TypeScript is a wonderful tool for writing JavaScript that scales. It’s more or less the de facto standard for the web when it comes to large JavaScript projects. As outstanding as it is, there are some tricky pieces for the unaccustomed. One such area is TypeScript discriminated unions. Specifically, given this code: interface Cat { weight: number; whiskers: number; } interface Dog { weight: number; friendly: boolean; } let animal: Dog | Cat; …many devel..

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(This is a sponsored post.) Design systems are an entire job these days. Agencies are hired to create them. In-house teams are formed to handle them, shipping them so that other teams can use them and helping ensure they do. Design systems aren’t a fad, they are a positive evolution of how digital design is done. Backlight is the ultimate all-in-one development tool for design systems. I think it’s interesting to start thinking about this at the end. What’s the best-..

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Say you have three HTML classes, and a DOM element should only have one of them at a time: <div class="state-1"></div> <div class="state-2"></div> <div class="state-3"></div> Now your job is to rotate them. That is, cycle through classes on an HTML element. When some event occurs, if the element has state-1 on it, remove state-1 and add state-2. If it has state-2 on it, remove that and add state-3. On the last state, remove it, and cy..

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Have you ever tried to make CSS borders in a repeating zig-zag pattern? Like where a colored section of a website ends and another differently colored section begins — not with a straight line, but angled zig zags, rounded humps, or waves. There are a number of ways you could do this sort of CSS border, dating all the way back to using a background-image. But we can get more modern and programmatic with it. In this article, we’ll look at some modern CSS mask techniques to..

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Say you’ve got a <Card /> component. It’s highly likely it shouldn’t be butted right up against any other components with no spacing around it. That’s true for… pretty much every component. So, how do you handle component spacing in a design system? Do you apply spacing using margin directly on the <Card />? Perhaps margin-block-end: 1rem; margin-inline-end: 1rem; so it pushes away from the two sides where more content natural flows? That’s a little..

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A little bit of animation on a site can add some flair, impress users, and get their attention. You could have them run, no matter where they are on the page, immediately when the page loads. But what if your website is fairly long so it took some time for the user to scroll down to that element? They might miss it. You could have them run all the time, but perhaps the animation is best designed so that you for sure see the beginning of it. The trick is to start the animat..

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You know that joke, “Two front-end developers walk into a bar and find they have nothing in common”? It’s funny, yet frustrating, because it’s true. This article will present three different perspectives on accessibility in web design and development. Three perspectives that could help us bridge the great divide between users and designers/developers. It might help us find the common ground to building a better web and a better future. Photo by Alexander Na..

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There is a little legwork to do if you plan on using SVG in WordPress. For fair-enough reasons, WordPress doesn’t allow SVG out of the box. SVG is a markup syntax that has lots of power, including the ability to load other resources and run JavaScript. So, if WordPress were to blanket-ly allow SVG by default, users even with quite limited roles could upload SVG and cause problems, like XSS vulnerabilities. But say that’s not a problem for your site and you just use SVG..

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Another aspect of web components that we haven’t talked about yet is that a JavaScript function is called whenever a web component is added or removed from a page. These lifecycle callbacks can be used for many things, including making an element aware of its context. Article series Web Components Are Easier Than You ThinkInteractive Web Components Are Easier Than You ThinkUsing Web Components in WordPress is Easier Than You ThinkSupercharging Built-In Elements Wi..

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(This is a sponsored post.) I remember vividly a period early in my coding career when I began to feel that things were changing away from what I knew, and headed towards a more complex set of tools and practices, anchored in the command line and something called npm. This is the first part of a beginner’s guide where we cover the broad topic of Node Package Manager, or npm. We often take those three little letters—npm—for granted as we type them into the command lin..

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