Once a year I teach Animation & Interaction at MKstart in Amsterdam. When I started teaching this class over 10 years ago, I used Flash. I’d make some very tiny animations with them during the first few classes and then some mini games during the last few classes. I loved it, they loved it, it was great. When Flash died, eventually I switched to Animate. The brush tool is still the same, the regular crashes are the same, but working in Canvas has made Animate more buggy and unreliable. I haven’t found any good alternatives so I use it anyway.
Jittery Scrolling
What: Jittery Scrolling, or very slow scrolling in Chrome-based browsers. It’s caused by too many paint operations when scrolling, in my particular case caused by an SVG set as a background-image with background-size: cover and background-attachment: fixed.
Media Queries for Input Devices
What: Since not every touch enabled device is a handheld device, checking for size and checking for touch should be handled separately, since the changes to the design and functionality they require are not the same.
How: You can use media queries.
Taking My WordPress Class Online
Because of the pandemic I too have to start teaching online. I’ve been setting everything up and I’m going to track my progress and findings under the teaching online-tag. This post is about my preparations to make this class available online.
scroll-margin-top
What: CSS-Tricks just posted about this last Friday and since I could have used this that day (!) but didn’t find it until now, I’m adding a note here for myself:
You have a page with a table of contents (with links), or you have a one page website with in-page navigation and you have a fixed header — when you click a link the content scrolls up too far and is hidden by the fixed header. This is not a good user experience, and you can improve it with scroll-margin-top in Firefox and Chrome-based browsers…
Hosting Assets: Do It Yourself?
I have started hosting more and more of the assets for sites, like web-fonts and JavaScripts libraries, stats, with the sites themselves instead of using a CDN / third-party service, largely because I was starting to feel squeamish about my role in helping tech giants follow you across the internet.
Always Include Widows and Orphans
What: Widows and orphans in CSS refer to leftover lines at the beginning or ending of a page, when you’re printing a website, or to the leftover lines at the beginning or ending of a column when you’re creating a multi-column layout.
Joy
I recently updated the links page on my personal website, something I hadn’t done in years, and there were some broken links there but I also stumbled again across entropy8.com.
Auto Sizing Font-sizes
What: Changing the font-size and the line-height based on the width of the viewport but without using media queries, to create a smoother experience (with less work).