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React is actually a bit of an outlier with state management. While it has first-class tools like useState and Context, you’re more own your own for reactive global state. Here’s David Ceddia with “React State Management Libraries and How to Choose” which does a good job of talking about the options...

Ever since the dawn of time, humanity has dreamed of having more control over form elements. OK, I might be overselling it a tiny bit, but creating or customizing form components has been a holy grail of front-end web development for years. One of the lesser-heralded, but most powerful features of ..

This blog post by Steve Fenton came across my feeds the other day. I’d never heard of HERE maps before, but apparently they are embeddable somehow, like Google Maps. The problem is that you zoom and and out of HERE maps with the scrollwheel. So imagine you’re scrolling down a page, your cursor (or f..

I love it when standards evolve from something that a bunch of developers are already doing, and making it easier and foolproof. Kitty Giraudel is onto that here with skip links, something that every website should probably have, and that has a whole checklist of things that we can and do screw up: ..

Geoff shared this idea of a checkerboard where the tiles disappear one-by-one to reveal an image. In it, an element has a background image, then a CSS Grid layout holds the “tiles” that go from a filled background color to transparent, revealing the image. A light touch of SCSS staggers the animatio..

In “What the heck, z-index??,” Josh Comeau makes the analogy of layer groups in design software like Photoshop or Figma to stacking contexts in CSS. If you’ve got an element in a layer group A in Photoshop that is below layer group B, there is nothing you can do to push a child of A on top of anythi..

Hey, look at that, An Event Apart is back with a new event taking place online from April 19-21. That’s three jam-packed days of absolute gems from a stellar lineup of speakers! Guess what? I’m going to be there, along with my ShopTalk Show co-host Dave Rupert doing a live show which could include ..

Up until 2020, blend modes were a feature I hadn’t used much because I rarely ever had any idea what result they could produce without giving them a try first. And taking the “try it and see what happens” approach seemed to always leave me horrified by the visual vomit I had managed to create on the..

AVIF has been getting a lot of tech press, but Jon Sneyers is hot on JPEG XL (which makes sense as he’s the “chair of the JPEG XL ad hoc group in the JPEG Committee”). According to Jon’s comparison, JPEG XL comes out on top on everything, except low fidelity compression, and offers progressive rende..

In this week’s round-up, prefers-contrast lands in Safari, MathML gets some attention, :is() is actually quite forgiving, more ADA-related lawsuits, inconsistent initial values for CSS Backgrounds properties can lead to unwanted — but sorta neat — patterns. The prefers-contrast: more media query is..