Bookmarks

Modern CSS For Dynamic Component-Based Architecture

Wide ranging article (adapted from a conference talk) from Modern CSS. Covers some global helpers, layout utilities and some specific components based on the latest CSS features.

June 2023
Measuring an engineering organization

Excellent article outlining an overall approach to engineering metrics, with a particular focus on practicality and application over theoretical purity.

June 2023
Semantics and the popover attribute: what to use when?

Article describing the different (ARIA) roles that should be attached to the new popover attribute.

June 2023
Table with Expando Rows — Adrian Roselli

Examples of handling a table with expanding rows, to show more information, in an accessible way.

May 2023
Fighting inter-component HTML bloat by Elise Hein

Lots of interesting ideas about preventing additional divs when building (largely React-based) design systems. Particularly interested in the ideas around the asChild prop, which is a really interesting workaround for issues with compound components.

May 2023
OKLCH in CSS: why we moved from RGB and HSL — Evil Martians’ team blog

Persuasive article on why OKLCH is the best of the "new" colour formats coming to CSS. The arguments are essentially: it retains the "readability" of LCH (it's fairly easy to guess what the colour from the code), it supports a much wider range of colours ("wide-gamut P3"), it prevents issues when changing colours programmatically (e.g. via a darken() function) as it models human colour perception much more closely - which also helps with preventing colour contrast problems.

May 2023
sips: Scriptable image processing system | Simon Willison’s TILs

Quick intro to a CLI tool installed in macOS by default. It can be scripted via JS, specifically the Canvas API. It also seems like it can convert WEBP into PNG fairly simply too.

May 2023
IdreesInc/Monocraft: A monospaced programming font inspired by the Minecraft typeface

A typeface designed around the Minecraft font (which is also linked in the README), but monospaced for usage with programming.

May 2023
Solved With :has(): Vertical Spacing in Long-Form Text | CSS-Tricks

Solving the problem of spacing heading appropriately within some prose - spacing is desirable between regular text and the next heading, but not between headers themselves. A clean solution using :has.

May 2023
Glyph.Tools | Tiny Tool For Text Transformation

Tool that converts any text into the Unicode equivalent for various "formatting" styles, e.g. superscript, strikethrough, "blackletter" (the oldey-timey style letters), etc. Useful to make memes 😂 (although note the disclaimer that heavily using this trick is generally considered inaccessible).

May 2023
speedscope

Web-based flamegraph visualiser. It accepts formats from Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Node, so seems like it would useful for comparison across browsers. There's also a couple of interesting options that change how the visualisation works, including one that sorts by the longest time.

May 2023
A Theory of Web Relativity - HTMHell

Comprehensive list of all spec'ed values to the rel attribute on link or anchor elements. There's quite a lot of interesting and useful stuff in here.

May 2023
Screen Readers support for text level HTML semantics

Some surprising results of how screen readers treat various text formatting elements like bold/italics. The short version is that screen readers will only announce formatting if styled with CSS. So using <b> or <strong> doesn't actually matter from a screen reader perspective.

May 2023
Conic gradient Android spinner

CSS snippet recreating an Android spinner using a couple of gradients and a keyframe animation.

May 2023
Circular gradient stroke chart

CSS snippet demonstrating a circular "dial" that completes more of the circumference based on a variable.

May 2023
useGlobalState()

A really clever idea to allow for globally synced state via a fairly simple custom hook. Using this avoids the need for complex Context nesting or lots of prop drilling.

May 2023
useSyncExternalStore – React

A useful looking React hook that I was previously unaware of!

May 2023
Dialogs and popovers seem similar. How are they different? | hidde.blog

Comprehensive article outlining when to use the dialog element and the popover attribute, and sometimes both! Breaks down the expected behavioural differences from an accessibility perspective.

May 2023
How to style the select button of file inputs

Short article pointing out that the ::file-selector-button pseudo-element exists and can be used to style the "Choose file..." button from <input type="file">.

May 2023
Dear Console,… - a collection of code snippets to use in the browser console

A collection of JS snippets to copy/paste into dev tools to perform various useful actions.

May 2023