Open Type Features in CSS
I've been playing a little with Open Type font variations (and their CSS equivalents) for a few weeks now and I've revisited a few areas I had played with before and left because, at the time, I...
WebAssembly: A new Swiss Army Knife
WebAssembly and its predecessor asm.js provide a portable target for compilation of high-level languages like C, C++, Go, and Rust among others, enabling deployment on the web for client and server...
Fetch and Axios: When and How
Fetch, the replacement for XmlHTTPRequest object (xhr for short) has been around long enough for me to consider it well baked into the platform and safe to use. As a quick refresher, this script will...
Javascript Inheritance: Prototypes and Classes
Until recently Javascript did not have a class system. This doesn't mean that we couldn't create reusable objects but that we had to work through hoops to make it work. Prototypal Inheritance: It's...
What is the modern view-source?
I started working on the web in 1994 and I've been privy to the evolution and complication of the web and its component technologies. The web was much simpler then, with a limited set of tags and...
Using Javascript to insert content into the DOM
JavaScript gives us multiple ways to insert content into the DOM. One generic and simple way and a more flexible and complicated alternative. Inserting new elements: The simple version # The simple...
Using SVG as images
Most of the work I've done recently has been as inline SVG meaning that the SVG is inserted directly into the document; this has advantages and disadvantages. In this post we'll discuss why we would...
Paginating or infinite scrolling web content
The web has always been a scrolling medium but there are reasons and motivations that will make people decide for one or the other. There is no perfect 'one-size-fits-all' solution and you will have...
Native lazy loading in Chrome
Addy Osmani posted a note on twitter about native lazy loading support that will, hopefully, appear in Chrome 75 (canary builds as I write this). This is awesome and I hope that other browsers will...
Keyboard events
In addition to pointer events, we should also provide a way for keyboard-only users or those users who prefer keyboard navigation to access content. This is particularly important when using custom...