Cool Links

I’ve been subscribed to this newsletter for over a year and it never occurred to me to recommend it here. Stefan Judis does a weekly roundup of web dev-related things and puts them out in a nice, easy-to-read, lighthearted newsletter. It’s been one of my favorites for a while and if you’re reading this, chances are you’ll enjoy his content too!

Programming is an activity, but it’s also a feeling. For those of us who actually enjoy programming, there is a deep satisfaction that comes from solving problems through well-written code, a kind of ineffable joy found in the elegant expression of a system through our favorite syntax. It is akin to the same satisfaction a craftsperson might find at the end of the day after toiling away on well-made piece of furniture, the culmination of small dopamine hits that come from sweating the details on something and getting them just right. Maybe nobody will notice those details, but it doesn’t matter. We care, we notice, we get joy from the aesthetics of the craft.

This site collects all kinds of designs for 404 pages found in the wild. Pretty cool source for inspiration or to admire other people’s creativity!

Amazing step-by-step explanation on building Card components, with a special focus on accessibility. I love this kind of articles that explain the thinking behind every step and every line of code!

Card elements are everywhere and we all do them a bit differently. I’ll pay much more attention to the things mentioned here to ensure they’re as accessible as possible.

It’s like image lazy loading, but for page elements! I’ve got to try this out sometime and measure the effectiveness of this technique. Depending on the results, this might end up as its own blog post ;)

Ahmad’s blog has been featured here a few times already, and here’s another gem! A fully interactive, well-written and just a plain joy to read article explaining different strategies to handle colors in CSS, focusing on all those little color variations we need to handle when building something.

In times where software “needs” to stand out rather than be familiar, we lose our heroes. Rest in peace, square checkboxes!

Sooo many times I’ve had to debug something in a npm package dependency of a project I’m working on, only to realize I need to change some of the code to make it work.

That’s usually a pain though, since you either have to open a pull request with a fix and wait for it to be merged, or setup your own fork of the package and host it somewhere.

This package aims to avoid that. It applies patches to other packages in your project, so you don’t have to go through the process of setting up a fork.

Customizing <select> elements is something every web developer has had to do, probably. And the thing about that is that… you really can’t customize it. Or couldn’t, until now.

Having to implement a custom look on this field was always, to me, the perfect definition of “reinventing the wheel”. You gotta pick up this element that works reliably, is accessible, natively supported by all browsers, and users have been using for 30+ years, and then… build it from scratch, with JavaScript (which already kills the accessibility for some people).

Now, as of Chromium 135, you can finally customize them as you always expected you could! This will probably take a while to get to Safari and Firefox, but here’s the cool thing: if those browsers don’t support this new thing, the <select> will just look like a normal field and work just as well. A perfect example of progressive enhancement!

I’ve written about Container Queries before, but this article by Josh Comeau is great at giving even more examples of its utility. It’s always nice to see what use cases other developers find for it.

A fun exercise about making elements “pop out” of their containers with CSS without altering markup. Might not be useful if you can change the markup (as there are easier ways to do that), but learning this kind of approach is always good for expanding your repertoire.

position: sticky is incredibly useful but I’ve had issues implementing it more than once. This article goes over some of the most common issues we can face with it and how we can fix them.

Cool article explaining a little bit about fonts and choosing them for your website/app. I’m still overwhelmed by the options, but I found the info in there to be interesting.

HTML and CSS are my favorite parts of web development, and this article gives some great examples of why. Learning HTML is one of the best things you can do for your (web development) career, as it’s the most foundational block of a website and by itself can do most of the functionality you need. From HTML, you can progressively enhance the rest.

That article about the faux containers lead me to this one. I knew about naming CSS grid areas, but I had no idea about the [area-start/end] pattern! You can set those explicitly or have them be automatically added by CSS. This is pretty cool!

Jake gives a really thorough explanation on view transitions, showing some of its shortcomings when animating some specific elements and how to fix them. View transitions are so nice 🤩

The smoothness of a web application is an anti-indicator of its reliability and predictability as a web page.

your team almost certainly doesn’t have what it takes to out-engineer the browser. The browser will continuously improve the experience of plain HTML, at no cost to you, using a rendering engine that is orders of magnitude more efficient than JavaScript.

I remember when I first learned about SPAs and how amazing it seemed like to be able to have smooth transitions between pages. Then, as I started building and using them, it became apparent that those benefits also brought a lot of issues that took a lot of dev work to fix.

Luckily, with View Transitions, lazy loading, and predictive pre-rendering (start loading a page before you click on its link) that a lot of frameworks have now, we can have most of the SPA benefits without having to reinvent the wheel.

Incredible article that not only explains the new-ish text-wrap: balance and text-wrap: pretty CSS properties in-depth, it also goes into the caveats those properties have. It’s well-written, well illustrated, and interactive. What else could you want?

Ahmad once again writing the articles I wish I did. Another well-written and interactive article going in-depth on the also new-ish overflow: clip CSS property. clip has helped me implement designs more than once and it’s so nice to have something that works just like I always expected overflow: hidden to work.

A really well-designed post from the Chrome team showing the coolest new things that were introduced to CSS in 2024. A lot of the things in there are really cool! The sad part is that, unless you’re running an up-to-date Chromium browser, you might not be able to see them in action. I initially saw this blog post on my iPhone (which only has access to Safari) and almost none of them worked.