CSS Tricks

When the conversation about the value of "View Source" rolls around, the #1 response I hear is along these lines: No way, Jose! I use View Source all the time! It's very useful when you want to look at the raw HTML, not the DOM. Yes, that is useful, and yes, there is a difference. But just because you are looking at DevTools doesn't mean the DOM is the only thing you can see.   This is Chrome DevTools. Safari has a Resources tab There is also a Network tab in DevTools for every browser. That's where you find a way to look at the document. Firefox's Network tab So, if your concern about losing View Source is that you'd have no possible way to see the document instead of just the DOM, that's just not true. You can rest assured that you have the same affordance in DevTools. ...

End-to-end testing is awesome because it mirrors the user’s experience. Where you might need a ton of unit tests to get good coverage (the kind where you test that a function returns a value you expect), you can write a single end-to-end test that acts like a real human as it tests several pieces of your app at once. It’s a very economical way of testing your app. Cypress is a new-ish test runner with some features that take some of the friction out of end-to-end testing. It sports the ability to automatically wait for elements (if you try to grab onto an element it can’t find), wait for Ajax requests, great visibility into your test outcomes, and an easy-to-use API. Note: Cypress is both a test runner and a paid service that records your tests, allowing you to play them back later. This ...

A little while ago, I wrote a well-received article about combining CSS variables with CSS grid to help build more maintainable layouts. But CSS grid isn’t just for pages! That is a common myth. Although it is certainly very useful for page layout, I find myself just as frequently reaching for grid when it comes to components. In this article I’ll address using CSS grid at the component level. Grid is neither a substitute for flexbox nor vice versa. In fact, using a combination of the two gives us even more power when building components. Building a simple component In this demo, I’ll walk through building a text-and-image component, something you might commonly find yourself building on a typical site, and which I have frequently built myself. This is what our first component should look...

WooCommerce is a powerful eCommerce solution for WordPress sites. If you're like me, and like working with WordPress and have WordPress-powered sites already, WooCommerce is a no-brainer for helping you sell things online on those sites. But even if you don't already have a WordPress site, WooCommerce is so good I think it would make sense to spin up a WordPress site so you could use it for your eCommerce solution. Personally, I've used WooCommerce a number of times to sell things. Most recently, I've used it to sell T-Shirts (and hats) over on CodePen. We use WordPress already to power our blog, documentation, and podcast. Makes perfect sense to use WordPress for the store as well! What I think is notable about our WooCommerce installation at CodePen is how painless it was, while doing...

In early 2017, I presented a couple of workshops on the topic of CSS feature detection, titled CSS Feature Detection in 2017. A friend of mine, Justin Slack from New Media Labs, recently sent me a link to the phenomenal Feature Query Manager extension (available for both Chrome and Firefox), by Nigerian developer Ire Aderinokun. This seemed to be a perfect addition to my workshop material on the subject. However, upon returning to the material, I realized how much my work on the subject has aged in the last 18 months. The CSS landscape has undergone some tectonic shifts: The Atomic CSS approach, although widely hated at first, has gained some traction through libraries like Tailwind, and perhaps influenced the addition of several new utility classes to Bootstrap 4. CSS-in-JS exploded in p...

In a recent post, Zach Saucier demonstrated the awesome things that the DOM allows us to do, thanks to the <canvas> element. Taking a snapshot of an element and manipulating it to create an exploding animation is pretty slick and a perfect example of how far complex animations have come in the last few years. ABeamer is a new animation ecosystem that takes advantage of these new concepts. At the core of the ecosystem is the web browser animation library. But, it's not just another animation engine. ABeamer is designed to build frame-by-frame animations in the web browser and use a render server to generate a PNG file sequence, which can ultimately be used to create an animated GIF or imported into a video editor. First, a little about what ABeamer can do A key feature is its ability...

VS Code is slowly closing the gap between a text editor and an integrated development environment (IDE). At the core of this extremely versatile and flexible tool lies a wonderful API that provides an extensible plugin model that is relatively easy for JavaScript developers to build on. With my first extension, VS Code All Autocomplete, reaching 25K downloads, I wanted to share what I learned from the development and maintenance of it with all of you. Trivia! Visual Studio Code does not share any lineage with the Visual Studio IDE. Microsoft used the VS brand for their enterprise audience which has led to a lot of confusion. The application is just Code in the command line and does not work at all like Visual Studio. It takes more inspiration from TextMate and Sublime Text than Visual Stu...