There is an alternative to corporate bubbles online — it’s called the IndieWeb. Build your own personal websites, control your online presence, and learn on your own terms. | Continue reading
SEO is an ever-changing world. Blink and you’ll miss the latest best practices, thought leaders, and tools. Feeling out of touch is natural. This guide is your way back into the groove, baby. | Continue reading
Rachel Andrew takes a look at a new effort to crowdfund the costs of implementing browser features. | Continue reading
Redux is a robust state-management library for single-page Javascript apps. It is described on the official documentation as a predictable state container for Javascript applications and it’s fairly simple to learn the concepts and implement Redux in a simple app. Going from a si … | Continue reading
In this article, we’ll take a look at five ways you can use the senses to put your visitors in a better headspace when they enter your site and interact with your brand. | Continue reading
For the last few years, whenever somebody wants to start building an HTTP API, they pretty much exclusively use REST as the go-to architectural style, over alternative approaches such as XML-RPC, SOAP and JSON-RPC. REST is made out by many to be ultimately superior to the other “ … | Continue reading
Tauri is a toolchain for creating small, fast, and secure desktop apps from your existing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In this article, Kelvin explains how Tauri plays well with the progressive framework Vue.js by integrating both technologies in bundling an example web app called … | Continue reading
As JavaScript developers, we often forget that not everyone has the same knowledge as us. It’s called the curse of knowledge: When we’re an expert on something, we cannot remember how confused we felt as newbies. We overestimate what people will find easy.Therefore, we think that … | Continue reading
As we refine our methods of responsive web design, we’ve increasingly focused on measure (another word for “line length”) and its relationship to how people read. | Continue reading
With the advent of responsive web design and the mobile-first approach, it’s been seven wonderful years since any new concepts have compelled us to adapt the way in which we write CSS at the base level. Well, I don’t have anything too groundbreaking to offer you, but I do have a … | Continue reading
In this tutorial, we will learn how to make a request in our Nuxt.js applications using the Axios module. We will also learn how to use the ayncData and fetch methods to fetch data on the server-side and the differences between the two methods. | Continue reading
In this article, we dive into the possibilities of mechanical keyboards. The different layouts, switch types and even keycap material. Strap yourself in — this will be a deep dive! | Continue reading
In this article, we take a look at each part of Houdini, its current browser support, and see how they can be used today using progressive enhancement. | Continue reading
Thanks to some recent changes in browsers, it’s now well worth setting `width` and `height` attributes on your images to prevent layout shifts and improve the experience of your site visitors. | Continue reading
Around the web and within the CSS Working Group, there has been some discussion about whether we should specify a version of CSS — perhaps naming it CSS4. In this article, Rachel Andrew rounds up some of the pros and cons of doing so, and asks for your feedback on the sugge … | Continue reading
Foldable devices have brought with them talk of a ‘foldable web,’ and the idea that long-standing web conventions may be on the verge of a serious shakeup. Is it all hype, or is it time to get flexible? | Continue reading
90% of the smartphones sold today have 5-inch displays. Bigger screen real estate presents newer challenges and opportunities for app makers and designers. Let’s look at how designing apps for one-handed usage can solve those challenges. | Continue reading
Does your website have a mascot that the audience isn’t responding well to or that outright hates it? Or maybe your new client has brought along a mascot that you’re unsure about? If a mascot’s design or messaging isn’t on point with an audience, there’s no sense in keeping it as … | Continue reading
The CSS contain property gives you a way to explain your layout to the browser, so performance optimizations can be made. However, it does come with some side effects in terms of your layout. | Continue reading
By naming lines when setting up our CSS Grid layouts, we can tap into some interesting and useful features of Grid — features that become even more powerful when we introduce subgrids. | Continue reading
In this post, we’ll set up a demo site and tutorial for headless WordPress, including a starter template! We’ll use the WordPress dashboard for rich content editing, while migrating the front-end architecture to the JAMstack. | Continue reading
WordPress adoption is massive. So why would a WordPress site consider moving to JAMstack? In this technical case study, we’ll cover what an actual WordPress migration looks like, using Smashing Magazine itself! We’ll talk through the gains and losses, the things we wish we knew e … | Continue reading
There’s more to spaces than the key you instinctively hit between words with one of your thumbs. Let’s find out what other space characters there are, what their heritage is, and how they can be useful today. | Continue reading
How do you move faster when adding folks to a project supposedly slows it down? Mailchimp’s CPO takes the reader through some considerations for preserving momentum while scaling up. | Continue reading
No frills, or flashing neon frills with sprinklers attached? ‘Brutalist’ websites have flourished in recent years, but their guiding philosophy remains unclear. | Continue reading
Let’s make 2020... fast! A front-end performance checklist (PDF/Apple Pages/MS Word), with everything you need to know to create fast experiences on the web today. | Continue reading
Skipping servers and using the JAMstack to build and deliver websites and apps can save time, money, and headache by allowing us to deliver only static assets on a CDN. But the trade-off of ditching traditional server-based deployments means that standard approaches to dynamic, a … | Continue reading
With a couple of days left until New Year's Eve, it's just about time to set aside 60 minutes to clean up, sort out and back up your digital footprint, to ensure a good smooth start to the new year. | Continue reading
The CSS contain property gives you a way to explain your layout to the browser, so performance optimizations can be made. However, it does come with some side effects in terms of your layout. | Continue reading
Agile has had a long time to infiltrate software development. While the methodology advocates for "co-located, dedicated teams," in its ubiquity Agile is frequently applied to teams partially or fully composed of part-time workers. While there are lessons to be taken from the pra … | Continue reading
In this article, Rachel Andrew looks at some common layout patterns that we can’t yet do on the web and the CSS Specifications that might let us achieve them in the future. | Continue reading
Design systems can improve usability, but they can also limit creativity or fall out of sync with actual products. In this article, we’ll explore how designers and developers can create more robust design systems by building a culture of collaboration. | Continue reading
For the past few months, I’ve been building a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application, and throughout the development process I’ve realized what a powerful tool Slack (or team chat in general) can be to monitor user and application behavior.After a bit of integration, it’s provi … | Continue reading
A significant part of the Internet-using population is aged 50 or older — including the people who invented it. Designers need to understand what older users need and why it’s not enough to just say, "I can read it, so what’s the problem?" | Continue reading
Ever since releasing Grid Inspector, the Firefox DevTools team has been inspired to build a new suite of tools to solve the problems of the modern web. In this article, we’ll learn about all 7 tools and take a peek at potential future projects. | Continue reading
In this article, we will use speech-to-text to draft transcripts of podcasts and interviews for publication. We’ll also evaluate the overall accuracy of these format-transformation technologies by running a few samples through round-trip transcriptions. | Continue reading
Since its release 8 months ago, Gutenberg has been greatly improved, offering a user experience much richer than anything that was possible in WordPress. Let's take a look at its latest developments, and where it is heading to. | Continue reading
In this article, Rachel Andrew explores the situations in which you might encounter overflow in your web designs and explains how CSS has evolved to create better ways to manage and design around unknown amounts of content. | Continue reading
Love your Bash terminal but also love your PC? Maybe you’ve had your eye on some of that new Surface hardware, but can’t make the switch without your terminal. Now you can have Windows and Bash. In this article, we’ll take an in-depth look at how to set up a Windows/Linux develop … | Continue reading
As our phones are getting bigger, we need to adjust how we build and design our websites. Is there something to learn from app design and tap bars? Can we fix the mobile navigation of our websites to have a lower interaction cost? In this article, we’ll find out. | Continue reading
You’ve probably heard of WebAssembly and why it’s a powerful tool in the browser. In this article, we explore why serverless WebAssembly might be equally powerful outside the browser, and how to get started using it. | Continue reading
The Embedded Image Preview (EIP) technique introduced in this article allows us to load preview images during lazy loading using progressive JPEGs, Ajax and HTTP range requests without having to transfer additional data. | Continue reading
When designing mobile first, navigation takes a back seat to content, and ruthless editing paves the way for more focused experiences. The pursuit of simplicity, combined with the tight spatial constraints of mobile viewports, often leads us to strip away elements in an attempt t … | Continue reading
Do you know the impact unused CSS has on performance? Spoiler: It’s a lot! In this article, we’ll explore a SASS-oriented solution for dealing with unused CSS, avoiding the need for complicated Node.js dependencies involving headless browsers, and DOM emulation. | Continue reading
In JavaScript, the Number type cannot safely represent integer values larger than 2⁵³. This limitation has forced developers to use inefficient workarounds and third-party libraries. BigInt is a new data type intended to fix that. | Continue reading
Data can be prohibitively expensive, especially in developing countries. Chris Ashton puts himself in the shoes of someone on a tight data budget and offers practical tips for reducing our websites' data footprint. | Continue reading
Take a moment to remember the last time you collaborated in a code review. Did your team overcome feedback resistance and manage time expectations? Fostering a healthy mindset is the key to build trust and sharing knowledge with your colleagues. | Continue reading
Margins in CSS seem simple enough at first glance. Applied to an element it forms a space around the element, pushing other elements away. However, there is more to a margin than you might think. | Continue reading