Today’s Readings

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The other day a co-worker shared the link for okayNav, and I have to agree: although dependent on jQuery, it certainly is one of the “okayest responsive navigation” menus I have seen…

walks us through properly using ARIA roles and writing more accessible markup.

And takes us on a nuts-to-bolts tour of HTTP/2, from an explanation and brief history, through the pros and cons, to how to make the switch.

created some very slick-looking CSS borders. This is what happens when you need more box-shadow…

A few quick tips on adding, styling, and protecting the appearance of telephone links on your sites.

Gutenberg – A Meaningful Web Typography Starter Kit

Looks pretty well thought-out…

But if you’d prefer the DIY approach, A Responsive Guide to Type Sizing may be more your speed…

react-native-nw-react-calculator let’s you use one code source to create apps that work as an iOS app, Android app, desktop app, and in a browser. Wow.

If you too have reservations over Google’s AMP Project, maybe CPP will look a little better?

And finally, whether you like AMP or not, you have to like Google’s proposed HTTP header, save-data, which developers can look for to send “lighter”, and thus faster, experiences to users that have activated the Save Data feature…

Happy reading,
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Today’s Readings

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Great (albeit simple, which is actually part of what makes it great!) example of sort-order progressive enhancement from , starting with select elements and enhancing with nifty drag-and-drop functionality, while still using the update process from the non-drag-and-drop version…

You may already be familiar with appendChild and insertBefore, but wants to help you also get familiar with insertAdjacentHTML. Thank you Dudley, quite handy!

Not sure how many Vim users there are out there, but hopefully these 10 Time-Saving Tips for UNIX Vim Beginners will help you, even if you are not a beginner anymore…

Don’t know about you, but one of my biggest gripes with Bootstrap is all the damned floats… Yeah, I know they are a really solid way to create layouts, but they feel so old to me… I mean, Flexbox has some pretty amazing support now-days… So Bulma, the CSS framework based on Flexbox looks very enticing to me.

And speaking of Flexbox frameworks, Flexo is a 100% CSS, Flexbox grid system! (Hopefully 12 columns is enough for you and your projects…)

Okay, here is just a bunch more Flexbox stuff from Smashing Magazine, you go read… ;-)

The future of loading CSS by demonstrates a progressive approach to page rendering, allowing for improved perceived page load speeds, and pretty ideally designed for modular design & development…

Then here is an interesting follow-up from Jake. As Jake says, not practical, and probably shouldn’t even be done, but it’s always interesting to push envelopes and see how various options affect things.

Service Worker Precache is a module for generating a service worker that precaches resources. The module is designed for use with gulp or grunt build scripts, though it also provides a command-line interface. The module’s API provides methods for creating a service worker and saving the resulting code to a file.

Very powerful!

Gotta do HTML emails? Sorry sod… But maybe this Responsive HTML email framework will help! Great-looking boilerplate.

Or this Responsive Emails without Media Queries article!

Boy did this site performance article send me down a rabbit hole… Into Ilya’s presentation, into my repo, onto my dev server, and finally this site makes fair use of rel-prefetch. :-) My Analytics, at least for now, says that preconnect, prefetch, and prerender don’t make much sense for me, but it is something I will keep an eye on!

And finally, beyond the wonderful lampooning of such an aggressively arrogant buffoon, trumpdonald.org is a wonderful technical achievement!

Happy reading,
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Today’s Readings

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For better or worse, Google’s AMP project is out there now, and as long as it is a thing, then hearing the news that WordPress is AMP-ready, is for the better…

And since we’re already drinking the WordPress Kool-Aid, let’s take a run through “just a few” WPMU DEV posts on how to set-up, tighten, and customize, a WordPress project:

And since we’re already drinking the Build Tool Kool-Aid, let’s have a look at 6 PostCSS plugins for Developers.

And once you’ve got your CSS all nicely modernized, make sure it is as lean as it can be by running it through TestMyCSS. Does a nice job of picking up long selectors, duplicate statements, duplicate selectors, and more! Does not do such a nice job of fetching CSS files from HTTPS, and I don’t see an “upload” option. Bummer, but still a great tool!

And if you’d like, here are a few more CSS tips and tricks, via a very cute delivery method…

Several great options for implementing automatic art-directed cropping for responsive images.

Three more death-blows to Flash…

  1. as the New York Times switches from Flash to HTML5 video players,
  2. media-delivery powerhouse Brightcove switches from Flash to HTML5, and
  3. some company called Google promises to stop running Flash display ads in 2017!

And with the continuing demise of Flash, let us remember that another aging comrade-in-arms is also soon dying: IE. And with that death will come much suddenly-superfluous code… But how to even start that clean-up? Fret not, as SitePoint is here to help with a few post-IE spring cleaning tips!

From The Paciello Group, comes a short note on the use of alt="" and the title attribute on img elements. TL;DR: Use alt, who cares about title?

One more from The Paciello Group, and one more regarding accessibility, here are a few basic screen reader commands for accessibility testing. You know, like we all do, right?

Okay, one more accessibility item, though really more of a browser/testing/support item, is this page of HTML5 elements, all with minimal styling, meant to help with cross-device support testing, as well as a single document to test your new CSS on.

If you’re looking at add a CSP security header to a project, getting the options just right can be a bit of a task, leaving you with either security holes or content/functionality breaking. So let walk you through fine-tuning your CSP header.

And finally, I think someone (read: Not it!) should convert this list of untranslatable words into a Lorem Ipsum-style content generator… :-)

Happy reading,
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Today’s Readings

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Pure CSS tribute to Mr. Dylan… Thank you, Mr. Keith… :-)

Nice walk-through of JS‘s classList from . Support is certainly looking good, with only IE10, 11 and Mobile partially supporting it.

continues the theme with these 5 Ways that CSS and JavaScript Interact That You May Not Know About.

Was wondering how long this would take:

Pressure.js… is a JavaScript library that makes dealing with Apple’s Force Touch and 3D Touch simple.

Great collection of Service Worker resources & notes from (and not just because he mentions me… :-P ).

Okay, one more from Jeremy, as he has one more note on Handling redirects with a Service Worker…

And as long as we’re talking about cutting-edge JS, here is an entire battery of articles on getting started, being productive, and moving beyond, with React…

  1. From SitePoint, Building a React Universal Blog App: A Step-by-Step Guide, by , starts from the very beginning (creating the directory), provides the starting package.json file, and marches right through code sample after code sample, to get you completely set-up and running!
  2. From CSS Tricks, I Learned How to be Productive in React in a Week and You Can, Too, by , offers a fresh set of eyes, debunks a few myths about React, and also walks through code sample after code sample to demonstrate how to get up and running!
  3. Then shares 9 things every React.js beginner should know; I always feel like I should read these kinds of lists before I get started with a tech, but then it often makes no sense until I start digging in… You decide your approach.
  4. Next, starts a series on Performance Engineering with React. Always good to know performance DOs from the get-go, I feel.
  5. From Egghead.io, hopefully these React and Redux Cheatsheets will come in handy during early navigation!
  6. And finally, comes MERN, which “is a scaffolding tool which makes it easy to build isomorphic apps using Mongo, Express, React and NodeJS.” Pretty sweet!!

Whew!

Nice series about the Web Animations API. The entire series is complete, so you can binge-read start to finish as soon as you finish reading this! ;-)

is so cool… She wrote an article simply titled The `background-clip` Property and its Use Cases, which indeed begins by explaining background-clip, then showing a few very primitive explanation demos. All very nice. Then she proceeds to just slam us in the face with increasingly awesome examples by adding CSS filters and creating skeuomorphic form controls… Amazing…

And finally, reader shares his article How to Speed Up Your WordPress Blog & Make it Insanely Fast. I think most of these are well-covered, but it cannot hurt to reiterate something so important!

Happy reading,
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Today’s Readings

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I recently referenced the Chrome Extension DevTools Author, which lets you theme certain panels. My experience wasn’t perfect, but nice job author of Author, , for reaching out and helping me resolve the issue!

Just in time for the official DevTools dark theme to hit the streets… :-/

I really like the floating label pattern, especially with no JS required! Maximum usability, minimal overhead…

walks us through CSS filters in this awesome live-coding presentation!

And if you’re digging the CSS filters, cssFilters.co is a really fun way to learn more!

From comes a crapload of useful SVG links!

A pretty thorough collection of responsive typography tidbits, culminating in a Sass plugin to help you write less code. There are a few other useful bits scattered throughout the comments, if you can tippy-toe your way around the piles left by the troll…

Then walks us through using SVG to create responsive hero text!

Writing Next Generation Reusable JavaScript Modules in ECMAScript 6 is a great intro to getting your hands dirty with ES6/ES2015 now, as in today, and making it usable by everyone out there.

With all the buzz Service Worker has received as of late, it is easy to see why is so excited about streams! At the very least, we can finally create real progress bars… ;-)

How to: Pure CSS masonry layouts.

How am I only now learning about the HTML5 hidden attribute?? And browser support is pretty slamming!

Great couple quick bits to make scrollable regions more accessible!

And finally, I was just doing a review of an older project where we use a lot of background images and wondered if I could use inline images instead, but the responsive positioning seemed like it would be tricky to match. Until I read this article about object-fit and object-position.

Happy reading,
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