Lea is currently busy doing research in Human-Computer Interaction at MIT CSAIL. She has previously written an advanced CSS book for O’Reilly (CSS Secrets) and worked as a Developer Advocate at W3C. She has a long-standing passion for open web standards, and is one of the few Invited Experts in the CSS Working Group. Lea has also started several popular open source projects and web applications, such as Prism, Dabblet and -prefix-free and maintains a technical blog at lea.verou.me. Despite her academic pursuits in Computer Science, Lea is one of the few misfits who love code and design equally.
The annual survey for anyone who writes CSS, State of CSS, is nearing the end of its response period for 2022. The survey is available in many different languages and all questions are optional.
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Have you ever wanted to make a website that non-technical folks can edit right in the browser? Or have you ever wanted to make a website that presents an editable collection of items (e.g. your portfolio)? Or simply upload images to a website you made, right from the browser?
Well, what if I told you, that you can do these things (and more!), just with HTML and CSS? No programming code to write, no servers to manage. You can make any element editable and saveable just by adding one HTML attribute to it. In fact, you can store your data locally in the browser, on Github, on Dropbox, or any other service just by changing an HTML attribute.
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In this article, Lea Verou explains what an HTML API is, why they’re useful, and which important lesson developers can learn from them. Keep reading to find out how to design a good one.
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Pie charts have traditionally been anything but simple to create with web technologies, despite being incredibly common for information ranging from simple stats to progress indicators and timers.
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Frequently, when I discuss CSS3 with other developers, the issue of stubborn clients comes up. They tell me that even though they personally don’t think a website should look the same in all browsers and they’re eager to try all of these new techniques, their clients insist that their website should look the same, so the developers are stuck with the same Web development techniques that we used five to ten years ago. Their clients just don’t “get” graceful degradation.
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Very frequently in Web development (and programming in general), you need to store a long list of boolean values (yes/no, true/false, checked/unchecked… you get the idea) into something that accepts only strings. Maybe it’s because you want to store them in localStorage or in a cookie, or send them through the body of an HTTP request. I’ve needed to do this countless times.
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Editor’s note: This article is the first piece in our new series introducing new, useful and freely available tools and techniques presented and released by active members of the Web design community. Lea Verou is well-known for her experiments with CSS and JavaScript and in this post she presents her recent tool, prefixfree which will hopefully help you break free from the CSS prefix hell.
The code I write in my live demo slides and presentations doesn’t have any prefixes, even for things like @keyframes or the transition property, which aren’t yet supported anywhere prefix-less. To be able to do this, I wrote a script that detects the prefix of the current browser and adds it where needed. Recently, I thought, why not adapt the script to process all of the CSS code on a page, so that the CSS in my style sheets is as elegant as the code in my demos? Shortly after, prefixfree was born.
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You might think that reporting the bug would be pointless. Read this post to know how to identify a bug, learn why you should bother reporting bugs, and become part of making the Web a better place.
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