Today we have a loose coupling between the front end and the back end of web applications. They are usually developed by separate teams, and keeping those teams and the technology in sync is not easy. To solve part of this problem, we can “fake” the API server that the back end tech would normally create and develop as if the API or endpoints already exist.… Read article “Don’t Wait! Mock the API”
Browser DevTools are indispensable for us front end developers. In this article, we’ll take a look at the Computed tab, a small corner of the DevTools panel that shows us big things, like how relative CSS values are resolved. We’ll also see how inheritance fits into the browser’s style computation process.… Read article “Computed Values: More Than Meets the Eye”
Monica Powell shared a really cool trick the other day:
Ajax, right? Ugh. Now we’re in client-side rendered site territory, which isn’t great for performance, speed, or resiliency.
After you hit the wall of unremovable complexity, any “advances” are a shell game, making tradeoffs that get passed down to the user … you get “advances” by shifting where the complexity lives.
This kind of counting and displaying could be hard-coded, but that’s no fun. JavaScript could do this job as well. But CSS? Hmmmm. Can it? CSS has counters, so we can certainly count the number of buttons. But how do we calculate only up to a certain button? Turns out … Read article “Displaying the Current Step with CSS Counters”
Hard-stop gradients are one of my favorite CSS tricks. Here, Marcel Moreau combines that idea with CSS grid to solve an issue that’s otherwise a pain in the butt. Say you have like a 300px right sidebar on a desktop layout with a unique background color. Easy enough. But then say you want that background color to stretch to the right edge of the browser window even though the grid itself is width-constrained. Tricker.… Read article “How-to guide for creating edge-to-edge color bars that work with a grid”
Being able to disable code in production is a power that many developers aren’t aware of. And that’s a shame. The ability to switch off some portions—or even complete features—of the codebase can dramatically improve the software development process by allowing best practices that can shorten feedback cycles and increase the overall quality.
I think of grids as arrangements of rectangles with vertical and horizontal lines running through. And they are, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still do clever things in how we place things on those grids and what we do with the elements afterwards.
The text-decoration-thickness property in CSS sets the stroke thickness of the decoration line that is used on text in an element. The text-decoration-line value needs to be either underline, line-through, or overline to reflect the thickness property.