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Chris Corner: The Tao of Demos¹
CodePen is a place where you can make demos. A Pen can be anything (a painting, a game, a landing page), but by and large, Pens today are demos. Why would you make a demo? Fam, why wouldn’t you make a demo? Demos are one of the most powerful tools we have as designers and […]
Published on: August 21, 2023 | Source:
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Chris’ Corner: React is Good, Bad, Old, Reliable, Stodgy, Stable, and Obsoleted
There is something about [INSERT MOST POPULAR THING] that inspires people to philosophize. Sometimes it’s a bummer. It’s tough to avoid the never-ending stream of “news” about Elon Musk, which strongarms your brain into having an opinion about him. WordPress, by the numbers, is pretty popular, so I’ll bet you have some kind of opinion […]
Published on: August 14, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: Useful HTML and CSS Patterns
The is one of the grand enemies of responsive design. They don’t wrap (that wouldn’t make much sense) so they can “blow out” the width of a mobile device pretty easily. The overflow property also doesn’t work on them. So you gotta find a way, and it really depends on the data. Sometimes a […]
Published on: August 08, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: Clever CSS Ideas & Explanations
If you think frosted glass effect in CSS, you probably think of the backdrop-filter property. Just backdrop-filter: blur(10px); will do the trick. I still think the look is kind of cool and fresh, but I should check myself a little here as the effect was popularized in the iOS 7 release which was 10 years […]
Published on: July 31, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: Hot New Web Features
Yuri Mikhin and Travis Turner over at Evil Martians implore us: Don’t wait, let’s use the browser ContactPicker API now. As I write, it’s only available essentially on Chrome for Android. But the spec exists and iOS also has an experimental flag for it. I’m an iOS guy so I flipped it on. I actually […]
Published on: July 24, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: More Like CSBest
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 […]
Published on: July 17, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: Complexity
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 […]
Published on: July 10, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: Design
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 […]
Published on: July 03, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: If these computers are so smart, how come I have tell them what to do?
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 […]
Published on: June 26, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: Little Useful Websites
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 […]
Published on: June 19, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: Shifting
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 […]
Published on: June 12, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: Scoping
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 […]
Published on: June 05, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: Signals
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 […]
Published on: May 29, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: Baseline
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 […]
Published on: May 22, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: Let’s Talk Web Components
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 […]
Published on: May 15, 2023 | Source:Google Log In
CodePen offers it now! Until recently, we only offered GitHub, Twitter, and Facebook social login buttons. Twitter log in totally stopped working on us (are you surprised?) last week. It turns out that was by far the least popular option for logging in anyway, so we just pulled it down and replaced it with Google. […]
Published on: May 12, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: Dithering
Dithering is a vibe: Dither is an intentionally applied form of noise used to randomize quantization error, preventing large-scale patterns such as color banding in images. Wikipedia For an academic PDF, this is pretty approachable. In the web world, I typically think of it as associated with “indexed colors” images like PNG and GIF can […]
Published on: May 08, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: A Balancing Act
If you’re a super normal person like me, you’ve gone to war with typographic widows and orphans many times over your years as a developer, trying to ensure they don’t happen and ruin anyone’s day. You know what I mean, a headline with one silly little word that has wrapped down onto its own line. […]
Published on: May 02, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: Write Once, Read Anywhere
Ryan Mulligan has an interesting exploration of a somewhat niche CSS Grid behavior in CSS Grid Gap Behavior with Hidden Elements. When creating a grid, I find it’s common to create pretty specific column behavior, and let rows auto-generate, but of course you can be specific about row sizes as well. If you do that, […]
Published on: April 24, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: Have You Ever
Have you ever heard web developers talk over each other? I enjoyed Mathias Schäfer’s Client-side JavaScript and React criticism: What comes next?. It’s a solid baby-bear take on meta discussions on the state of building websites. I hear JavaScript critics yelling: “Just use Progressive Enhancement! Sprinkle some JavaScript on your static HTML! Don’t believe those […]
Published on: April 17, 2023 | Source:Hyperplexed Videos
Hyperplexed makes amazing Pens on CodePen! If you’ll remember from our Most Hearted of 2022 wrap-up, in 2021, he got one place on the Top 100, then in 2022 had nine, including the #1 spot. But not only does he create great work, he’s also an educator, showing off how some super modern and classy […]
Published on: April 13, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: Little Websites
Gotta love a good little single-purpose website, right? I generally love what they do, what they say, or what service they provide, I love them on some deeper meta-level. Like someone cared so much about this idea that they just had to produce something, and a website made the most sense. Global reach! Easily findable […]
Published on: April 10, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: A Little Back and Forth
I feel like y’all out there are like: ya know what I could use this week? A scattered collection of interesting links with light commentary about what is interesting about them or how they connect with the modern web zeitgeist. No worries gang, I got ya. I like Josh’s take on all this coding + […]
Published on: April 03, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: Fresh SVG Drop
Lemme show off some cool SVG-related things this week. Gotta love SVG. It’s this graphics language built right into the web platform that has a ton of capability and is always right there waiting for us when we need it. Thanks the web! Portability is a cool SVG feature. You can copy and paste a […]
Published on: March 27, 2023 | Source:React Email
Only in the last year have I started switching us over to MJML here at CodePen to help craft our HTML emails. Aside from a few minor rough edges, it’s been a nice upgrade from hand-writing the email HTML. Not only was that tricky and time-consuming, but it was also error-prone. The switch-over was in […]
Published on: March 24, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: Websites, Highlights, and Guesses
I love Henry’s guide: How to Make a Website. There is precious little recent instructional material on how you can build a website, a perfectly great website, using just the raw materials of the web. Raw HTML & CSS, as it were. But that’s not all that Henry’s guide is about. It’s full of holistic […]
Published on: March 20, 2023 | Source:GPT-4 Demo Turns a Crude Sketch of a “My Joke Website” into a Functional Website for Revealing Jokes
Here’s the clip from the original YouTube where Greg Brockman shows it off. Ultimately GPT-4 produced HTML output, which Greg copy-pasted into CodePen in order to show it off. What a big release! Shawn Wang notes: To use simple measures of how anticipated this was – GPT-4 is already the11th-most upvoted Hacker News storyofALL TIME,the […]
Published on: March 15, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: Resizing, Conditionals, and Initials
Ahmad Shadeed recently wrote: I like to think of CSS as a conditional design language. It totally is! We tend to think of stuff like @media queries as the conditional part: That’s true, and new stuff like container and style queries are giving us more “conditional” stuff to work with. But it might be better […]
Published on: March 13, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: More Like Hypography
CSS hyphenation support is pretty good — just a -webkit- prefix left for Safari I’d love to see them yank off. Toss it on a parent, let it cascade, and you’ll see text hug the ragged edge a little closer and a little more consistently. You don’t have to use it, it’s a bit of […]
Published on: March 06, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: Gradients, Generators, and Glows
Radial gradients do represent a bit of a leap up in complexity compared to linear gradients in CSS. With linear gradients, you sorta pick a direction and plop some stops on there. The default direction, to bottom, you don’t even have to include if that’s the direction you want, and two color stops with no […]
Published on: February 27, 2023 | Source:Classless CSS library Almond.css
From Alvaro Montoro: almond.css This is one of those “classless” CSS libraries — CSS that you apply to semantic HTML to apply a nice look. You apply no classes or any other selectors — it totally removes that mental exercise. The only selectors it uses are HTML elements. A perfect sort of choice for things […]
Published on: February 23, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: Font Size, Document Hierarchy, and Dialog
How about some accessibility quick hits! It’s a bit hard to keep track of when using certain CSS value types is bad. For a while, using pixel (px) values in media queries was considered a bad practice as the breakpoints didn’t trigger as expected when a user zoomed in. But then that changed, and media […]
Published on: February 20, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: Portals, Pages, Potential Polyfills, and the Pretty Reasonable
Maggie Appleton calls “Programming Portals”: Small, scoped areas within a graphical interface that allow users to read and write simple programmes brb updating all the marketing copy around here. I like how casually Brad Frost describes essentially all of web design. It all boils down to stuff and layout: The bulk of a design system’s […]
Published on: February 16, 2023 | Source:400: Hiatus
Marie and I jump on the show to tell y’all we’re taking a little break! It feels like years since we’ve been eluding to the fact that we’re working on a new major upgrade to CodePen. Rather than keep dancing around it, we’re going to minimize or remove working on anything that isn’t working on […]
Published on: February 08, 2023 | Source:Chris’ Corner: Trends, Beziers, and the Free Betterment of Subgrid
Cubic-bezier easings are part of what set apart really nicely done animations. I usually leave off the easing, which defaults to ease. Then I feel weird about it and try out keywords like ease-in or ease-in-out and they generally look weird or worse and stick with the default. But any really classy animation always seems […]
Published on: February 06, 2023 | Source: