Share This
Get in Touch
Scroll Down
//Blog

Fire SVG animations (SMIL) when the SVG is visible

When requirements read “when visible” your brain should go straight to IntersectionObserver. That’s exactly what Zach is doing here to kick off an animation when it scrolls into view. Except this animation is an SVG SMIL animation: an <animate> situation. SMIL animations have some kinda cool things they can do, like begin when another animation ends, which is something CSS doesn’t help with that much. Turns out SMIL has a JavaScript API as well, so it’s pos..

Read more
  • 0 Comment

Building Your Own Subscription Newsletter

(This is a sponsored post.) I did a sponsored video the other week explaining how to build a paid subscription newsletter using WordPress (we did it on WordPress.com but it could be hosted anywhere), MailPoet (a plugin to visually author the emails, as well as send them), and WooCommerce (to manage the payments and subscriptions). I published the video here and there is a landing page for the whole concept here. I spent a lot of time on it! I feel personally compelled..

Read more
  • 0 Comment

Firefox’s `bolder` Default is a Problem for Variable Fonts

Variable fonts make it easy to create a large set of font styles from a single font file. Unfortunately, the default rendering of the <b> and <strong> elements in browsers today is not very compatible with the wide range of font-weight values enabled by variable fonts. Unexpected: in Firefox the HTML element `b` has a user agent style of `font-weight: bolder` and Chrome/Safari/Edge all use `font-weight: bold`.Noticed with `<div style="font-weight: 700"&..

Read more
  • 0 Comment

Early Days for CSS Scoping

There is a working draft spec for CSS scoping now, a newsworthy event for the W3C. Other than a weird period where <style scoped> shipped and then was subsequently removed from the spec (and browsers), this is the furthest a scoping proposal has gotten (the Level 1 spec never got anywhere). This one comes from Miriam Suzanne. The basics: <div class="media"> <img alt="Proper alt." src="..."> <div class="content"> <p>...</p&gt..

Read more
  • 0 Comment

AWS Lambdas: Easy, Easier, Easiest

I’d say cloud functions are one of the most transformative technologies in the last bunch of years. They are (usually) cheap, scale well, secure in their inherit isolation, and often written in JavaScript—comfortable territory for front-end developers. Nearly every cloud provider offers them, but AWS Lambda was the OG and remains the leader. But also: The DX around cloud functions is just as interesting to watch as the tech behind the functions themselves. There is all..

Read more
  • 0 Comment

Supercharging Built-In Elements With Web Components “is” Easier Than You Think

We’ve already discussed how creating web components is easier than you think, but there’s another aspect of the specification that we haven’t discussed yet and it’s a way to customize (nay, supercharge) a built-in element. It’s similar to creating fully custom or “autonomous” elements — like the <zombie-profile> element from the previous articles—but requires a few differences. Customized built-in elements use an is attribute to tell the browser..

Read more
  • 0 Comment

Links on Performance IV

HTTP Caching is a Superpower — Hugh Haworth covers how the Cache-Control header is an awfully potent ingredient in web performance. I mis-read the title at first and was waiting to read about HTML caching. Hugh covers it a bit (like how you’d need to be careful doing so on something like a forum, where the content on pages changes rapidly), but I find it something that’s generally under-talked-about. As in, generally, people just don’t cache HTML at all, because it ch..

Read more
  • 0 Comment

I completely ignored the front-end development scene for 6 months. It was fine.

Have you ever fretted that front-end web development moves so fast that if you stepped away for a while, you’d be lost coming back? Rachel Smith has: The hectic pace of needing to learn one thing after the next didn’t bother me so much because when I was 26 because I was quite happy to spend much of my free time outside of my day job coding. I was really enjoying myself, so the impression that I had to constantly up-skill to maintain my career wasn’t a concern. I did..

Read more
  • 0 Comment

If I work really hard on my Open Graph images, people will share my blog posts.

Zach did that thing where each of his blog posts has a special URL with the design of social image card that is screenshat by a headless browser (like Puppeteer) and used as a true meta Open Graph image, meaning it’s displayed on Twitter, Facebook, iMessage, Slack, Discord, and whatever else supports that card look. I like it. Even though I’ve got a pretty good solution cooking now (for WordPress), the templates aren’t controlled with HTML/CSS like I wish they we..

Read more
  • 0 Comment

Accessing Your Data With Netlify Functions and React

(This is a sponsored post.) Static site generators are popular for their speed, security, and user experience. However, sometimes your application needs data that is not available when the site is built. React is a library for building user interfaces that helps you retrieve and store dynamic data in your client application.  Fauna is a flexible, serverless database delivered as an API that completely eliminates operational overhead such as capacity planning, data replica..

Read more
  • 0 Comment
Get in Touch
Close