We gotta talk about CSS! That’s my favorite thing! It’s always on the table for a good Chris’ Corner edition, but sometimes focusing on it entirely is best. Klint Finley called it “The modern web’s underrated powerhouse” for GitHub’s publication The ReadME Project back in February, and I’m inclined to agree. Although the days of […]

Have you seen The Grug Brained Developer? It’s an essay with a URL. It’s written like a caveman became a developer and put together a philosophy that is largely a rally against complexity. Cavemen have dumb simple brains, get it? It has good points, and I largely agree with it. The caveman angle is a […]

Rauno Freiberg wrote an article getting into the CSS implementation of some of the neat features of the most recent Next.js website. Gotta love an article showing off how things work on a really top-notch modern design. Thoughts as I go down the list: • The randomized dots on the switchboard look super cool. Just […]

It’s clear that this current generation of “AI” / LLM tools likes offering a “chat box” as the primary interaction model. Both Bard and OpenAI’s interface center a text input at the bottom of the screen (like most messaging clients) and you converse with it a bit like you would text with your friends and […]

I came across Alexey Ardov’s work the other day. Looks like the color bug hit him pretty hard. I first saw this playground: It’s awfully cool. I like seeing color palettes presented in the context of UI like that. Sometimes it’s hard to picture how it all might come together if colors are looked at […]

So many interesting little nuggets I’ve saved up for you this week! Let’s do it. Jehl’s Law of Web Performance: A website should load before you can say “cumulative layout shift” lol I love that. Stoyan calculated it to be 1.722 seconds. Speaking of layout shifts, did you know the ch unit in CSS might […]

If I were going to argue against @scope, the new CSS feature, I might say that CSS already has scope. Like, every selector is “scope”. If you say .el, you’re saying “scope this bit of CSS to elements that have the class name of ‘el’”. But then someone might tell you, ok, but what about […]

I wonder if reactivity is useful line to draw in JavaScript land. In the past, the great jQuery-and-friends era, we didn’t have it. If you needed to change something in the DOM with jQuery, you reached your grubby little paws in there and did it. You couldn’t just update some data and somewhere in a […]

At this latest Google I/O, Rachel Andrew introduced a new concept they are spearheading called Baseline. It’s a visual thing to help developers understand browser support for features better. Here’s one: It’s essentially a simplified browser support chart, featuring only Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari. I’d argue Edge is just taking up space there as […]

Last week I linked up a Web Component (feels like we should do Captial W and Captial C when referring to the official technology, yes?) that would take an image and output a “dithered” version of it. Why did Andrew make it a Web Component? I can’t be sure, but check out how you use […]