Service workers do a lot of different things; there are myriad ways to harness their powers. In this article, Lyza Danger Gardner explains what a service worker is and how to put together your own by registering, installing, and activating it without any hassle. She decided to build a simple service worker for her website that roughly mirrors the features (provide a customized offline fallback experience, make the website function offline, and increase online performance by reducing network requests for certain assets) that the obsolete Application Cache API used to provide.
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In this article, Nadav Soferman introduces a new free open source web tool that will allow you to generate breakpoints for your images interactively: the Responsive Breakpoints Generator. Nadav hopes this tool will help you address some of the challenges related to responsive images. This complexity is the driving force for new solutions that keep arising, such as the HTML5 picture element and srcset image attribute, the Client-Hints specification, and plenty of other client-side and server-side solutions.
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Whenever you want to change existing or create new functionality in WordPress theme and development, you will have to turn to hooks. Learning hooks is like studying law: you don’t need to know all of the statements and paragraphs, but simply where to find them. In this article, Thomas Maier will show you how to avoid common problems, how to allow others to extend your code, and all you need to setup Hook Routines and get ready to have a better experience developing for Wordpress.
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One of the relatively recent tools introduced for styling is PostCSS, which aims to reinvent CSS with an ecosystem of custom plugins and tools. Working with the same principles of preprocessors such as Sass and LESS, it transforms extended syntaxes and features into modern, browser-friendly CSS. Over the next few years, the way you use CSS will change in many different ways. Every project will have different requirements, to which you will have to adapt your production methods. Working within a modular ecosystem like PostCSS allows you to pick and choose the features you want to complete a project.
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Have you used calc()? It’s a function that should work as a value in all places where a number value — with or without specified units — works. However, while basic support is really good, you might run into trouble depending on where you use it. In this article, Ana Tudor will look at a few examples of how to use calc() including what support problems they have (if any) and whether they’re ultimately the best solution.
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From a high-level perspective, web components will enable better composability, reusability and interoperability of front-end web application elements by providing a common way to write components in HTML.
In this article, Sebastian Metzger will show you why this will be such an important step, by showing off what can be accomplished right now using Polymer. Polymer is currently the most advanced and (self-proclaimed) production-ready library based on web components.
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Back in spring 2013, Smashing Magazine sported a <select> menu as its mobile navigation. It wasn’t considered an anti-pattern back then and Marco Hengstenberg still thinks it’s a viable solution to the complex problem of how to build accessible and functional cross-device navigation. Brad Frost wrote a few words about the pros and cons of this pattern on his blog and Marco couldn’t agree more. In this article, Marco will explain how he helped rebuild the mobile navigation in order to enhance the experience for the readers of Smashing Magazine.
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In this article, Heydon Pickering mixes old with new, taking a somewhat primitive art and breathing new life into it. With the help of Sass, he streamlines the necessary workflow and hopefully demonstrating that automation can, sometimes, be a friend to creativity. The reason he conceived the technique and wrote the necessary code for this article is because he really wanted to make cel animations of his drawings. There was already a goal. The design part is in determining what we want to make in the first place, for whom, and whether it’s really such a good idea.
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CSS quantity queries follow the concept of changing the styles based on a condition: the condition within a quantity query being the number of sibling elements. An example would be navigation where items are 25% wide when four items are available; yet when there are five items available, the width of the navigation items changes to 20%. This is a common problem with dynamic site frameworks like WordPress or Ghost. Can you avoid too many media queries and JavaScript workarounds? Yes, you can. This is where quantity queries are best used. By being creative with CSS selectors, we can count the number of sibling items and apply styles if they meet the conditions. Using these queries, we can future-proof our designs and projects, and allow them to scale gracefully.
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Implementations usually involved either using an external image editor to create multiple images for multiple values of the pie chart, or large JavaScript frameworks designed for much more complex charts. Although the feat is not as impossible as it once was, there’s still no simple one-liner for it. However, in this article, Lea Verou will show you that there are many better, more maintainable ways to achieve it today.
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