We’ve discussed a lot about the internals of using CSS in this ongoing series on web components, but there are a few special pseudo-elements and pseudo-classes that, like good friends, willingly smell your possibly halitotic breath before you go talk to that potential love interest. You know, they help you out when you need it most. And, like a good friend will hand you a breath mint, these pseudo-elements and pseudo-classes provide you with some solutions both from within ..

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A fun deep dive from Zach. Do you have an opinion on which you should use? 1) https://website.com/foo/ 2) https://websites.com/foo The first option has a “trailing slash.” The second does not. I’ve always preferred this thinking: you use a trailing slash if that page has child pages (as in, it is something of a directory page, even if has unique content of its own). If it’s the end-of-the-line (of content), no trailing slash. I say that, but this very ..

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In my recent article about CSS underline bugs in Chrome, I discussed text-decoration-thickness and text-underline-offset, two relatively new and widely-supported CSS properties that give us more control over the styling of underlines. Let me demonstrate the usefulness of text-decoration-thickness on a simple example. The Ubuntu web font has a fairly thick default underline. We can make this underline thinner like so: :any-link { text-decoration-thickness: 0.08em; ..

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If you’re looking for a primer on CSS specificity, we’ve got that. And if you’re trying to get ahead of the game, you should be aware of CSS Cascade Layers as well. One of the ways to help get a grasp of CSS specificity is thinking terms of “what beats what” or how strong the specificity is. Manuel Matuzovic has a helpful interactive step-by-step demo. You keep clicking the “Add selector” button, and the CSS shown (and applied to the page) changes wit..

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 Nic Chan: […] the will-change property landed in major browsers in August 2015, and I’ve been on the lookout for when to use it ever since. It might seem self-evident to apply it to commonly animated properties such as transform or opacity, but the browser already classifies them as composite properties, thus, they are known as the few properties that you can already expect decent animation performance from. So, heeding the advice of the great developers who came ..

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For the past few weeks, I’ve been hiring for a senior full-stack JavaScript engineer at my rental furniture company, Pabio. Since we’re a remote team, we conduct our interviews on Zoom, and I’ve observed that some developers are not great at live-coding or whiteboard interviews, even if they’re good at the job. So, instead, we have an hour-long technical discussion where I ask them questions about web vitals, accessibility, the browser wars, and other similar topics a..

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(This is a sponsored post.) In recent years, the Jamstack methodology for building websites has become increasingly popular. Performance, scalable, and secure, it’s easy to see why it’s becoming an attractive way to build websites for developers. GatsbyJS is a static site generator platform. It’s powered by React, a front-end JavaScript library, for building user interfaces. And uses GraphQL, an open-source data query and manipulation language, to pull structured dat..

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Kinda silly sounding, isn’t it? CSS database queries. But, hey, CSS is capable of talking to other languages in the sense that it can set the values of things that they can read. Plus, CSS can request other files, and I suppose a server could respond to that request with something it requested from a database. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The idea of CSS database queries was a joke tweet going around the other day about recruiters looking for a developer who can co..

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Let’s face it: building an AA or AAA-accessible product can be quite daunting. Luckily, having an accessible product isn’t all-or-nothing. Even seemingly small improvements can have nice quality of life benefits for many people. In that spirit, here are five accessibility quick wins you can implement today. Quick Win 1: Indicate the Current Page It’s probably safe to assume that a different style is the most common way to communicate the current page of a s..

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That’s a damn one-two punch from Dave. He goes for the ultimate clickbait title¹, then follows up with a pile of epic advice for us all. If you want web browsers to get better, listen up: Complaining on Twitter sure does feel good but it doesn’t do much other than burning bridges and burning through people’s patience. I guess you may also get hit with the mute button which is probably the opposite effect you were hoping for. Despite how good or valid your complaint ..

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