Get that desk more cuter, fam. Amy (@sailorhg) has this perfectly cute minisite with assorted desktop backgrounds, fonts, editor themes, keyboard stuff, and other accessories. These rainbow cables are great.

And speaking of fonts, we’re still plucking away at this microsite for coding fonts and it’s ripe for contribution if anyone is into it.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

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Get that desk more cuter, fam. Amy (@sailorhg) has this perfectly cute minisite with assorted desktop backgrounds, fonts, editor themes, keyboard stuff, and other accessories. These rainbow cables are great.

And speaking of fonts, we’re still plucking away at this microsite for coding fonts and it’s ripe for contribution if anyone is into it.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

The post compute cuter appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

You can support CSS-Tricks by being an MVP Supporter.

I updated my personal website the other day. Always a fun project since it’s one of the few where it’s 100% just me. It’s my own personal playground with no other goal than making the site represent me to have a little fun. It’s not a complete re-write, just some new paint.

I thought I’d document little bits of it here just to hone in on some of the bits of trickery in the spirit of learning through sharing.

Hoefler Fonts

I think the Inkwell family is super cool. I like mix and matching not just the weights but the serif and sans-serif and caps vs not.

I used Inkwell in the last design as well, but I was worried that it was a little too jokey for blog post body copy. My writing is extremely casual, but not always, and Inkwell is way too jovial for serious topics. I went with Ideal Sans for body copy last time, but the pairing with Inkwell felt a little off.

This time I went with Whitney for general body copy, which is still pretty lighthearted, but works when the copy is more straight toned.

Blogroll

If you’re going to zebra-stripe a table, you’d do something like…

tr:nth-child(even) {
  background-color: var(--color-1);
}
tr:nth-child(odd) {
  background-color: var(--color-2);
}

What if you wanted to rotate four colors though? It’s still :nth-child trickery, selecting every four, and then offsetting. Here, I’ll do it with list items in Sass (the nesting is nice, not having to repeat the selector):

li {
  &:nth-child(4n) a {
    color: $blue;
  }
  &:nth-child(4n + 1) a {
    color: $yellow;
  }
  &:nth-child(4n + 2) a {
    color: $red;
  }
  &:nth-child(4n + 3) a {
    color: $purple;
  }
}

That’s what I did to build the colorized blogroll:

Note the Sass used above… I used Sass because it was already in use on the project. All I had to do was open CodeKit and the processing was ready-to-go.

Oh, and blogrolls are cool again.

Chill YouTube

I used this click-to-load-YouTube-(at all) technique which is still extremely clever. Having an <iframe> that behaves just like a YouTube embed would but only loading a simple static image (rather than heaps and heaps of resources) is great for performance and behaves essentially the same as a normal YouTube embed does.

<iframe
  width="560"
  height="315"
  src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Y8Wp3dafaMQ"
  srcdoc="<style>*{padding:0;margin:0;overflow:hidden}html,body{height:100%}img,span{position:absolute;width:100%;top:0;bottom:0;margin:auto}span{height:1.5em;text-align:center;font:48px/1.5 sans-serif;color:white;text-shadow:0 0 0.5em black}</style><a href=https://www.youtube.com/embed/Y8Wp3dafaMQ?autoplay=1><img src=https://img.youtube.com/vi/Y8Wp3dafaMQ/hqdefault.jpg alt='Video The Dark Knight Rises: What Went Wrong? – Wisecrack Edition'><span>▶</span></a>"
  frameborder="0"
  allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture"
  allowfullscreen
  title="The Dark Knight Rises: What Went Wrong? – Wisecrack Edition"
></iframe>

Custom Post Types everywhere

I’m a big fan of giving myself structured data to work with. In WordPress-land, that often means Custom Post Types paired with something like the Advanced Custom Fields plugin for just the right data needed for the job.

Then I can loop over stuff and output it however I want. This isn’t that fancy, but it opens up whatever future doors I want to a lot easier.

Build your own bio

There is nothing fancy about how this works:

I literally made 18 <div> elements (3 lengths * 2 styles * 3 code types = 18) and swap between with a bit of JavaScript that calculates a class string based on the current choices, selects that class, and unhides it while hiding the rest.

$(".bio-choices input").on("change", function () {
  var lengthClass = ".bio-" + $("input[name=length]:checked").attr("id");
  var styleClass = ".bio-" + $("input[name=style]:checked").attr("id");
  var codeClass = ".bio-" + $("input[name=code]:checked").attr("id");
  var selector = lengthClass + styleClass + codeClass;

  $(".bio").hide();
  $(selector).show();
});

jQuery! That’s what was already on the site, and the site also uses the jQuery version of FitVids for responsive videos — so I figured I’d just leave it all be.

If I was going to re-write these bits of the site, I’d probably rip out jQuery and use this for FitVids. Then I’d find a way to only have three bios (maybe six if I can’t find a nice way to handle first vs. third person with word swaps) and then get the rest by automatically converting the formats somehow (maybe some cloud function if I had to).

ztext.js

I used ztext for the header! It’s this kinda stuff that makes the web feel extra webby to me. I’m not sure I’d do something with quite so much movement on a site like CSS-Tricks (because people visit it more often and the time-on-site is higher). But for a site that people might land on once in a blue moon, it has the right amount of cheerful levity, I think.

Background SVG

I was stoked to see the SVG Backgrounds site get an upgrade lately. I was playing around in there and was like YES, I’m doing this.

I went with a background-attachment: fixed look, which I think I like. I also added the slideout footer effect on desktop, but I’m less sold that it’s working here. It’s more fun when the background changes, and that doesn’t happen here. I’ll probably either change the background of the footer, or rip the effect out.

Filter trick for links

Some of the different sections on the site use a different primary highlight color, and I’m having the links in those sections follow that color. That might be questionable (perhaps all links should be blue) but, so far, I think it makes decent sense (they still have hover and focus styles). When you have a variety of colors and styles for interactive elements though, it often means that you have to create special alternate styles for hover and focus. That could mean crafting bespoke color alterations for each color. Not the end of the world, but I really like this little trick for interactive styles that ends up with a consistent look across all colors:

a:focus, .button:focus,
a:hover, .button:hover {
  filter: brightness(120%);
}

Anyway! This was just a couple hours of paint on this site. Mostly because blogrolls were the CodePen Challenge that week. But I can never touch a site I haven’t in a while and just do one thing. I get sucked in and gotta do more!

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Twenty-plus years ago, tables were the main way web pages were created in HTML. It gave web builders consistent control of constructing pages with some “design.” No longer did sites only have to be top-to-bottom in a linear manner — they could be set up with columns that align left-to-right and top-to-bottom. Back then, it was seen as a huge breakthrough.

Tables, however, were never designed to lay out pages and, in fact, have all sorts of problems when used that way today. It was a convenient hack, but at the time, a very welcome one, particularly for those trying to achieve a super-specific layout that previous ways couldn’t handle.

Fast-forward to modern days and it’s now obvious that were tons of issues with the table layout approach. Accessibility is a big one.<table>, <th>, <tr> and <td> elements aren’t exactly accessible, especially when they’re nested several levels deep. Screen readers — the devices that read web content and serve as a measure of accessibility compliance — struggle to parse them into cohesive blocks of content. That’s not to say tables are bad; they simply were never intended as a layout mechanism.

Check out this table layout. Feel free to run it through VoiceOver or whatever screen reading software you have access to.

Yes, that example looks very much like a typical website layout, but it’s crafted solely with a table. You can see how quickly it becomes bloated and inaccessible the very moment we start using it for anything other than tabular data.

So after more than 20 years of being put through the ringer, you might think we should avoid tables altogether. If you’ve never shipped a table-based layout, you’ve undoubtedly heard war stories from those of us who have, and those stories are never kind. It’s like we’ve sort of made tables the “Internet Explorer of HTML elements.”

But that’s not totally fair because tables do indeed fill a purpose on the web and they are indeed accessible when they are used correctly.

Tables are designed to handle data that is semantically related and is best presented in a linear-like format. So, yes, we can use tables today in the year 2020, and that will likely continue to be true many years from now.

Here’s a table being used to display exactly what it’s intended to: tabular data!

With the push toward web standards in the early 2000s, tables were pushed aside as a layout solution in favor of other approaches, most notably the CSS float property. Designers and developers alike rejoiced because, for the first time, we had a true separation of concerns that let markup do the markup-y things it needs to do, and CSS to do the visual stuff it needs to do. That made code both cleaner and way easier to maintain and, as a result, we could actually focus on true standards, like accessibility, and even other practices, like SEO.

See (or rather hear) the difference in this example?

Many of us have worked with floats in the past. They were originally designed to allow content to flow around images that are floated either to the left or right, and still be in the document flow. Now that we’ve gotten newer layout features — again, like grid and flexbox — floats, too, have sort of fallen by the wayside, perhaps either because there are better ways to accomplish what they do, or because they also got the same bad rap as tables after being (ab)used for a long time.

But floats are still useful and relevant! In fact, we have to use them for the shape-outside property to work.

A legitimate float use case could be for wrapping content around a styled <blockquote>.

CSS features like grid, flexbox, and multicolumn layouts are among the wonderful tools we have to work with these days. With even more layout possibilities, cleaner and more accessible code, they will remain our go-to layout approaches for many years to come.

No hacks or extra code in this flexbox example of the same layout we’ve looked at throughout this article:

So, next time you find yourself considering tables or floats, reach for them with confidence! Well, when you know the situation aligns with their intended use. It’s not like I’m expecting you to walk away from this with a reinvigorated enthusiasm for tables and floats; only that, when used correctly, they are perfectly valid techniques, and even continue to be indispensable parts of our overall toolset.

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Maybe you’ve already heard of (or even worked with!) KendoReact. It’s popped up in some of my day-to-day conversations, especially those about working with design systems and React. You could think of it as a component library like Bootstrap or Material Design, except the components in KendoReact are far more robust. These are interactive, state-driven components ready to start building full-blown UI’s right out of the gate (not to mention, if you want to use Bootstrap as the theme, you absolutely can).

Whenever you’re thinking about using a UI library, you need to think about the styling capabilities. Are you able to really express your brand with these? Were they meant to be styled? What is the styling experience going to be like?

Fortunately, KendoReact really makes styling a citizen of the entire UI library.

KendoReact is a collection of UI components for building sites. It’s a pretty massive one. Over 80 by my count, and that doesn’t include the child components of heavy lifters like the <Grid /> family.

Here’s one, the <DropDownList />, and just using the default theme (even that is optional):

If I want to style this, I don’t need any special proprietary skills, I can just use CSS. Here’s me forcing a whole new look onto it with different colors and fonts, with just some simple CSS:

But hey, maybe you want to do something a bit more systematized than cowboying some random override CSS. I don’t blame you. Good news: KendoReact themes are Sass-powered. So you can control a lot of the colorization and styling just by changing a few Sass variables.

They have a whole theme builder you can use right on their site that spits out exactly what you need. Say you want to start from their base theme and go from there, select the Default theme:

Then you can play with all the colors in the UI to your liking. Here’s me poking at a theme with some CSS-Tricks colors.

I can download that from the site which will give me the variables as a SCSS file that I can apply before the default theme in my build (there is a great tutorial covering how to do that over on the Telerik blog). Plus, it gives me the whole dang CSS file of the theme if I want to use it that way, which is simple and quick. Here’s me using their conversational chat widget with that theme:

Again, I can start with Bootstrap, I can start with Material, I can start with their default theme, or I can start from scratch. Styling is totally up to me. Each theme has its perks and, as you might expect, are super flexible as far as configuring colors, fonts, and other design elements.

If you really get into this, of course you’ll be consulting their docs and finding your way around there (it’s nice to know they have really comprehensive docs). It’s all pretty straightforward though, you’ll do great! If you need to get going building out a state-driven interactive interface quickly without sacrificing any customizability or power, you’ll find KendoReact is your friend.

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Back in July 2020, I got an email from James0x57 (I always try to refer to people by their name, but I think I get the sense they prefer to go by screen name) that says:

The entire world of branching conditional logic and bulk feature toggling for custom CSS properties is possible and only exists because of a tiny footnote in the CSS spec that has gone unnoticed.

That line is:

Note: While <declaration-value> must represent at least one token, that one token may be whitespace.

In other words, --foo: ; is valid.

If you’re like me, this doesn’t read as some massive revelation that unlocks huge doors, but to smarter people, like James0x57, it does! We started working on a draft blog post, but for various reasons it didn’t make it all the way here. One of those reasons is that I just wasn’t getting it. Call me dense, sorry James0x57. One demo they sent me when I asked super dumbed-down example was helpful though, and I think it’s kind of clicked for me. Here’s my interpretation:

Let me attempt to explain:

• The breakpoint we’ve set up here is a 900px max-width media query. You can see that’s where the variable --mq-sm flops from initial to an empty space value.
• When the browser window is wider than 900px, that the value of --mq-sm is initial.
  • That makes the variable --padding-when-small contain two values — initial and 2rem —which, I guess is invalid.
  • So when we actually set the padding and call that variable like padding: var(--padding-when-small, var(--padding-when-large)), the second value (the “fallback”) is used because the first value is invalid.
• When the browser window is narrower than 900px, the --mq-sm value is a space.
  • That makes the variable --padding-when-small value "(space)2rem" which, I guess is valid.
  • That means when we actually set the padding and call that variable like padding: var(--padding-when-small, var(--padding-when-large)), the first value is used.

So, now we can flip the padding between two values by changing a placeholder variable.

That clicks for me.

When see this as simply changing a single value, it’s almost like uh, ok, you’ve found a really complex way to change some padding, but you could have just changed the padding in the media query. But the trick is that now we have this placeholder variable that has changed and we can key into that to change unlimited other values.

We could have a single media query (or set of media queries) in our CSS that only toggles these placeholder variables and we use elsewhere to toggle values. That could be nice and clean compared to sprinkling media queries all over the CSS. It’s a proper toggle in CSS, like a form of IF/THEN logic that we haven’t quite had before.

James0x57 extended that thinking to all the logical possibilities, like AND, OR, XOR, NAND, NOR, and XNOR, but that lost me again. Not really a computer scientist over here. But you can follow their work if you want to see real world usage of this stuff.

This variable stuff is wild and gets very confusing. I noted in a possibly recent (but the byline says 2015?) article from Patrick Brosset that covers some tricky CSS custom properties stuff. For example, fallbacks can be infinitely nested, like:

color: var(--foo, var(--bar, var(--baz, var(--are, var(--you, var(--crazy)))));

Also, valid values for CSS custom properties can have commas in them like this:

content: var(--foo, one, two, three);

Is that really just one fallback with a single one, two, three value? This is rather mind-bending.

Anyway, fast-forward a bunch of months now, and CSS trickery master Lea Verou has set her sights on this whitespace-in-custom-properties stuff:

What if I told you you could use a single property value to turn multiple different values on and off across multiple different properties and even across multiple CSS rules?

It’s the same trick! In Lea’s example, though, she uses this ability to:

• set variations on a button, and
• set four different properties rather than one.

This really hones in on why this is the concept is so cool.

Lea points to some downsides:

There is no way to say “the background should be red if --foo is set and white otherwise”. Some such conditionals can be emulated with clever use of appending, but not most.

And of course there’s a certain readability issue: --foo: ; looks like a mistake and --foo: initial looks pretty weird, unless you’re aware of this technique.

We’re certainly entering the next era of how custom properties are used. First, we used them like preprocessor variables. Then we started seeing more cascade and fallback usage. Next, we used it alongside JavaScript more frequently. Now this.

There is even more writing about keeping CSS preprocessor variables around, not so much for the times when you only need what they can do, but for the things that only they can do, like having their color values manipulated.

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Back in August 2020, when the content-visiblity property in CSS trickled its way into Chrome browsers, Una Kravets and Vladimir Levin wrote about it and we covered it. The weirdest part is that to get the performance value out of it, you pair it with contain-intrinsic-size on these big chunks of the page where you insert some arbitrary guess at a height. I wrote:

That part seems super weird to me. Just guess at a height? What if I’m wrong? Can I hurt performance? Can (or should) I change that value at different viewports if the height difference between small and large screens is drastic?

Jake Archibald and Das Surma just did a video on all this and it helped clarify that a bit. You can see at about 7:30 in just how confusing it is. Jake used this massive HTML spec page as a demo, and made <section> wrappers around big chunks of HTML, and applied:

section {
  content-visibility: auto; /* this is the thing that delays painting */
  contain-intrinsic-size: 1px 5000px; /* this is the guess at the height of the content, and also saying width doesn't matter */
}

Apparently that 5000px isn’t the height of the element, it’s the size of the content of that element. I guess that matters because it will push that parent element taller by that number, unless the parent element overrides that with a height of its own. The magic comes from the fact that the browser will only paint¹ the first section (where it’s very likely the viewport isn’t over 5000px tall) and defer the painting on the rest. Sorta like lazy loading, but everything rather than media alone. It assumes the next section is 5000px tall, but once the top of it becomes visible, it will actually get painted and the correct height will be known. So assuming your page is just big ass blocks on top of each other, using an extremely large number should work fine there. Godspeed if your site is more complicated than that, I guess.

It’s a good video and you should watch it:

This is yet another thing where you have to inform the browser about your site so that it can Do Performance Good™. It is information that it can figure out by itself, but not until it has done things that have a performance cost. So you have to tell it up front, allowing it to avoid doing certain types of work. With responsive images, if we give images a srcset attribute with images and tell the browser in advance how big they are, including a sizes attribute with information about how our CSS behaves, it can do calculations ahead of time that only download the best possible image. Likewise, with the will-change property in CSS, we can tell the browser when we’re going to be doing movement ahead of time so it can pre-optimize for that in a way it couldn’t otherwise. It’s understandable, but a little tiresome. It’s like we need a stuff-you-need-to-know.manifest file to give browsers before it does anything else — only that would be an additional request!

The accessibility implications are important too. Steve Faulkner did a test applying content-visibility: auto to images and paragraphs:

The content is visually hidden, but in both JAWS and NVDA the hidden <img> is announced but the content of the <p> element is not. This has to do with how the img and the p element content are represented in the browser accessibility tree: The img is exposed in the accessibility tree with the alt text as the accessible name. The content of the p element is not present in the accessibility tree.

He notes that content hidden this way should not be available to screen readers, per the spec. I could see it going either way, like hide it all as if it was display: none, meaning none of it is in the accessibility tree. Or, leave it all in the accessibility tree. Right now it’s a tweener where you might see a bunch of stray images in the accessibility tree without any other context than their alt text. This is an interesting example of new tech going out with more rough edges than you might like to see.

Speaking of alt text, we all know those shouldn’t be empty when they represent important content that needs to be described to someone who can’t see them. They should be like paragraphs, says Dave:

I finally made the simplest of all connections: alt text is like a paragraph. Word pictures. Basic I know, but it helps me contextualize how to write good alt text as well as source order of my code.

I don’t want to be overly negative here! The performance gains for setting up a long-scrolling page with content-visibility is huge and that’s awesome. Being able to inform the browser about what is OK not to paint in two lines of code is pretty nice.

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There are so many static site generators (SSGs). It’s overwhelming trying to decide where to start. While an abundance of helpful articles may help wade through the (popular) options, they don’t magically make the decision easy.

I’ve been on a quest to help make that decision easier. A colleague of mine built a static site generator evaluation cheatsheet. It provides a really nice snapshot across numerous popular SSG choices. What’s missing is how they actually perform in action.

One feature every static site generator has in common is that it takes input data, runs it through a templating engine, and outputs HTML files. We typically refer to this process as The Build.

There’s too much nuance, context, and variability needed to compare how various SSGs perform during the build process to display on a spreadsheet — and thus begins our test to benchmark build times against popular static site generators.

This isn’t just to determine which SSG is fastest. Hugo already has that reputation. I mean, they say it on their website — The world’s fastest framework for building websites — so it must be true!

This is an in-depth comparison of build times across multiple popular SSGs and, more importantly, to analyze why those build times look the way they do. Blindly choosing the fastest or discrediting the slowest would be a mistake. Let’s find out why.

The tests

The testing process is designed to start simple — with just a few popular SSGs and a simple data format. A foundation on which to expand to more SSGs and more nuanced data. For today, the test includes six popular SSG choices:

• Eleventy
• Gatsby
• Hugo
• Jekyll
• Next
• Nuxt

Each test used the following approach and conditions:

• The data source for each build are Markdown files with a randomly-generated title (as frontmatter) and body (containing three paragraphs of content).
• The content contains no images.
• Tests are run in series on a single machine, making the actual values less relevant than the relative comparison among the lot.
• The output is plain text on an HTML page, run through the default starter, following each SSG’s respective guide on getting started.
• Each test is a cold run. Caches are cleared and Markdown files are regenerated for every test.

These tests are considered benchmark tests. They are using basic Markdown files and outputting unstyled HTML into the built output.

In other words, the output is technically a website that could be deployed to production, though it’s not really a real-world scenario. Instead, this provides a baseline comparison among these frameworks. The choices you make as a developer using one of these frameworks will adjust the build times in various ways (usually by slowing it down).

For example, one way in which this doesn’t represent the real-world is that we’re testing cold builds. In the real-world, if you have 10,000 Markdown files as your data source and are using Gatsby, you’re going to make use of Gatsby’s cache, which will greatly reduce the build times (by as much as half).

The same can be said for incremental builds, which are related to warm versus cold runs in that they only build the file that changed. We’re not testing the incremental approach in these tests (at this time).

The two tiers of static site generators

Before we do that, let’s first consider that there are really two tiers of static site generators. Let’s call them basic and advanced.

• Basic generators (which are not basic under the hood) are essentially a command-line interface (CLI) that takes in data and outputs HTML, and can often be extended to process assets (which we’re not doing here).
• Advanced generators offer something in addition to outputting a static site, such as server-side rendering, serverless functions, and framework integration. They tend to be configured to be more dynamic right out of the box.

I intentionally chose three of each type of generator in this test. Falling into the basic bucket would be Eleventy, Hugo, and Jekyll. The other three are based on a front-end framework and ship with various amounts of tooling. Gatsby and Next are built on React, while Nuxt is built atop Vue.

My hypothesis

Let’s apply the scientific method to this approach because science is fun (and useful)!

My hypothesis is that if an SSG is advanced, then it will perform slower than a basic SSG. I believe the results will reflect that because advanced SSGs have more overhead than basic SSGs. Thus, it’s likely that we’re going to see both groups of generators — basic and advanced — bundled together, in the results with basic generators moving significantly quicker.

Let me expand on that hypothesis a bit.

Linear(ish) and fast

Hugo and Eleventy will fly with smaller datasets. They are (relatively) simple processes in Go and Node.js, respectively, and their build output will reflect that. While both SSG will slow down as the number of files grows, I expect them to remain at the top of the class, though Eleventy may be a little less linear at scale, simply because Go tends to be more performant than Node.

Slow, then fast, but still slow

The advanced, or framework-bound SSGs, will start out and appear slow. I suspect a single-file test to contain a significant difference — milliseconds for the basic ones, compared to several seconds for Gatsby, Next, and Nuxt.

The framework-based SSGs are each built using webpack, bringing a significant amount of overhead along with it, regardless of the amount of content they are processing. That’s the baggage we sign up for in using those tools (more on this later).

But, as we add thousands of files, I suspect we’ll see the gap between the buckets close, though the advanced SSG group will stay farther behind by some significant amount.

In the advanced SSG group, I expect Gatsby to be the fastest, only because it doesn’t have a server-side component to worry about — but that’s just a gut feeling. Next and Nuxt may have optimized this to the point where, if we’re not using that feature, it won’t affect build times. And I suspect Nuxt will beat out Next, only because there is a little less overhead with Vue, compared to React.

Jekyll: The odd child

Ruby is infamously slow. It’s gotten more performant over time, but I don’t expect it to scale with Node, and certainly not with Go. And yet, at the same time, it doesn’t have the baggage of a framework.

At first, I think we’ll see Jekyll as pretty speedy, perhaps even indistinguishable from Eleventy. But as we get to the thousands of files, the performance will take a hit. My gut feeling is that there may exist a point at which Jekyll becomes the slowest of all six. We’ll push up to the 100,000 mark to see for sure.

The results are in!

The code that powers these tests are on GitHub. There’s also a site that shows the relative results.

After many iterations of building out a foundation on which these tests could be run, I ended up with a series of 10 runs in three different datasets:

• Base: A single file, to compare the base build times
• Small sites: From 1 to 1024 files, doubling each to time (to make it easier to determine if the SSGs scaled linearly)
• Large sites: From 1,000 to 64,000 files, double on each run. I originally wanted to go up to 128,000 files, but hit some bottlenecks with a few of the frameworks. 64,000 ended up being enough to produce an idea of how the players would scale with even larger sites.

Click or tap the images to view them larger.

Summarizing the results

A few results were surprising to me, while others were expected. Here are the high-level points:

• As expected, Hugo was the fastest, regardless of size. What I didn’t expect is that it wasn’t even close to any other generator, even at base builds (nor was it linear, but more on that below.)
• The basic and advanced groups of SSGs are quite obvious when looking at the results for small sites. That was expected, but it was surprising to see Next is faster than Jekyll at 32,000 files, and faster than both Eleventy and Jekyll at 64,000 files. Also surprising is that Jekyll performed faster than Eleventy at 64,000 files.
• None of the SSGs scale linearly. Next was the closest. Hugo has the appearance of being linear, but only because it’s so much faster than the rest.
• I figured Gatsby to be the fastest among the advanced frameworks, and suspected it would be the one to get closer to the basics. But Gatsby turned out to be the slowest, producing the most dramatic curve.
• While it wasn’t specifically mentioned in the hypothesis, the scale of differences was larger than I would have imagined. At one file, Hugo was approximately 170 times faster than Gatsby. But at 64,000 files, it was closer — about 25 times faster. That means that, while Hugo remains the fastest, it actually has the most dramatic exponential growth shape among the lot. It just looks linear because of the scale of the chart.

What does it all mean?

When I shared my results with the creators and maintainers of these SSGs, I generally received the same message. To paraphrase:

The generators that take more time to build do so because they are doing more. They are bringing more to the table for developers to work with, whereas the faster sites (i.e. the “basic” tools) focus their efforts largely in converting templates into HTML files.

I agree.

To sum it up: Scaling Jamstack sites is hard.

The challenges that will present themselves to you, Developer, as you scale a site will vary depending on the site you’re trying to build. That data isn’t captured here because it can’t be — every project is unique in some way.

What it really comes down to is your level of tolerance for waiting in exchange for developer experience.

For example, if you’re going to build a large, image-heavy site with Gatsby, you’re going to pay for it with build times, but you’re also given an immense network of plugins and a foundation on which to build a solid, organized, component-based website. Do the same with Jekyll, and it’s going to take a lot more effort to stay organized and efficient throughout the process, though your builds may run faster.

At work, I typically build sites with Gatsby (or Next, depending on the level of dynamic interactivity required). We’ve worked with the Gatsby framework to build a core on which we can rapidly build highly-customized, image-rich websites, packed with an abundance of components. Our builds become slower as the sites scale, but that’s when we get creative by implementing micro front-ends, offloading image processing, implementing content previews, along with many other optimizations.

On the side, I tend to prefer working with Eleventy. It’s usually just me writing code, and my needs are much simpler. (I like to think of myself as a good client for myself.) I feel I have more control over the output files, which makes it easier for me to get 💯s on client-side performance, and that’s important to me.

In the end, this isn’t only about what is fast or slow. It’s about what works best for you and how long you’re willing to wait.

Wrapping up

This is just the beginning! The goal of this effort was to create a foundation on which we can, together, benchmark relative build times across popular static site generators.

What ideas do you have? What holes can you poke in the process? What can we do to tighten up these tests? How can we make them more like real-world scenarios? Should we offload the processing to a dedicated machine?

These are the questions I’d love for you to help me answer. Let’s talk about it.

The post Comparing Static Site Generator Build Times appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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You would think that hiding content with CSS is a straightforward and solved problem, but there are multiple solutions, each one being unique.

Developers most commonly use display: none to hide the content on the page. Unfortunately, this way of hiding content isn’t bulletproof because now that content is now “inaccessible” to screen readers. It’s tempting to use it, but especially in cases where something is only meant to be visually hidden, don’t reach for it.

The fact is that there are many ways to “hide” things in CSS, each with their pros and cons which greatly depend on how it’s being used. We’re going to review each technique here and cap things off with a summary that helps us decide which to use and when.

How to spot differences between the techniques

To see a difference between different ways of hiding content, we must introduce some metrics. Metrics that we’ll use to compare the methods. I decided to break that down by asking questions focused on four particular areas that affect layout, performance and accessibility:

1. Accessibility: Is the hidden content read by a screen reader?
2. Document flow: Will the hidden element affect the document layout?
3. Rendering: Will the hidden element’s box model be rendered?
4. Event triggers: Does the element detect clicks or focus?

Now that we have our criteria out of the way, let’s compare the methods. Again, we’ll put everything together at the end in a way that we can use it as a reference for making decisions when hiding things in CSS.

Method 1: The display property

We kicked off this post with a caution about using display to hide content. And as we established, using it to hide an element means that the element is not generated at all. It’s in the DOM, but never actually rendered.

The element will still show in the markup, if you inspect the page you will be able to see the element. The box model will not generate nor appear on the page, which also applies to all its children.

And what’s more, if the element has any event listeners — say a click or hover — they won’t register at all. And as we’ve discussed already, all the content will be ignored by screen readers. Here, we have two visible buttons and one hidden with display: none. All three buttons have click events but only the two visible buttons will render and register the clicks.

Display is the only property that will affect image request firing. If an image tag (or parent element) has a display property set to none either through inline CSS or by selector, the image will be downloaded. On the other hand, if the image is applied with a background property, it won’t be downloaded.

This is the case because the parser hasn’t applied the CSS when an HTML document is parsed and it encounters an <img> tag. On the other hand, when we apply the image to an element with a background property, the image won’t be downloaded because the parser hasn’t applied the CSS where the image is called. This behavior is matched across all latest browsers. The only exception is IE 11, which will download images in both cases.

Method 2: The visibility property

If an element’s visibility property is set to hidden, then the element is “visually hidden.” Being “visually hidden” sounds a lot like what display: none does, but it’s incredibly different in that the element is generated and rendered, but invisible. This means that the element’s box model is present, giving it dimensions that continue to occupy space on the screen even though it doesn’t appear to be there.

Imagine you’re wearing an invisible cloak that makes you invisible to others, but you are still able to bump into things. You’re physically there, even if you’re invisible to the human eye.

But that’s where the differences between “visually hidden” and “not displayed” end. In fact, elements hidden with visibility and display behave the same in terms of accessibility and event triggers. Invisible elements are inaccessible to screen readers and won’t register events, as we see in the following demo that’s exactly the same as the last example, but merely swaps display: none with visibility: hidden.

Method 3: The opacity property

The opacity property only affects the visual aspect of the element. If we set an element’s opacity to zero, the element will be fully transparent. Again, it’s a lot like visibility: hidden where we’re draping an invisible cloak on the element where it’s invisible, but still physically present.

In other words, what we have is a hollow, transparent element that acts like any other element, only it’s invisible. Sounds a lot like the visibility method, right? The difference is that a fully transparent element is still accessible to a screen reader and can register events, like clicks, as we see in the following example.

Method 4: The position property

Pushing an element off-screen with absolute positioning is another way developers often hide things. Using top and left, we can push the element so far off the screen that there’s no way it will ever be seen. It’s like hiding the cookie jar outside of the house so the kids (or maybe you!) can’t find them.

“Absolute” is the key word here. If we set position to absolute, an element is taken out of the document flow which is a way of saying it no longer adheres to its natural position in the DOM. In other words, the page doesn’t reserve any space for it, which knocks the element out of order visually, positioning it to it’s nearest positioned element if there is one, or the document root if nothing else.

We take advantage of absolute positioning by taking the “hidden” element out of the document flow and offsetting it toward the top-left with values of -9999px.

.hidden {
  position: absolute;
  top: -9999px;
  left: -9999px;
}

If the hidden element contains focusable content, the page will scroll to the element when it is in focus, creating a sudden jump.

Method 5: The “visually hidden” class

So far, the position method is the closest we’ve seen to an accessibility-friendly way to hide things in CSS. But the problem with focusable content causing sudden page jumps isn’t great. Another approach to accessible hiding combines absolute positioning, the clip property and hidden overflow. Scott O’Hara blogged it back in 2017.

.visually-hidden:not(:focus):not(:active) {
  clip: rect(0 0 0 0); 
  clip-path: inset(50%);
  height: 1px;
  overflow: hidden;
  position: absolute;
  white-space: nowrap; 
  width: 1px;
}

Let’s break that down.

We need to remove the element from the document flow. The best way to do this is by using position: absolute. This will remove the element, but we won’t push it off the screen.

.visually-hidden {
  position: absolute;
}

We can hide the element by setting the width and height property to zero. Unfortunately, that won’t work because some screen readers will ignore elements with zero width and height. What we can do is set it to the second-lowest value, 1px. That means the content will easily overflow the space, so we also need overflow: hidden to make sure it doesn’t visually spill over.

.visually-hidden {
  height: 1px;
  overflow: hidden;
  position: absolute;
  width: 1px;
}

To hide that one-pixel square, we can use the CSS clipping property. It is perfect for this situation, as it doesn’t affect screen readers. The content is there but, again, is visually hidden. The thing to note is that clip was deprecated in favor of clip-path but is still needed if we need to support older versions of Internet Explorer.

.visually-hidden {
  clip: rect(0 0 0 0);
  clip-path: inset(50%);
  height: 1px;
  overflow: hidden;
  position: absolute;
  width: 1px;
}

Another piece of the “visually hidden” class puzzle is to address smushed off-screen accessible text, an oddity that removes white-spacing between words, causing them to be read aloud like one big string of words. For example, “Welcome back home” will be read out as “Welcomebackhome.”

A simple solution to this problem is to set the white-space: nowrap:

.visually-hidden {
  clip: rect(0 0 0 0);
  clip-path: inset(50%);
  height: 1px;
  overflow: hidden;
  position: absolute;
  white-space: nowrap;
  width: 1px;
}

And, finally! The last thing to consider is to allow certain element with native focus and active sites to display when they are in focus, while continuing to prevent other elements, like paragraphs, from displaying. We can use the :not pseudo-selector for that.

.visually-hidden:not(:focus):not(:active) {
  clip: rect(0 0 0 0);
  clip-path: inset(50%);
  height: 1px;
  overflow: hidden;
  position: absolute;
  white-space: nowrap;
  width: 1px;
}

Honorable mentions

There are even more methods than the five we’ve covered. For example, the text-indent property can push text off the screen like the position method:

.hidden {
  text-indent: -9999em;
}

Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t jive with RTL writing modes. That makes it less adaptable than other solutions we’ve covered.

Another method is using transform to scale or move the element out of the way. It works the same — visually only — like opacity.

.hidden {
  transform: scale(0);
}

Let’s put everything together!

We got to a solution that will visually hide content but still be accessible. Then, should you stop using display: none? No, this is still the best way to hide an element completely (visually and accessibly).

That said, It is worth mentioning that if you want to achieve an opposite result — hide something from the screen reader, the aria-hidden="true" attribute will hide the content from screen readers, but not visually.

With that, here is a complete table that compares all of the approaches. Use it to guide your decisions on how to hide content next time you find yourself in that situation.

The post Comparing Various Ways to Hide Things in CSS appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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Imagine this scenario: You get an email from the design team. It contains a link to a high-fidelity prototype of a React app they want you to build. You click the link and get ready to inspect the work only to find… the components have already been built.

Huh?

It might sound like a dream or wishful thinking, but that’s exactly what Anima 4.0 does. For years, Anima has worked to streamline the handoff between design and development, and with it’s latest update, designers are brought fully into the fold by turning designs into developer-friendly code.

Let’s repeat that again, but more specifically: Anima 4.0 lets you cherry-pick elements straight from a design and get fully written React components that just work.

The easiest design handoff ever

Anima isn’t your typical design-to-development workflow. It actually feels a little inaccurate to say that it facilitates handoffs because development is part of the process all along.

Consider what’s involved in a design handoff. Sure, it varies by organization, but they generally flow something like this:

• Design creates high-fidelity mockups.
• Design creates a package of the work, possibly including assets, like images and fonts.
• Design and development meet up and talk things out, possibly with an interactive prototype.
• Development gets started.
• Development demos the work.
• Design requests changes.
• Development makes those changes.
• And on and on…

With Anima 4.0, that process is more like this:

• Design creates code-based prototypes.
• Development works alongside, with the ability to reference prototypes, grab assets, generate code, and test things out.

So, what we have is less of a handoff and more of a productive and collaborative process that saves boatloads of time… and frustration to boot.

No more “How does this thing work?”

That’s probably the question I ask the most with any design handoff. Front-enders have to be aware of so many things and that often leads to lengthy meetings and numerous emails about how things are supposed to work.

• Where does this link to?
• Does this have an active state?
• Will this image be SVG?
• …you know how it goes

That’s where Anima shines. The deliverable is not just a flat design, but a fully interactive prototype. All of the links, states, assets, and anything else you can think of is right there for you to view and interact with, including animations and effects.

Oh, and if your design is responsive (which, of course, it is), it’s easy as cake to see how it behaves at any breakpoint, whether you’re using the integrated browser in the design application or in the Anima prototype.

Getting the responsiveness of a design down pat is probably one of the more time-consuming parts of a project. I’ve had so many back-and-forth discussions with designers that would have never happened if it was possible to test the design in a real browser during design in the design tooling that designers are probably already using, including Sketch, Figma and Adobe XD. And because Anima generates all the code, that would have saved a lot of my time trying to get the breakpoints just right. It would have also saved the designers time without having to document that behavior and answer all my questions.

No more “That’s not how it was designed!”

Not only do you have a prototype that realistically simulates a live site, but you get all the code you need! And no, this isn’t like the HTML and CSS generators you’ve probably seen in the past. Anima outputs extremely clean code, complete with semantic HTML elements and modern CSS features. Here’s the CSS I got from a quick design of a hero component I threw together:

@import url("https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/meyer-reset/2.0/reset.min.css");
.hero {
  background-color: transparent;
  flex-shrink: 0;
  height: 1037px;
  position: relative;
  width: 505px;
}
.hero-container {
  background-color: var(--royal-blue);
  height: 1024px;
  left: 0px;
  position: absolute;
  top: 0px;
  width: 505px;
}
.shape-circle {
  background-color: transparent;
  height: 444px;
  left: 283px;
  position: absolute;
  top: 593px;
  width: 222px;
}
.shape-dots {
  background-color: transparent;
  height: 646px;
  left: 43px;
  position: absolute;
  top: 189px;
  width: 418px;
}
.shape-triangle {
  background-color: transparent;
  height: 332px;
  left: 0px;
  position: absolute;
  top: 79px;
  width: 269px;
}
.video {
  background-color: transparent;
  height: 294px;
  left: 43px;
  overflow: hidden;
  position: absolute;
  top: 278px;
  width: 418px;
}
:root {
  --royal-blue: rgba(67,83,255,1.0);
}

Lots of precise numbers in there that normally would have taken some time-consuming guesswork. And those are class names and custom properties I can actually pronounce! Will I change any of that code? Maybe! But at least I was part of the process all along, and have a solid head start that I would have otherwise spent time writing myself.

But, the real gem here is that Anima 4.0 goes where no other platform has gone because it can…

Turn anything into a functional React component

All it took was a single click and here’s what I got:

import React from "react";

function App(props) {
  return (
    <div className={`hero ${props.className || ""}`}>
      <div className="hero-container"></div>
      <img
        className="shape-circle"
        src="https://anima-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/projects/5f8e220bdff56f27ee5b7cc7/releases/5f9082de53033dac763b4b6c/img/desktop-hd-learn-path-2-DC8E0494-121C-40B1-8AE1-3C8BEAC833A7.png"
      />
      <img
        className="shape-triangle"
        src="https://anima-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/projects/5f8e220bdff56f27ee5b7cc7/releases/5f9082de53033dac763b4b6c/img/desktop-hd-home-triangle2x-BA81FE1D-AE06-47A2-91D5-20EC51D5F0F8.png"
      />
      <img
        className="shape-dots"
        src="https://anima-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/projects/5f8e220bdff56f27ee5b7cc7/releases/5f9082de53033dac763b4b6c/img/desktop-hd-home-rectangle2x-4EFFE4A8-CAD1-47C7-A175-D3256F2E5124.png"
      />
      <div className="video">
        <iframe
          style="border: 0; pointer-events: auto;"
          id="ytplayer"
          type="text/html"
          width="100%"
          height="100%"
          src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rk71kS4cY7E?rel=0"
          frameborder="0"
          allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"
          mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen"
          msallowfullscreen="msallowfullscreen"
          oallowfullscreen="oallowfullscreen"
          webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen"
        ></iframe>
      </div>
    </div>
  );
}

export default App;

This is real — and brand new in Anima 4.0! And I can do this with any element in the Anima interface. Select an element, mark it as a component, then generate the code.

You can expect the same for Vue and Angular in future releases.

Why this is a big deal

Perhaps it’s obvious by now, but I see tons of benefits from where I sit as a front-end developer. Getting HTML and CSS is great, but having a tool like this that integrates with modern frameworks and code practices is more than impressive — it’s a game-changer. There’s a lot less context switching and time spent on things that I’d rather spend doing better work (or getting started on the next project)!

Like many of you, I straddle the line between design and development and see how this fills a lot of the gaps on the design side of things as well. I can’t get over the in-app browser previews. All of the time spent design QA’ing responsive breakpoints instantly opens up when that stuff can be done at the point of design — not to mention the time saved with the code it generates.

Here’s a quick video of moving from Adobe XD to a real rendered React components in the browser:

Anima 4.0 is available… today

As in, it literally shipped today, October 27. In fact, there’s a virtual party happening and you’re invited. I’m told it’s going to be an epic geeky event with great folks, demos, and even gifts. Hope to see you there!

The post Anima 4.0: Go Straight From Design to React in the Design Handoff appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

You can support CSS-Tricks by being an MVP Supporter.