HTML, CSS, JavaScript & PHP
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.
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.
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…
What: You have an unordered list and you want to turn it into an ordered one through CSS
How: You can do this with CSS 2.1 and the counter element. Yay! I love CSS.
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 using multicol.
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).
A nice old (2016) video of a talk by Heydon Pickering about writing less code. It’s smart, funny, and I agree.
What: Say the background of your website is white and you want, for example, a different color header, full width, with content inside the header that’s contained at a lesser width, and centered. Common enough scenario and usually created with one HTML-element (div, section, …) at full width and with a colored background and one HTML-element (div, article, …) with a fixed width and centered, holding the content.
Not something new I learned, more something I keep forgetting over and over.
::placeholder to change how placeholders look. You’d think I’d remember something so obvious…
If it’s not working, this post over at CSS-Tricks may have some more information on why.
(Actually, what that post taught me, is that there is a difference between pseudo elements and pseudo classes!)
For years the first thing I would do on a new project is add a { text-decoration: none; } in some form or other to the styling of any website. However I was going to make links look, I was not leaving that offensive-looking text-decoration:underline; in place.
But text-decoration is growing up and browser support for the new options is improving, including, for example, the increased support in the recent release of Firefox 70.
My favorite feature is that underline can skip glyphs now, if you want! Followed almost immediately by my second favorite feature: text-underline-offset: <length>; There are more options than just <length>, read more on text-underline-offset here at MDN web docs. Between these two text-decoration: underline; can actually look classy.
Unfortunately, support for text-underline-offset is even less: Firefox and Safari at the moment. Glyph skipping specifically is supported much better with text-decoration-skip-ink in Firefox, Chrome and Opera. And most browsers now support a shorthand version of text-decoration which can also set color. Lovely!
Read more about all of it at MDN web docs.