Picks

You’ve probably already seen this common pattern in action: blurry versions of the images of a site appear immediately and, moments later, their full versions replace them. This pattern has become so common that many image CDNs, frameworks, and libraries support it out of the box. But every implementation has…

On January 30, 2005, the New York Times published an article about mommy blogging to their style section. Rather than frame it’s rise as something interesting or nuanced, the article chose a mostly reductive article, spinning the act of blogging as a reflection of the writer’s narcism. “The baby blog…

A week and a bit on UpCloud, deleting my DigitalOcean account after more than 10 years, and what DigitalOcean is doing to CSS-Tricks, one of the best places on the whole internet.

Ever since Piccalilli started to get traction, I’ve always seen CSS-Tricks, Smashing Magazine and A List Apart (among others) as peers. We all help each other behind the scenes and importantly, back each other. When CSS-Tricks was initially acquired by DigitalOcean, I was really happy for Chris. The work that…

I owe a lot of my professional identity and success to CSS-Tricks. CSS-Tricks repeatedly gave me the opportunity to write for them. In doing so, the immense popularity and huge reach of the publication helped to both socialize and normalize accessibility as a mainstream frontend concern. I’m deeply thankful to…

The HTML specification is old and, while there is beauty in longevity, there’s an inevitable build-up of boondoggles and baggage. Some elements like <marquee> have sadly been consigned to the dustbin of history – but there are still vestigial attributes just waiting to trip up the unwary. If you’re young,…

Recently implemented in Chrome are two of my top asks for CSS—the concept of rows in multiple-column layout, and gap decorations for rows and columns in grid, flexbox, and multicol. Rows (using column-wrap) provide a way to use multicol on the web without risking scrolling up and down to read…

Sidney Paget illustration of Sherlock Holmes from Strand Magazine, December 1892, p.646, but I added papers from his March 1893 (p.281 of Strand Magazine) illustration and then two versions of the W3C logo to the front page. When performing a WCAG evaluation (or review or audit), it’s easy to get…

Making and breaking grids I’ve been doing more front-end coding this year than I have in a while and every time I come back to write markup and CSS, it feels like there are new tricks. We’re closing in on the 30th anniversary of CSS (already a little past 30…

This is the second of two parts on media creation. You can find the first part over here: Creating media with an uncooperative mind Infinite negatives # In trying to figure out what I should write and talk about, I could spend the rest of my life outlining all the…