The “Gray Dead Zone” of Gradients

Erik D. Kennedy notes an interesting phenomenon of color gradients. If you have a gradient between two colors where the line between them in the color space goes through the zero-saturation middle, you get this “gray dead zone” in the middle. It’s a real thing. See the gray middle here: CodePen E..

How to Map Mouse Position in CSS

Let’s look at how to get the user’s mouse position and map it into CSS custom properties: --positionX and --positionY. We could do this in JavaScript. If we did, we could do things like make make an element draggable or move a background. But actually, we can still do similar things, but not use an..

CSS Border Font

Every letter in this “font” by Davor Suljic is a single div and drawn only with border. That means employing some trickery like border-radius with exotic syntax like border-radius: 100% 100% 0 0 / 37.5% 37.5% 0 0; which rounds just the top of an element with a certain chillness that works here. Plus..

Next.js on Netlify

(This is a sponsored post.) If you want to put Next.js on Netlify, here’s a 5 minute tutorial¹. One of the many strengths of Next.js is that it can do server-side rendering (SSR) with a Node server behind it. But Netlify does static hosting not Node hosting, right? Well Netlify has functions, and t..

Weekly Platform News: Reduced Motion, CORS, WhiteHouse.gov, popups, and 100vw

In this week’s roundup, we highlight a proposal for a new element, check the use of prefers-reduced-motion on award-winning sites, learn how to opt into cross-origin isolation, see how WhiteHouse.gov approaches accessibility, and warn the dangers of 100vh. Let’s get into the news! The new ..

The Things I Add to Tailwind CSS Right Out of the Box

In every project where I use Tailwind CSS, I end up adding something to it. Some of these things I add in every single project. I’ll share these with you, but I’m also curious what y’all are adding to your tailwind.css files. I’ll start with myself. In each project: I define -webkit-tap-highlight-..

An Interactive Guide to CSS Transitions

A wonderful post by Josh that both introduces CSS transitions and covers the nuances for using them effectively. I like the advice about transitioning the position of an element, leaving the original space it occupied alone so it doesn’t result in what he calls “doom flicker.” Six hundred and fifty ..

Ensuring the correct vertical position of large text

Tobi Reif notes how the position of custom fonts set at very large font sizes can be super different, even in the same browser across operating systems. The solution? Well, you know how there are certain CSS properties that only work within @font-face blocks? They are called “descriptors” and font-d..

How We Improved the Accessibility of Our Single Page App Menu

I recently started working on a Progressive Web App (PWA) for a client with my team. We’re using React with client-side routing via React Router, and one of the first elements that we made was the main menu. Menus are a key component of any site or app. That’s really how folks get around, so making ..

Boost app engagement with chat, voice, and video APIs

Sendbird is a service for helping you add social features to your app. Wanna add in-app chat? Sendbird does that. Wanna add in-app voice or video calls? Sendbird does that. Here’s how I always think about stuff like this. Whatever the thing you are building is, you should specialize in the core of..