When it comes to incorporating irregular shaped text into web projects, we often end up using images. However, there may be a better way – using inline SVG and CSS to create dynamic, responsive, and accessible graphics directly within our HTML. In this post, we'll walk you through the process of achieving this, ensuring our designs are on point while maintaining accessibility and SEO friendliness.
HTML radio buttons are a staple of web forms, but their default appearance leaves much to be desired. In this blog post, we'll walk through one of my favorite methods to customize the look of radio buttons using CSS, creating a more user-friendly and visually appealing experience.
For the longest time we’ve been stuck with boxes and it makes things that are common yet beautiful in the print world difficult if not impossible on the web. CSS shapes change this, leveling the playing field allowing us to create much more engaging layouts and designs on the web.
I was lucky enough to get the invite from Matt West, founder/organizer of CodeSLO, via my coworker @schwarty to give a presentation at the CodeSLO meetup "HTML and CSS - Part 3 - Modern Web Design" meet up. This was a good time. I got to get out and talk shop with a great group of people who were excited to learn about design and the role it plays on the web. My talk went a little over thirty minutes and covered the basic principles of good design: contrast, repetition, proximity, alignment, layout, typography, color, and more. For those that were unable to attend, feel free to take a look at the slides to see what you missed...
Sometimes it's necessary to have a link that contains some children elements. Say, for example, you have a link that contains some text and an inline SVG icon that's styled using CSS. This set up allows you to style the icon for all of the link states `:hover`, `:visited`, and `:active` right? Well yes, with the exception of the `:active` state in Internet Explorer. Well, not without a work around at least.
We are all designing and building responsive websites now. For many of us this means both exciting new challenges and significant increases to our workload. Testing at many variable widths is more and more difficult to do and is likely the culprit of much of our increase in development time.
You've likely seen CSS animations and transitions in various web applications out there where they just didn't work well. They are choppy and freeze along with a bunch of other issues. This occurs because they are not taking advantage of the device GPU and hardware acceleration, but are instead using the browsers' built in rendering engine.
For those of us who are used to working with XHTML this is going to seem a little odd but, with HTML5, we no longer need to add a trailing slash on self closing tags like images and inputs.
With all of the great frameworks popping up it can be difficult to choose the "right" one. Besides doing some really great things, probably the two most popular frameworks [Twitter Bootstrap](http://getbootstrap.com/2.3.2/) and [Zurb Foundation](http://foundation.zurb.com/), can be a little overreaching at times when it comes to theming them. You may find that you have to overwrite and undo many styles to make them look unique. This is where web developer [James South's](https://twitter.com/James_M_South) [Responsive Boilerplate](http://responsivebp.com/) may prove to be that "right" one.
Now that there are so many people accessing the sites we build through touch devices many of us will see that we need to alter the default panning and zooming behavior of the browser when touching them.
If you use Illustrator for interface design you probably take advantage of using placed files for some of your design elements. I've started using the heck out of them in order to make updating items across files much easier and quicker. As I started doing this I quickly realized that it's monotonous to update the placed files manually after making edits to them. Well, there's good news, you can set Illustrator to automatically updated them for you.
It used to be that websites and their interactions were much different than those from native software applications. Well this is not so much the case anymore. [Mary Lou](http://tympanus.net/codrops/author/crnacura/), a freelance web designer and developer from [tympanus.net](http://tympanus.net/), wrote an interesting article discussing a few different morphing buttons concepts that showcase some amazing possibilities for web interactions.
Have you ever attempted to use a condensed or expanded font face from a particular font family using CSS? How did you do it? Did you create a new web font with a subset of the condensed or expanded versions? Well, thanks to CSS3 there's now a better way, [sort of](#sortof).
If you're reading my blog I'll assume that you are familiar with how to live edit code within all browser developer tools. I use them all the time and can hardly remember what it was like without them. Chrome DevTools tend to be my favorite but FireFox and Internet Explorer continue to improve.
Paul Irish created and maintains a site devoted to Ampersands. The site is a collection of open source web fonts that only contain the ampersand character. He created it based off an [article from 2008](http://simplebits.com/notebook/2008/08/14/ampersands-2/) regarding the usage of ampersands and the fact that certain variants of the character in some fonts are more interesting than others. The article also points out that the ampersand character is often used only for display purposes and not in content so there is no reason not to use more interesting versions.
CSS provides us with a handful of pseudo classes that are specific to HTML5 forms. They allow us to create forms that are easier to fill out by highlighting fields that are required, optional, valid, invalid, etc.
With HTML5 we have been given new input types (email, tel, url, number, etc.) and built in browser validation to validate them. This is great but you may want to disable this validation if you want to test your server side validation, use custom validation, or something else.
For those of you who have taken advantage of web fonts you've likely noticed various levels of quality. Sometimes, in some browsers, they look great. Other times, in other browsers, they look thin grainy. And if you're like me you probably just cringed a little and dealt with it. Well, fortunately we now have help thanks to [Alfred Xing](http://alfredxing.com/) who has created [Brick](http://brick.im/).
Back in the good ol' days, CSS was much more limited than it is today. If we needed to style something it had to be in the page which, in turn, led to bloated markup simply for design purposes. Luckily we are no longer in those days.
The ng-cloak directive was added to Angular in order to prevent the flickering of elements before your application has fully loaded. It then removes ng-cloak once it has had a chance to compile your views. However, there is still a flicker issue that occurs between when the view is first loaded and before Angular has had a chance to run.