Code articles

SVG is winning the race when it comes to graphics that scale on the web. Designers and developers are choosing SVG in lieu of icon fonts, raster images, and raster sprites. The benefits of using SVG are numerous but to me, it boils down to scalability. Using SVG can be as simple as copying and pasting the exported code from a vector-based program. From there the problem lies with delivering those graphics in the most efficient manner. Enter SVG...

Building email templates is down right hard. Building responsive emails is even harder. Luckily, the kind folks over at Zurb have developed a fantastic framework that makes the process of building responsive emails easier than it has ever been before. Foundation for Emails (formerly Ink) is a framework tailor fit for a modern designer/developer looking to use the tools and technologies of today to build responsive email templates for tomorrow....

In keeping with Google’s tendency to always debut new initiatives for developers, the latest in the company’s plan is its new mobile certification for web developers. Recently launched, this program is essentially an accreditation from Google to mobile developers, confirming that they’re skilled at mobile site creation. You can access the certification program here. To attain certification, you’ll have to pass a special exam,...

At the end of 2016, I put out the 2016 Front-End Tooling Survey. The response has been phenomenal. Thank you to all of you who have taken the time to do so. The aim was pretty straight-forward; to find out more details about the tools front-end developers are currently using in their own workflows. In our industry, it’s all too easy to take for granted what people are using based on your own knowledge. This survey aims to give more of an insight into...

Whether you love them or hate them, conversational interfaces have started making a significant impact in the business/brand communication landscape. Though many businesses have realized that conversational interfaces are likely to cause a major shift in brand communication there are many who are skeptical about CIs.  CIs have limitations, but they are here to stay and they will get better and more advanced, and that the current issues...

January is the time most of us cease reflecting on the year gone by, and start looking to the months ahead. It seems everyone has different ideas on what to expect in 2017 (you’ll read ours next week) and one of the most anticipated changes this year, is the introduction of CSS Grid Layout. Grid Layout allows us to define areas of a page, and determine how they stretch, scale, and respond to the viewport. Developed as a mature layout solution for...

With hundreds of free JS libraries out there it’s tough to know where to put your energy. Some end up discarded or forked into new projects, while others grow rapidly and achieve widespread adoption. Most developers already know the big names like jQuery and React. But in this post I’d like to introduce twelve alternative JS libraries that are less well-known but rising rapidly. 1) D3.js Big data is a growing industry and data visualization...

If you have a modern website or mobile app, there’s no doubt you deal with a lot of media resources, particularly images. But delivering these images can be a challenge. You may not know if there are broken images on your website, or if URLs point users to non-existing images, resulting in HTTP status errors. Worse yet, search engines like Google, may have indexed the URLs of images that have since been deleted or modified, leading to even more...

I’ve made no secret of my love for LESS. It was my first CSS pre-processor, and still my favorite, even as pragmatism pushes me towards SASS. The addition of variables, mixins, selector nesting, and advanced calculations to CSS just blew my mind. And while the enhanced versatility and ease of writing CSS was much appreciated, I was especially excited about the potential for the increased separation of content from presentation. That was...

This one’s for the absolute beginners. Once you’ve learned how the box model works, and how to float those boxes, it’s time to get serious about your CSS. To that end, we’ve compiled a massive list of tips, tricks, techniques, and the occasional dirty hack to help you build the design you want. CSS can get tricky, and you should too. And now, in no particular order, (almost) everything you’ll need to know: 1. Absolute positioning If...

HTTP/2 is a new way of making your website load much faster by eliminating many inefficiencies associated with the current version of HTTP. The greatest thing about it? You don’t have to go to much effort to get it up and running. Or do you? What is HTTP/2? When HTTP1 and HTTP1.1 were originally developed, the web was very different to what it is today. Websites had fewer resources (JavaScript files, CSS files, images) than today. Connections...

We take web fonts for granted these days. We didn’t always have the option of setting our text in almost any typeface. I mean, we could, but then we’d have to sigh and say, “Well, that’ll look good on about five people’s computers. Hope everyone else likes Verdana!” Web fonts brought some much needed variety to the seen, a few abuses of typography, some extra page weight as the fonts themselves were loaded, and flashes of unstyled...

The internet is constantly making headway with speed being the major metric of progress and a key question for most web developers. A previous WebdesignerDepot article How slow is too slow in 2016? highlighted the need to focus on speed, so we decided to present a few features that will help your site make the grade in 2016. HTTP/2 Published in May 2015 and supported since the second half of 2015, HTTP/2 is a new version of the world wide web...

If you use any kind of social media like Facebook or Twitter, you won’t have been able to avoid the merciless onslaught of ads promoting WYSIWYG website development. I’m not talking about those fancy software applications like DreamWeaver, but actually hosted site building applications that offer drag-n-drop website building systems complete with predefined templates. You could easily think that this is a great idea because on the...