When starting a new year, it is important to make sure we are excited about new things coming our way! And here are some very exciting CSS features we can hope to see, and use, soon! I am particularly excited about :has, because it finally provides an option I have wanted for some time, being able to apply CSS based on what is inside of an element! This example, from the article, would apply a border to any a element that has an img inside of it:
a:has( > img ) { border: 1px solid #000; }
Sweet!
Speaking of exciting CSS, Flexbox continues to grow and excite, but also frustrate, because of its staggered, and varying, implementation across various browsers. Philip Walton writes about Normalizing Cross-browser Flexbox Bugs, and even created a Github repo called Flexbugs to help catalog issues, and ideally, solutions!
Continuing with a couple features from that first article, and adding more, Razvan Caliman presents on Cutting-edge CSS Features for Graphics: CSS Masking, Blending and Shapes. Yeah!
Skype Live Voice Translation Gets Public Launch. Yes, after you register, and only on couple variations of Windows set-ups, but nonetheless, it is an impressive claim, I can’t wait to try it and see if it does a better job at translation than Google Translate or Bing Translator… (Both of which are impressive, just not quite great…)
The hamburger menu… Still hate the name, but I personally think that, if it is working correctly, it is a nice way to roll menus out of the way on small screens, but still keep them pretty accessible. Two articles that conducted tests have a grab bag of results. (Note that the tests conducted in the second article are actually included in the first article, and I would actually argue on that one the burger icon was really hard to see, and that that could explain at least part of the poor performance…)
Interesting responsive image situation I hadn’t really thought of yet: Trying to change alt and figcaption based on the image being shown. A few comments seemed to think it doesn’t matter, which could be the case on some images, but others (mostly art-direction, maybe) I would say it certainly could matter.
And speaking of responsive, here is a nice discussion about preparation for a responsive project. So often, I find, the developer gets a series of mocks, definitely a large-screen, probably a small-screen, and maybe a medium-screen, and then it is up to the developer to fill-in the gaps. Would be nice to see an entire “plan” in place before development actually starts…
Sticking with the responsive theme for another minutes, here are three presentations covering four very hot responsive design topics from Andreas Bovens.
And now sticking with Andreas for another minute, he writes another responsive article, this time about how @media queries inside of your SVG files can be a great way to control the behavior of your SVG images.
And finally moving beyond responsive (but still sticking with it too!), Aaron Gustafson recently released his book Adaptive Web Design on the web, for free…
A fantastically-detailed article on Pinned Apps (websites that act like native apps by letting users create icons on their mobile device home screens), including why this is a good practice, basic steps for getting started, and questions about moving forward.
Another fantastically-detailed article, this time on AngularJS, converting a prototype to a functioning product. I still haven’t dipped my toes into Angular, but am (somewhat) eager to try… :-)
Do you Grunt or Gulp? Lots of us do now-days, but here is a suggestion that we simply do it all in Node, including several how-tos… Thoughts?
Leave it to Paul Lewis to author an article titled The Applied Science of Runtime Performance, walking us through a pretty slick animation he created, keeping it all under 60 fps, of course…
And speaking of 60 fps, Ariya Hidayat writes a bit more on the topic, with Hardware Accelerated CSS: The Nice vs The Naughty, discussing what we should, and shouldn’t, try to leverage the GPU for…
And finally, for all those people out there that at some point in the past have screamed that Bill Gates should eat [excrement], would watching him drink it be good enough? ;-)
Happy reading,
Atg