(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..

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Nathan Hardy shares when things “clicked”: Reflecting back on this time, I think there are a few key concepts that were vital to things finally all making sense and fitting together. These were:• The Box Model (e.g. box-sizing, height, width, margin, padding)• Layout (e.g. display)• Document Flow and Positioning (e.g. position, top, left, etc.) I called this my ah-ha moment a few years back: For me, it was a couple of concepts that felt like an unl..

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SKWAR — Heydon Pickering made a hard-edged monospaced variable font. The axes are width and weight. Twenty Bits I Learned About Making Fonts Book — Dan Cederholm has been making fonts, like Captain Edward and Ship Whistle and has turned his learnings into a book.The perfect cross-platform serif and sans-serif font stacks — Daniel Aleksandersen has lots of details about pre-installed fonts across operating systems, like: Mac and iOS also come with Helvetica Neue preinst..

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I think this is good advice from Silvestar Bistrović: An enabling selector is what I call a selector that does a job without disabling the particular rule. The classic example is applying margin to everything, only to have to remove it from the final element because it adds space in a place you don’t want. .card { margin-bottom: 1rem; } /* Wait but not on the last one!! */ .parent-of-cards :last-child { margin-bottom: 0; } You might also do… /* "..

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You know like https:? That’s a URL Scheme. You’re probably familiar with the concept, thanks to others that come up in front-end development, like mailto:. You can actually make your own, which is pretty cool. There are a lot of them. I find that custom URL schemes come up the most with apps that are both web apps and native apps. For example, two that I use nearly every day: Notion and Figma. I love that the things I work on in these apps have URLs. URLs for everythin..

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A bonafide CSS trick if there ever was one! @ShadowShahriar created a CodePen demo that uses pseudo-elements to place commas between list items that are displayed inline, and the result is a natural-looking complete sentence with proper punctuation. CodePen Embed Fallback How it works The trick? First, it’s to make an unordered list an inline element with no markers or spacing: ul { padding: 0; margin: 0; display: inline; list-style-type: none; } ..

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After the fragmentation effect, I am going to tackle another interesting animation: the blob! We all agree that such effect is hard to achieve with CSS, so we generally reach for SVG to make those gooey shapes. But now that the powerful Paint API is available, using CSS is not only possible, but maybe even a preferable approach once browser support comes around. Here’s what we’re making. It’s just Chrome and Edge support for now, so check this out on one of those..

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That’s a heartwrenching title from Michael Williamson. I believe it though. It’s kinda like a maximized version of the blogging phenomenon where if you work on a post for weeks it’ll flop compared to a post that’s some dumb 20-minute thought. Or how your off-handed remark to some developer at the perfect time might cause some huge pivot in what they are doing, changing the course of a project forever. For Mike, it was a 3,000 line-of-code side project that had more im..

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What options do you have if you want the body background in a fixed position where it stays put on scroll? background-attachment: fixed in CSS, at best, does not work well in mobile browsers, and at worst is not even supported by the most widely used mobile browsers. You can ditch this idea completely and let the background scroll on small screens using media queries. Or get around it with a small fix. I suppose we could call it a “hack” since it’s a workaround in co..

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When I think about what front-end development really is and feels like, this is at the heart of it: designing around a huge set of unknowns, and really embracing that notion as a strength of the web rather than a weakness or unfortunate truth we have to work around. Cathy Dutton digs into this with real code and examples over on A List Apart. A recurring theme is the idea that content (certainly an unknown, since content changes) can and should drive design decisions. It ..

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