One of the things that makes this new, tooling-heavy era of front-end development so seemingly hard to understand at first is that, while we often call things by a singular name, they tend to be actually comprised of several different interconnected pieces. The same is true for npm and the ecosystem around it. For example: Think of how we casually refer to “the internet,” even though the web itself is not a single, unified thing, but a collection of protocols, DNS, ser..

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Now that we know what npm stands for and have a super general idea of what it does and how it fits into web development, we ought to spend a little bit of time looking at the command line, because it’s how we interact with npm. Guide chapters Who the Heck is This Guide For?What the Heck Does “npm” Mean?What the Heck is the Command Line? (You are here!)What the Heck is Node?What the Heck is a Package Manager?How the Heck Do You Install npm?How the Heck Do You I..

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(This is a sponsored post.) Here’s what you need to know about Node.js (or simply Node) and how it relates to npm right off the bat: Node is JavaScript, but as a server-side language.This is possible because of V8, Chromium’s JavaScript engine, which can run on its own, outside the confines of the browser.Node and browser-based JavaScript can be very different, and have different capabilities, though both are JavaScript at their core.You don’t need to know Node to us..

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If you’re keeping score, so far in this npm guide we’ve developed a general understanding of what npm is—notably, that it stands for Node Package Manager. In the process, we’ve discussed the importance of the command line and how it’s used with npm. We also looked specifically at the “n” in npm—Node—and learned that Node is a lot like the JavaScript code we write to run on websites in a browser. In fact, Node is JavaScript; it just runs outside of the bro..

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There’s a serene warmth to the early evening sunlight peaking through rustling leaves. Artists use dappled light to create a soft, hypnotic effect. Bedford Dwellings by Ron Donoughe (2013) We can create the same sort of dappled light effect in web design, using it on photos and illustrations to add that magic touch to what might otherwise be drab walls of content to bring them back to life. I’ll give you one easy, quick way to add this effect… with just CSS. ..

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“CSS3” was a massive success for CSS. A whole bunch of stuff dropped essentially at once that was all very terrific to get our hands on in CSS. Gradients, animation/transition, border-radius, box-shadow, transform… woot! And better, the banner name CSS3 (and the spiritual umbrella “HTML5”) took off and the industry was just saturated in learning material about it all. Just look at all the “CSS3”-dubbed material that’s been published around here at CSS-Tricks o..

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Offering a table of contents block in WordPress for blog posts (or really any other type of long-ish written content) is a good idea for two reasons: It helps users jump around in the post for what they need (and hopefully doesn’t get in the way).It’s provides SEO value. The RankMath SEO plugin factors it in as part of your page score (suggesting you should have one), because of that second point. See what Google likely gives you if you do it right: It ma..

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Another year has passed and once again I’ve had the privilege of going through the Web Tools Weekly newsletter archives from the past 12 months to hunt down the front-end tools that readers found to be the most interesting during 2021. So, to kick off 2022, I’ve compiled a list of the 60 most popular tools. I’m sure there are at least one or two listed here that you can start using in your front-end projects today. Some of these front-end tools are super-practical, w..

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Stoyan is absolutely correct. As much as we all love CSS, it’s still an important player in how websites load and using less of it is a good thing. He has a neat new bookmarklet called CSS Me Not to help diagnose unnecessary CSS files, but we’ll get to that in a moment. The [problem] is that CSS is in the critical path, it blocks rendering and often even JavaScript execution. We love CSS, it’s magic, it can do unbelievable feats and fix broken UIs and manipulate im..

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