It’s always a gas when a good person doing good work gets a good deal. In this case, Jason’s viral WPGraphQL plugin has not only become a canonical WordPress plugin, but creator Jason Bahl is joining Automattic as well. I’m linking this up because it’s notable for a few reasons: WPGraphQL is a must-have plugin for creating headless WordPress sites and making it a canonical plugin is WordPress making a big step in that direction. Jason is leaving WP Engin..

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More times than I can count, while writing, I get myself into random but interesting topics with little relation to the original post. In the end, I have to make the simple but painful choice of deleting or archiving hours of research and writing because I know most people click on a post with a certain expectation of what they’ll get, and I know it isn’t me bombing them with unrelated rants about CSS. This happened to me while working on Monday’s article about at-ru..

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I sat down with Heydon Pickering in the most recent episode of the Smashing Hour. Full transparency: I was nervous as heck. I’ve admired Heydon’s work for years, and even though we run in similar circles, this was our first time meeting. You know how you build some things up in your mind and sorta psyche yourself out? Yeah, that. Heydon is nothing short of a gentleman and, I’ll be darned, easy to talk to. As is the case with any Smashing Hour, there’s no ..

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The @supports at-rule has been extended several times since its initial release. Once only capable of checking support for property/value pairs, it can now check for a selector using the selector() wrapper function and different font formats and techs using font-format() and font-tech(), respectively. However, one feature the community still longs for is testing other at-rules support. @supports at-rule(@new-rule) { /* @new-rule is supported */ } The CSSWG decided..

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There is an amazing community effort happening in search of a new logo for CSS. I was a bit skeptical at first, as I never really considered CSS a “brand.” Why does it need a logo? For starters, the current logo seems… a bit dated. Displayed quite prominently is the number 3. As in CSS version 3, or simply CSS3. Depending on your IDE’s selected icon pack of choice, CSS file icons are often only the number 3. To give an incredibly glossed-over history of ..

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Kate Kaplan hits on something over at Nielsen Norman Group’s blog that’s been bugging me: The challenge with this icon is sparkle ambiguity: Participants in our recent research study generally agreed that it represented something a little special. But, what was that something? And why was it special? That was less obvious. We encountered widely and wildly varied interpretations. Man, I hate those sparkles. Correction: I loathe it as an icon but I use the hec..

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Not long ago, if we wanted a tooltip or popover positioned on top of another element, we would have to set our tooltip’s position to something other than static and use its inset/transform properties to place it exactly where we want. This works, but the element’s position is susceptible to user scrolls, zooming, or animations since the tooltip could overflow off of the screen or wind up in an awkward position. The only way to solve this was using JavaScript to check wh..

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An approach for creating masonry layouts in vanilla CSS is one of those “holy grail” aspirations. I actually tend to plop masonry and the classic “Holy Grail” layout in the same general era of web design. They’re different types of layouts, of course, but the Holy Grail was a done deal when we got CSS Grid. That leaves masonry as perhaps the last standing layout from the CSS 3 era that is left without a baked-in solution. I might argue that masonry is no longer e..

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The creator of CSS has said he originally envisaged CSS as the main web technology to control behavior on web pages, with scripting as a fallback when things weren’t possible declaratively in CSS. The rationale for a CSS-first approach was that “scripting is programming and programming is hard.” Since introducing the :hover pseudo-class, CSS has been standardizing patterns developers create in JavaScript and “harvesting” them into CSS standards. When you t..

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Miriam Suzanne’s in the middle of a redesign of her personal website. It began in August 2022. She’s made an entire series out of the work that’s worth your time, but I wanted to call out the fifth and latest installment because she presents a problem that I think we can all relate to: But the walls got in my way. Instead of minimal renovation, I got just far enough to live with it and then started a brand new Eleventy repo. The plan was to prototype […] an..

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