firstSVG), var(--secondSVG);
}
Brilliant! Not only does this remove any duplication of the SVG source, it also makes your CSS nice and readable: no more big blobs of SVG source code in the middle of your style sheet.
You might be wondering what will happen in older browsers that don’t support CSS custom properties (that would be Internet Explorer 11). Those browsers won’t get any background image. Which is fine. It’s a background image. Therefore it’s decoration. If it were an important image, it wouldn’t be in the background.
Progressive enhancement, innit?
Scott writes up that super smart transclusion trick of his.
Woah! This is one smart hack!
Scott has figured out a way to get all the benefits of pointing to an external SVG file …that then gets embedded. This means you can get all the styling and scripting benefits that only apply to embedded SVGs (like using fill).
The fallback is very graceful indeed: you still get the SVG (just not embedded).
Now imagine using this technique for chunks of HTML too …transclusion, baby!
This article by Cassie is so, so good!
First off, there’s the actual practical content on how to change the hover styles of SVGs that aren’t embedded. Then there’s the really clear walkthrough she give, making some quite complex topics very understandable. Finally, there’s the fact that she made tool to illustrate the point!
Best of all, I get to work with the super-smart developer who did all this.
Another good reason to use the currentColor value in SVGs.
Aw, this is so nice! Chris points to the way that The Session generates sheet music from abc text:
The SVG conversion is made possible entirely in JavaScript by an open source library. That’s the progressive enhancement part. Store and ship the basic format, and let the browser enhance the experience, if it can (it can).
Here’s another way of thinking of it: I was contacted by a blind user of The Session who hadn’t come across abc notation before. Once they realised how it worked, they said it was like having alt text for sheet music! 🤯
Browser implementations of Sol LeWitt’s conceptual and minimal art, many of which only exist as instructions like this:
Vertical lines, not straight, not touching, covering the wall evenly.
On Ev’s blog, Marcin goes into great detail on theming an interface using CSS custom properties, SVG, HSL, and a smattering of CSS filters.
I was kind of amazed that all of this could happen via CSS and CSS alone: the colours, the transitions, the vectors, and even the images.
Using a single path SVG, a smidge of CSS, and ~6 lines of JavaScript.
In this days of monolithic frameworks, I really like seeing modest but powerful patterns like this—small pieces that we can loosely join.
This is impressive—a fully featured graphics app for creating SVGS right in your browser.
Metaballs, not to be confused with meatballs, are organic looking squishy gooey blobs.
Here’s the maths behind the metaballs (implemented in SVG).