Unlike JavaScript, there is no simple built-in method in CSS to access an element’s width and height. But using some (call it hacky) modern CSS techniques, we can get our hands on the number and even use it.
Let’s look at a cool animated nav effect (from a recent post by Emil Kowalski) that uses CSS `clip-path` to move the highlighted nav item around. It’s an interesting look at this CSS feature and adds a lot of polish to a simple idea.
Svelte 5 introduces significant improvements in reactivity, state management, and prop handling, maintaining its user-friendly Developer Experience (DX).
You should know that in-app browser can and do literally inject JavaScript into the websites you visit with them with tracking scripts from the app you’re inside of. And that’s just one thing that sucks about them.
Danila Fedorin’s article about unique UX features in blogs is fun. Here’s some extra thoughts, resources, and opinions.
Having a named block of styles to apply in CSS can be useful, and newfangled Style Queries are pretty close to that. We look at one use case here, how Sass did mixins better, and hope for a native solution.
CSS allows setting different overflow behaviors for x and y directions. It doesn’t actually work with the `hidden` value, but it does with `clip`!
CLIs are so hot right now.
Over the past few years, it seems like the rate at which new CLI tools are being written has picked back up again, accelerating after seeing relatively little activity between ~1995 and ~2015.
Gabe Venberg
Why? Gabe thinks it might be proliferation of tooling written in Go and Rust, and the fact that they both have healthy package ecosystems.
Ahmad Shadeed on CSS display: contents; — a feature that makes the DOM pretend that element just isn’t there (but it’s children are). Anything you use it for requires specific accessibility testing, but it can be quite useful. There are lots of use-cases here many of which boil down to “sometimes I want all these elements to be siblings, and sometimes I want wrappers around some of them”. I like Jeremy’s idea that HTML web component wrappers use this to remove themselves from equation, if the only purpose of that web component is augmenting the content already within it.
Little boosts of front-end development news, information, and advice — right to your feed reader of choice.
RSS
11) If possible, try to do a few different types of programming earlier in your career. This doesn’t have to mean switching jobs: most companies are doing several different kinds of programming at once. So like if you’re starting in a webdev company, try some frontend, some backend, some operations, some database stuff, and so forth. This helps you learn, but far more importantly increases your chances of finding a kind of software work that you really really like.
Hillel Wayne
It’s not that modals are all automatically bad, it’s that, as Adrian Egger says, “modals are the crutch of the inarticulate design and developer” and they “are easily replaced with other patterns that are less jarring.” on the dedicated site for this crusade: modalzmodalzmodalz.com. Adrian’s personal site is sweet, too.
Here's our page on guest writing. It's a win-win-win!
Frontend Masters Donates to open source projects. $363,806 contributed to date.