Last year, Elise Blanchard did some great historical research and discovered that blue hyperlinks replaced black hyperlinks in 1993. They’ve been blue for so long now that the general advice I always hear is to keep them that way. There is powerful societal muscle memory for “blue text is a clickable link.” BUT WHY?! On a hot tip, Elise kept digging and published a follow-up and identified the source of blue hyperlinks: […] it is Prof. Ben Shneiderman wh..

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The File System Access API is a web API that allows read and write access to a user’s local files. It unlocks new capabilities to build powerful web applications, such as text editors or IDEs, image editing tools, improved import/export, all in the frontend. Let’s look into how to get started using this API. Reading files with the File System Access API Before diving into the code required to read a file from the user’s system, an important detail to keep ..

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Kilian Valkhof: […] Mobile Safari increases the default font-size when you switch a website from portrait to landscape. On phones that is, it doesn’t do it on iPad. Safari has been doing this for a long time, as a way to improve readability on non-mobile optimized websites. While undoubtedly useful in a time when literally no website was optimized for mobile, it’s significantly less helpful nowadays. […] Text size increasing randomly in a single situation is exactl..

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Every now and then, I find that I’ve accumulated a bunch of links about various things I find interesting. Like React and JavaScript! Here’s a list of nine links to other articles about them that I’ve been saving up and think are worth sharing. Source: “Good advice on JSX conditionals” by Vladimir Klepov Seed Funding for RemixRemix went open source after taking funding which seems like a solid move. It’s a for-now-React-only framework, so I think it’s..

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Imagine you have an element with a multi-value CSS property, such as transform: optional custom property values: .el { transform: translate(100px) scale(1.5) skew(5deg); } Now imagine you don’t always want all the transform values to be applied, so some are optional. You might think of CSS optional custom property values: .el { /* |-- default ---| |-- optional --| */ transform: translate(100px) var(--transform); } But surprisingly using optiona..

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I was just writing in my “What’s new in since CSS3?” article about recent and possible future changes to CSS colors. It’s weirdly a lot. There are just as many or more new and upcoming ways to define colors than what we have now. I thought we’d take a really quick look. First, a major heads up. This stuff is so complicated. I barely understand it. But here are some aspects: Before all this upcoming change, we only had RGB as a color model, and everything deal..

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This is a wonderful roundup from Jeremy, who I picture circling January 1, 2022, in red marker on a giant paper calendar back in 2008 and patiently counting the days. See, there was a little smattering of internet drama back in 2008 (weird, right?) where Hixie kind of “officially speculated” that HTML5 would take 19 years to make it to full “recommended” status (2003-2022). Seems like most web developers at the time were quite certain HTML, and perhaps the internet..

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I recently rewrote one of my projects — Minimal Theme for Twitter — as a Next.js Chrome extension because I wanted to use React for the pop-up. Using React would allow me to clearly separate my extension’s pop-up component and its application logic from its content scripts, which are the CSS and JavaScript files needed to execute the functionality of the extension. As you may know, there are several ways to get started with React, from simply adding script tags to us..

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(This is a sponsored post.) Cloudinary is a host for your digital assets like images and video. If you don’t already know them, you should, because you can build it into the asset management you almost certainly need to do if you run any size of website. Cloudinary helps you serve the assets as efficiently as technologically possible, meaning optimization, resizing, CDN hosting, and goes further in allowing interesting transforms on those assets. If you already use it, u..

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Say you have a bitmap graphic — like a JPG, PNG, or GIF — and you wish it was vector, like SVG. What do you do? You could trace it yourself in some kind of design software. Or tools within design software can help. (I don’t wanna delay the lede here, there is a free online tool for it now called SVGcode.) I remember when Adobe Illustrator CS2 dropped in 2005 it had a feature called “Live Trace” and I totally made it my aesthetic. I used to make business cards..

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