Svelte and Spring Animations

Spring animations are a wonderful way to make UI interactions come to life. Rather than merely changing a property at a constant rate over a period of time, springs allow us to move things using spring physics, which gives the impression of a real thing moving, and can appear more natural to users. ..

Creating CSS APIs without JavaScript With the datasette-css-properties plugin

Simon Willison has a project called Datasette, an open source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data. I’m not sure I’m qualified to explain it, but it’s like a tool to make handling data easier and doing more — through the web — with data you have. Like making that data queryable and giving it..

Theming and Theme Switching with React and styled-components

I recently had a project with a requirement to support theming on the website. It was a bit of a strange requirement, as the application is mostly used by a handful of administrators. An even bigger surprise was that they wanted not only to choose between pre-created themes, but build their own them..

Win a Copy of Zell Liew’s Learn JavaScript Course

Zell Liew is giving away 10 free copies of his Learn JavaScript course, and entering the giveaway is pretty easy: sign up for his newsletter. I’ve personally subscribed for some time now and all I get is as occasional hand-written email with useful JavaScript gems. It’s sort of like winning no matte..

Styling Code In and Out of Blocks

We’ll get to that, but first, a long-winded introduction. I’m still not in a confident place knowing a good time to use native web components. The templating isn’t particularly robust, so that doesn’t draw me in. There is no state management, and I like having standard ways of handling that. If I’m..

Whack-a-Mole: The CSS Edition

We’ve seen the checkbox hack and how it can be used to build a complete state machine in CSS. Today, we’ll take that line of thought a step further and build a simple game of Whack-A-Mole, where the player needs to react quickly to win … all without a touch of JavaScript. This might seem a little s..

Some Recent Videos About Websites That Are Pretty Good

Here’s a little hodgepodge of videos I’ve recently bookmarked (and watched). I couldn’t decide if each one of them should be a separate blog post or if I should do this combined list post thing. If I had a lot more to say about each video I would have split them off, but I went with the combined pos..

Custom Properties as State

Here’s a fun idea from James Stanley: a CSS file (that presumably updates daily) containing CSS custom properties for “seasonal” colors (e.g. spring is greens, fall is oranges). You’d then use the values to theme your site, knowing that those colors change slightly from day to day. This is what I ..

Creating Arrays in Hasura

Hasura is one of my favorite ways to create a managed GraphQL API for my applications. I find it easy and straightforward as well as suitable for a wide range of use cases. However, since working with Hasura, I’ve seen the same question come up again and again: how should we make an array? Given the..

The End of Adobe Flash

I come to bury Flash, not to praise it, writes Matt May in this excellent thread about the end of Adobe Flash. Not so long ago, web designers used Flash to create striking visuals and animations and games. But shortly after that, it began to replace HTML and CSS which caused a ton of accessibility p..