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HTML Whitespace is Broken – Devel without a Cause
October 30, 2024
Recently, I was working on a project which required a deeper understanding of how whitespace works in HTML. I was never a fan of HTML’s whitespace behavior before as I’ve been burned by it...
Read MoreState of CSS 2024
October 29, 2024
et me make a prediction: we’ll look back at 2024 as the turning point between “CSS Classic” and “New CSS”. CSS Classic is how most of us have been writing CSS for years: using a limited ...
Read MoreFlexible Typesetting is now yours, for free
October 28, 2024
Originally published in 2018, Flexible Typesetting has sold thousands of copies and given a new generation of designers fresh mental models to craft meaningful, multidimensional typography. It is requ...
Read MoreCome To The Light-dark() Side
October 28, 2024
You’d be forgiven for thinking coding up both a dark and a light mode at once is a lot of work. You have to remember @media queries based on prefers-color-scheme as well as extra complications that ...
Read MorePlatform Strategy and Its Discontents – Infrequently Noted
October 28, 2024
Web developers and browsers have capped the web’s mobile potential by ensuring it will feel terrible on the phones most folks have. A web that can win is a web that doesn’t feel like sludg...
Read MoreA Very Brief History of Design Systems, Part 1
October 25, 2024
In our modern digital era, the term design system is primarily associated with user interface (UI) development. It describes a structured set of components, guidelines, tools, etc. used to deliver con...
Read MoreA world without passwords is in sight
October 25, 2024
Apple thinks 249 of my passwords need attention. Some of them have been reused. Some of them have been caught up in data breaches. Some are just bad passwords. That’s why, for the past 11 years...
Read MoreWhat Makes a Font Accessible? A Designer’s Guide
October 24, 2024
Discover the key characteristics of accessible fonts and learn best practices for selecting and combining typefaces that ensure readability for all users. Source: What Makes a Font Accessible? A Desig...
Read MoreSmarter than ‘Ctrl+F’: Linking Directly to Web Page Content
October 24, 2024
Historically, we could link to a certain part of the page only if that part had an ID. All we needed to do was to link to the URL and add the document fragment (ID). If we wanted to link to a certain ...
Read MoreClarifying The Relationship Between Popovers And Dialogs
October 24, 2024
The difference between Popovers (i.e., the popover attribute) and Dialogs (i.e., both the element and the dialog accessible role) is incredibly confusing — so much that many articles (like this, thi...
Read MoreThe Interactive Guide to Rendering in React
October 24, 2024
What is rendering?Put simply, rendering is just a fancy way of saying that React calls your function component with the intent of eventually updating the View.When React renders a component, two thing...
Read MoreWhere web components shine
October 23, 2024
In this job we need to think a lot about the tools we choose and why, so I cataloged all the places where web components (for me) feel like “the right tool for the job”. Your list may be different...
Read MoreUnleash The Power Of Scroll-Driven Animations
October 23, 2024
A scroll-driven animation is an animation that responds to scrolling. There’s a direct link between scrolling progress and the animation’s progress. Scroll-driven animations are different than scr...
Read MoreThe 3 AI Use Cases: Gods, Interns, and Cogs
October 22, 2024
It gets confusing! For laypeople, it’s hard to nail down what AI actually does (and doesn’t) do. For those in the field, we often have to break down and overspecify our terms before we can get to ...
Read MoreThe Shadow DOM is an antipattern
October 21, 2024
In my video on building a modern web app with vanilla Web Components, I mentioned that I believe the Shadow DOM is an antipattern when using Web Components.I had a few folks in the comments ask me why...
Read MoreThe blockquote element: HeydonWorks
October 18, 2024
Even before HTML5, was designated for longer quotations. Indeed, the term “block quotation” precedes the element and the concept of block-level HTML elements. The Chicago Manual Of Style recommend...
Read MoreEval-driven development: Build better AI faster
October 18, 2024
AI changes how we build software. In combination with developers, it creates a positive feedback loop where we can achieve better results faster. However, traditional testing methods don’t work ...
Read MoreBig W for Web Components
October 16, 2024
Quick review: If you don’t regularly work with Web Components, the term “Shadow DOM” might sound a little more kinky than the topics we normally cover. But fortunately (or unfortunately?), Shado...
Read MoreQueering design systems thinking
October 15, 2024
Despite the way they’ve infiltrated product building processes large and small, the teams behind organizations’ design systems are constantly having to defend their own existence. Paradoxically, c...
Read MoreHyper-responsive web components
October 15, 2024
Web components can be placed anywhere on the page, like any other HTML element, which makes them incredibly portable and practical. Source: Hyper-responsive web components | Trys Mudford...
Read MoreExploring the AI Solution Space
October 15, 2024
The popular imagination has equated intelligence with convincing conversation since Alan Turing proposed his “imitation game” in 1950. The concept is simple: if a system can fool you into thinking...
Read MoreExploring the AI Solution Space
October 15, 2024
As I’ve been experimenting with AI, I’ve wondered what “used well” might look like. There are several scenarios, and they’re all different. My current model of the possibility space is a two...
Read MoreHow Microsoft Edge Is Replacing React With Web Components
October 14, 2024
Microsoft’s Edge browser team is on a mission to swap out React UI components with native web platform components. We speak to the team lead. Source: How Microsoft Edge Is Replacing React With W...
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