Every so often I want to explore new WordPress themes for my blog without having to start from scratch using Underscoreshttps://underscores.me/. At the same time, I want the flexibility of customizing the theme without losing the changes every time I update the theme. That's where child themeshttps://developer.wordpress.org/themes/advanced-topics/child-themes/ come in. They allow developers to customize an existing theme independently of the parent and without losing the changes when we update the parent theme. Process Creating a child theme is a four-step process: 1. Create a folder inside the wp-content/themes directory 2. Create a style.css stylesheet and add the theme boilerplate 3....
In its simplest form can be used to draw graphics via scripting usually JavaScript. This can, for instance, be used to draw graphs, combine photos, or create simple and not so simple animations. This post will only discuss the 2D drawing canvas mode. You can also use the canvas element to host 3D WebGL models, but that's a whole other set of articles, so we'll skip it for now. Getting started In our HTML document, we need to add a canvas element where we will draw our content. The id attribute is the name that we'll use in the script...
There are times that we want to test snippets of Javascript code in different browsers to make sure that it works as intended in all our target browsers. I've always fired the browsers and pasted the code into DevTools or Web Inspector to check if the results are the same. Now there is a pair of applications that will automate this for you: jsvuhttps://www.npmjs.com/package/jsvu and eshosthttps://www.npmjs.com/package/eshost. To install these packages run the following command bash npm i -g jsvu eshost JSVU JavaScript Version Updater manages the installation and updates for different Javascript engines avoiding the compilation process. Out of the...
One of the things I like about the annual release schedule for Javascript is that the learning curve for new versions is much smaller than ES2015/ES6 and previous versions. Two of the features that I'm most interested in are optional Chaining and Nullish Coalescing. Optional Chaining Optional Chaininghttps://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/Optionalchaining, allows yout to check the existence of a property or short circuit and return undefined if any property in the chain that doesn't exist. In the example below, we define a zoo object with animal types and their names. js const zoo = { name: 'Alice', bird: { name: 'Hawkeye', }, dog:...
> This is a different take on hooks from Pre Commit Hooks: Combating Lazinesshttps://publishing-project.rivendellweb.net/pre-commit-hooks-combating-laziness/, written two years ago There are times when it would be awesome if we could force ourselves or our development team to perform some actions before committing code to the project's repository. Git has a set of tools called hookshttps://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Hooks that can help with this enforcement proccess. The idea behind hooks is that they will run at set times during the request lifecycle and run the code you specify in the hook file. You can use hooks to run linting and accessibility checks before you commit...
prefers-color-scheme is geared towards accommodating user preferences. With prefers-color-scheme we can control the color scheme we use based on the operating system preferences for the user. It supports three values: - no-preference: The user has not specified a preference. This keyword value evaluates as false - light: The user has indicated that uses a light theme dark text on light background - dark: The user has notified the system that they prefer a page that has a dark theme light text on dark background. The example below taken from prefers-color-scheme: Hello darkness, my old friendhttps://web.dev/prefers-color-scheme/ shows one way to use...
I'm doing this post to reply to a series of tweetshttps://twitter.com/wendyareid/status/1204922559894097926 from Wendy Reid, chair of the W3C Publishing WG, presenting questions about the future of digital publishing. Rather than reply via tweets, I've consolidated my thoughts here and broken them down according to the tween in the stream that I think they address. \\Comment on tweet 1\\ I think you should start asking why is epub the predominant format outside Amazon and Apple and why there's no desire for even exploring another format and its implications. We already use XHTML in epub so why are we so afraid that...
> Thanks to Jason Pamentalhttps://twitter.com/jpamental for feedback on this post. Variable fonts have a problem as currently implemented. If you use font-variation-settings to control the different axes of the font then every time one changes you must change the other ones or they will reset back to their default values. We'll use Recursivehttps://www.recursive.design/ as the font for this post. Recursive has two custom axes: Monospace and Csual and three default axes: Weight, Slant and Italics. The axes information is shown in the table below. | Axis Designation | Axis Name | Min Value | Max Value | Default | |...
Most of the time it's ok to work with left and right to define elements of our design; that's what we're used to: English and other western languages that read from left to right and top to bottom. However if your design uses right to left text or you plan to internationalize the text you may want to consider logical properties. Logical propertieshttps://drafts.csswg.org/css-logical/ provide styles that control the logical layout of a document as opposed to the physical layout. In other words, logical layouts are independent of the physical look of the document. According to the specification: > This module...
Every so often I hear people complaining about accessibility and what should we do about it and more important whether we, as developers, should care about accessibility. The tweet below made me think about this again in a larger context. Should commercial websites be required by law to implement a minimum level of WCAG? a11y— dave.js @davejs November 25, 2019 I'm reminded of a phrase that was the mantra with the accessibility team at HTCTU while I was working on the Virtual Campus: There is never time to do it right but there's always time to do it over. The...
