Dependencies are everywhere. They’re unavoidable. They aren’t inherently bad, but if you don’t consider the possibility a given dependency might not be met, you run the risk of frustrating your users. Reducing dependencies improves the likelihood that your site will be usable by the greatest number of people in the widest variety of scenarios. Even knowing this, however, it’s easy to overlook the most basic dependencies our projects have, undermining their resilience in the process. To illustrate this point, consider the humble submit button.
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If you write CSS for a living, it is important to understand how to write valid CSS property values correctly. Once you understand how different values can be combined or multiplied, the CSS property value syntax becomes much easier to comprehend. The following syntax can be hard to understand if you don’t know the various symbols and how they work. However, it is worth taking the time to learn. If you understand how the W3C defines property values, you will be able to understand any of the W3C’s CSS specifications.
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Image filters are a fun and effective way to provide visual unity and aesthetic appeal on the web. Keep in mind that they do come with a slight performance hit, but also with the benefits of speedy design in the browser and the opportunity to design interactions with. In this article, Una Kravets will take a look at one of the most popular image effects, grayscale, and assess both the ease of implementation and performance implications of HTML canvas, SVG, CSS filters, and CSS blend modes. Which one will win?
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Fluid typography resizes smoothly to match any device width. It is an intuitive option for a web in which you have a practically infinite number of screen sizes to support. Yet, for some reason, it is still used far less than responsive techniques In this article, Michael Riethmuller will teach you how to apply the techniques you know in a slightly different way. Careful attention to detail will ensure you still have a perfectly crafted experience at all screen sizes.
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CSS pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements can certainly be a handful. They provide so many possibilities that one can easily feel overwhelmed, but that’s the life of a web designer and developer! In this guide, Ricardo Zea will teach you all the things you need to keep in mind so that your pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements are well implemented. If you’re an experienced web designer or developer, you must know and have used most of the pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements discussed here. However, you might not have heard of one or two of them before.
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Imagine a web component distributed as a single .js file and containing everything. We would still have our basic style sheets, but the dynamic CSS would be a part of JavaScript. Now this is possible, and one way to achieve it is with CSSX. Similar to JSX, CSSX offers encapsulation. Being able to see all parts of a single component is a big step forward. The separation of concerns defined development for years, but the web is changing. Understanding what is going on is easier when everything is in one place.
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Houdini is a new W3C task force that introduces a new set of APIs that will give developers the power to extend CSS itself, and the tools to hook into the styling and layout process of a browser’s rendering engine. In this article, Philip Walton is going to talk about how Houdini will solve CSS feature problems and list some of the more exciting features currently in development. He’ll also offer some concrete things you as web developers can do today to help make Houdini a reality.
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Finding little techniques and tricks to help you get to results faster can immensely improve your productivity, so you don’t have to waste time on solutions that will never see the light of day. Vitaly Friedman loves finding those little useful front-end goodies that make our lives easier. Since technologies emerge and evolve permanently, keeping track on what’s going on is often difficult, especially since specifications change and so does the browser support.
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In this article, Cosima Mielke has collected tips, tricks, and tools To give you a head start into Flexbox and provide you with ideas on how to use it to master common coding challenges, that will help you get the most out of its power already today. Flexbox gives us a new kind of control over our layouts, making coding challenges that were hard or impossible to solve with CSS alone straightforward and intuitive. It provides us with the means to build grids that are flexible and aware of dynamic content. The list is by no means complete but includes the resources which we found helpful and useful.
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Using a preprocessor does not automatically upgrade one’s code: A thorough foundation in CSS is a prerequisite. In Karen Menezes’ experience, badly architected and overly abstracted preprocessor code is much harder to debug and maintain than a large CSS file created with basic structure and common sense. Variables can be seen as the backbone of a well-constructed project. Well-commented and well-defined variables set a great foundation for a project of any size. By maintaining a variable-centric approach, we can structure our style sheets with a meaning and modularity that persist beyond the trends that come and go.
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