CSS Tricks

The other day I posted an image, quite literally as a thought exercise, about how you might accomplish "nested" links. That is, a big container that is linked to one URL that contains a smaller container or text link inside of it that goes to another URL. That's harder than it might seem at first glance. The main reason being that... <!-- this is invalid and won't render as expected --> <a href="#one"> Outside <a href="#two"> Inside </a> </a> Eric Meyer once called for more flexible linking, but even that doesn't quite handle a situation where one link is nested inside another. Here's what happens with that HTML, by the way: The nested link gets kicked out.My first inclination would be to simply not nest the links in the markup, but make them appear...

Some people prefer to write JavaScript with React. For others, it’s Vue or jQuery. For others still, it is their own set of tools or a completely blank document. Some setups are minimal, some allow you to get things done quickly, and some are crazy powerful, allowing you to build complex and maintainable applications. Every setup has advantages and disadvantages, but positives usually outweigh negatives when it comes to popular frameworks verified and vetted by an active community. React and Vue are powerful JavaScript frameworks. Of course they are — that’s why both are trending so high in overall usage. But what is it that makes those, and other frameworks, so powerful? Is it the speed? Portability to other platforms like native desktop and mobile? Support of the huge community? The su...

Images are critical. Whether it is marketing banners, product images or logos, it is impossible to imagine a website without images. Sadly though, images are often heavy files making them the single biggest contributor to the page bloat. According the HTTP Archive’s State of Images report, the median page size on desktops is 1511 KB and images account for nearly 45% (650 KB) of that total. That said, it’s not like we can simply do away with images. They’re too important to the overall user experience. Instead, we need to make our web pages load really fast with them. In this guide, we will cover all of the ins and outs of lazy loading images, a technique that helps improve the time it takes for a web page to load by deferring image loads until they are needed. Before we dive right in, he...

As a web UI developer and designer, there are countless things to learn and only so many hours in the day. There are topics I’ve purposefully avoided, like mobile and offline application development because, at some point, you have to draw a line somewhere in the millions of shiny new topics and get some work done. One of the areas I’ve avoided in the past is browser extension development. I didn’t understand how they worked, what the development environment was, or how permissions interacted with overriding pages because, frankly, I didn’t think I was interested. Then one day, my very talented designer/developer friend Natalie Schoch asked me to get her Chrome Extension across the finish line. She had the front-end prototyped, but needed some help plugging in the data set and with inter...

In the summer of 1998, when President Clinton fended off allegations of sexual impropriety and Donald Trump filmed a cameo in a Woody Allen movie, I embarked on my career as a freelance web developer. Twenty years and more than 300 websites later, I’m still at it—always working on my own and always from home. Over that time, I’ve had the pleasure of partnering with many prominent advertising agencies and boutique design firms as well as scores of local businesses and individuals. Those interested in making the switch to freelancing have often asked me for advice, and I’ve been happy to help with whatever words of wisdom I can provide. This article is a distillation of much of that. And it may prove helpful not only to developers and programmers who wish to freelance, but also designers, pr...