I’m actually working on a talk (whew! been a while! kinda feels good!) about just how good the world of building websites has gotten. I plan to cover a wide swath of web tech, on purpose, because I feel like things have gotten good all around. CSS is doing great, but so is nearly everything else involved in making websites,...

When you’re about to start a new website, what do you think first? Do you start with a library or framework you know, like React or Vue, or a meta-framework on top of that, like Next or Nuxt? Do you pull up a speedy build tool like Vite, or configure your webpack? There’s a great tweet by Phil Hawksworth that I bookmarked...

(This is a sponsored post.) High-velocity, online businesses produce multiple digital assets like banners, images, videos, PDFs, etc., to promote their businesses online. For such businesses, Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions are essential. These solutions help centrally store, manage, organize, search and track...

Animation on the web is often a contentious topic. I think, in part, it’s because bad animation is blindingly obvious, whereas well-executed animation fades seamlessly into the background. When handled well, animation can really elevate a website, whether it’s just adding a bit of personality or providing visual hints...

Lea Verou made a Web Component for processing Markdown. Looks like there were a couple of others out there already, but I agree with Lea in that this is a good use case for the light DOM (as opposed to the shadow DOM that is normally quite useful for web components), and that’s what Lea’s does. The output is HTML so I...

One of the best things you can do for your website in 2022 is add a service worker, if you don’t have one in place already. Service workers give your website super powers. Today, I want to show you some of the amazing things that they can do, and give you a paint-by-numbers boilerplate that you can use to start using them...

I hadn’t heard of most of the Chrome extensions that Sarem Gizaw lists as 2021 favorites. Here are my hot takes on all of them, except the virtual learning specific ones that aren’t very relevant to me. LoomOh that’s neat how it records your screen and your camera, encouraging you to do little personal walkthroughs of...

One of the coolest things I’ve been messing with in the last couple years is the CSS Paint API. I love it. I did a talk on it, and made a little gallery of my own paint worklets. The other cool thing is the prefers-color-scheme media query and how you can use it to adapt to a user’s preference for light or dark modes. Recently,...

The first time I had my breath taken away by a humble scrollbar was on this very site. When CSS-Tricks v17 rolled out with its FAT CHONKY BOI, my jaw dropped. I didn’t know you could do that on a professional site. And it would look… good?! I appreciated so much about it—the gentle gradient, the reckless rounding,...

How do you make a great website? Everyone has an answer at the ready: Flashy animations! The latest punk-rock CSS trick! Gradients! Illustrations! Colors to pack a punch! Vite! And, sure, all these things might make a website better. But no matter how fancy the application is or how dazzling the technology will ever be...

One thing people can do to make their websites better is to remember that you are not representative of all your users. Our life experiences and how we interact with the web are not indicative of how everyone interacts with the web. We must care about accessibility. Some users rely on assistive technology to navigate...

Last year, we kicked out a roundup of published surveys, research, and other findings from around the web. There were some nice nuggets in there, like a general sentiment that the web needs more documentation, Tailwind CSS dun got big, TypeScript is the second most beloved language, and that the top one million sites are...