Note: To understand the following, I expect you to know how regex lookahead works. If you don’t, read about it first and return here after you’re done. I was quite excited to discover this, but to my dismay, Steven Levithan assured me it’s actually well known. However, I felt it’s so useful and unde...

A common dilemma while teaching (I’m not only talking about teaching in a school or university; talks and workshops are also teaching), is whether it’s better to first teach some easy special cases and then generalize, or first the general case and then present special cases as merely shortcuts. I’v...

¿animation-direction? Lets assume you have a CSS animation for background-color that goes from a shade of yellow (#cc0) to a shade of blue (#079) and repeats indefinitely. The code could be something like this: @keyframes color { from { background: #cc0 } to { background: #079 } } div { animation: c...

As much as I like .net magazine, I was recently outraged by their “Texturizing Web Type” article. It features a way to apply a texture to text with -webkit-mask-image, presenting it as an experimental CSS property and misleading readers. There are even -moz-, -o- and -ms- prefixes for something that...

I’m often asked how I got into web development, especially from people that haven’t met many women in the field. Other times it’s people with little kids and they are asking for guidance about how to steer them into programming. I promised them that I would write a long post about it at some point, ...

A few days ago, the incredibly talented Roman Komarov posted an experiment of his with pure CSS “scrolling shadows”. If you’re using Google Reader, you are probably familiar with the effect: In Roman’s experiment, he is using absolutely positioned pseudoelements to cover the shadows (which are basic...

I was working on a project today, when I realized that I had forgotten to commit for days (local only repo). I switched to my terminal, spent at least five minutes trying to decide on the commit message before settling to the completely uninformative “Another commit”. Embarrassed with myself, I shar...

One of the first things a software engineer learns is “don’t reinvent the wheel”. If something is already made, use that instead of writing your own. “Stand on the shoulders of giants, they know what they’re doing better than you”. Writing your own tools and libraries, even when one already exists, ...

If you’ve used definition lists (<dl>) you’re aware of the problem. By default, <dt>s and <dd>s have display:block. In order to turn them into what we want in most cases (each pair of term and definition on one line) we usually employ a number of different techniques: Using a different <dl> for each...

My first article in ALA was published today, read it here: Every time you call a proprietary feature “CSS3”, a kitten dies Some comments about it on twitter: https://twitter.com/kkmett/status/169424038421204994 https://twitter.com/codepo8/status/169425611801108480 https://twitter.com/lydiamann/statu...

The CSS Working Group is recently discussing the very serious problem that vendor prefixes have become. We have reached a point where browsers are seriously considering to implement -webkit- prefixes, just because authors won’t bother using anything else. This is just sad. :( Daniel Glazman, Christi...

It all started a few months ago, when Chris Coyier casually asked me how would I move an element along a circle, without of course rotating the element itself. If I recall correctly, his solution was to use multiple keyframes, for various points on a circle’s circumference, approximating it. I could...

A while ago, I posted about how to use steps() as an easing function to create a typing animation that degrades gracefully. Today I decided to simplify it a bit and make it more flexible, at the cost of browser support. The new version fully works in Firefox 1+ and IE10, since Opera and WebKit don’t...

This project started as an attempt to improve dabblet and to generate data for the book chapter I’m writing for Smashing Book #3. I wanted to create a very simple/basic testsuite for CSS3 stuff so that you could hover on a e.g. CSS3 property and you got a nice browser support popup. While I didn’t a...

If you follow me on twitter or have heard one of my talks you’ll probably know I despise spaces for indentation with a passion. However, I’ve never gone into the details of my opinion on stage, and twitter isn’t really the right medium for advocacy. I always wanted to write a blog post about my take...

Warning: Personal post ahead. If you’re here to read some code trickery, move along and wait for the next post, kthxbai Blogs are excellent places for new year’s resolutions. Posts stay there for years, to remind you what you’ve been thinking long ago. A list on a piece of paper or a file in your co...

With the rise of all these APIs and the browser race to implement them, you’d think that currently we can do pretty much everything in JavaScript and even if we currently can’t due to browser support issues, we will once the specs are implemented. Unfortunately, that’s not true. There are still thin...

Not sure if you noticed, but Dabblet now has a blog: blog.dabblet.com I’ll post there about Dabblet updates and not flood my regular subscribers here who may not care. So, if you are interested on Dabblet’s progress, follow that blog or @dabblet on twitter. That was also an excuse to finally try tum...

Yesterday, I released dabblet. One of its aspects that I took extra care of, is it’s keyboard navigation. I used many of the commonly established application shortcuts to navigate and perform actions in it. Some of these naturally collided with the native browser shortcuts and I got a few bug report...

I loved JSFiddle ever since I first used it. Being able to test something almost instantly and without littering my hard drive opened new possibilities for me. I use it daily for experiments, browser bug testcases, code snippet storage, code sharing and many other things. However, there were always ...

Edit: This was originally written to be posted in www-style, the mailing list for CSS development. I thought it might be a good idea to post it here as other people might be interested too. It wasn’t. Most people commenting didn’t really get the point of the article and thought I’m suggesting we sho...

What kind of transitions can you create with only one property? This is what my new experiment, animatable aims to explore. It’s essentially a gallery of basic transitions. It aims to show how different animatable properties look when they transition and to broaden our horizons about which propertie...

This month has been very busy conference-wise. I had 4 conferences in a row, so I was flying from country to country and giving talks for 2 weeks. As I usually do after conferences, this post sums up my experiences and feedback I got from these conferences, in chronological order. FromTheFront This ...

My newest article on Smashing Magazine’s coding section is for the geekiest among you. It’s about how you can pack long lists of boolean values into a string in the most space-efficient way. Hope you enjoy it :)

I always loved Github’s ability to publish pages for a project and get the strain out of your server. However, every time I tried it, I struggled to keep the gh-pages branch up to date. Until I discovered the awesome git rebase. Usually my github workflow is like this: git add . git status // to see...

I wrote this script while at the airport travelling to Oslo and during the Frontend 2011 conference. I think it’s amazing, and it makes authoring CSS3 a pleasure. Read my announcement about it on Smashing Magazine. Hope you like it!

I’m writing this blog post while eating some of the amazing Lindt chocolates I got for free 10 days ago at Frontend conference in Zurich. But it wasn’t a good experience only because of them! First of all, it gave me the opportunity to visit Zurich for free, and meet an old friend for the first time...

A week ago, I released Chainvas. It was a spin-off script I wrote while developing my cubic-bezier tool, to make using the Canvas API a bit less painful. However, unlike similar attempts to make the Canvas API chainable, most of my code was written in a very generic manner, and was actually able to ...

A few days ago, I had a talk at a conference in Zurich (I’m going to write more about it in another post). The talk was about “10 things you might not know about CSS3”. The first of those things was how you can do bouncing transitions with cubic-bezier() instead of an easing keyword. As usual, my sl...

It’s definitely not the first time someone writes a script to make the canvas API chainable, as a quick Google search will confirm. However, I think my attempt has merit, because it’s not really focused in chaining canvas methods, but just about every API you use it on and because it’s super small, ...