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Have design systems helped bridge the gap between designers and developers? Probably not. Is part of that potentially the increasing complexity of frontend build tooling? Possibly. Design and …

Busy, busy, busy. Life is far too busy right now. I only got back from the Hebrides on Monday and we're already packing for the next trip! Not that I'm complaining about being on the move, it's …

Craft CMS has the ability to accept environment variables as well as aliases. It can be worthwhile understanding how these two seemingly similar concepts differ, and when you might want to use one over the other.

Welcome to the third version of theAdhocracy! It's been a long time coming, but the site has finally been rebuilt, rehosted, and re-just-about-everything else, so I figured I'd actually formalise the launch with a new post explaining what's happened and why.

Notes from the fully remote React Summit 2020 (or at least the talks I tuned in for). Lots covered, from static-site generators and the Jamstack through to React state management and accessibility. What a fun day!

Notes from the 2020 Jamstack Conf. Some interesting dives in the Jamstack community and various applications of Jamstack technologies, with tweet threads as usual.

Jeremy has been updating The Session to use variable font sizes with the new CSS clamp() property. He offers some interesting ideas on how best to do …

The idea of a great divide in front-end development resonated with me. I'm worried about how the erosion of certain skills could lead to a less inclusive, accessible web, for both users and developers. On the other hand, there are some massive advantages to our new tools. It's a double-edged sword.

I've long wondered whether there were any particular gotchas with React when it came to using the prefers-reduced-motion flag. Well, Josh has written up the answer (and, as usual, extremely well). …

I've been thinking a lot about an article I read recently that called out technical writing online for being overly trusted. But shouldn't that same argument apply more universally to third-party code coming from any source?

What do you do when a website has loaded but the content is still being fetched from an API? One answer is to fill the page with animated placeholders, creating a skeleton of what the user can expect, with a dash of CSS animation to let them know that something's still going on behind the scenes.

A fascinating look at how modern front-end architecture and practices can help solve some of the communities issues; even the ones they initially created! Really neat to see how Brad has been using …

Making the case for the title UI Engineer as a meaningful descriptor for those of us that consider our work in front-of-the-front-end terms.

Heydon's video is an excellent overview of their much-loved owl selector and "stack" layout pattern. I actually didn't realise that Heydon was the original "inventor" of the owl, though it makes a …

Ahmad has put together some really interesting examples of where modern CSS techniques can replace traditional use-case for absolute positioning. I'd be really interested to know how some of them …

With half the year now firmly in the past, how are my 2022 goals coming along?

Apparently, ARIA live regions don't play nicely with React. Whilst they work fine in many browsers, they simply don't function in VoiceOver without some workarounds.

I'm not sure I agree fully with everything Jared has written here – and there's a strong feeling of bias-tinted vision to some of the claims – but I enjoyed the overall trend of the argument and …

Various notes from my battle to get a local development environment working for Craft CMS.

The increasing use of React Server Components is meaning the end of the CSS-in-JS era. But what options exist to fill that gap? I've been pleasantly surprised with what I've found.

I'm still enjoying the wombo-combo of Sass and CSS Modules, but my React-ified brain occasionally blanks on how to approach certain problems. The one that catches me out the most: style inheritance.

I have long sought a web-native way to achieve sidenotes with CSS, and it turns out Eric is in the same boat. The new Anchor Position API in CSS is seeking to solve that problem, and whilst it …

Good design involves a lot of decision making, and decisions result in trade-offs. Understanding how to go about considering design decisions is critical to good user experiences and ensuring other …

Specifically, the 6th (and 7th) of August, 2023; the day we tied the proverbial knot.

Are there any concerns with using superscript and subscript when crafting content for the web?

I finally made it to an IndieWebCamp! It was a huge amount of fun and left me with many ideas, thoughts, and questions.

A phenomenally interesting journey through one person's assistive set-up, using only the left mouse button to navigate the web, code websites, play video games, and everything else …

Migrating content between fields in Craft is not as simple as it might be. In the wake of Craft 5, I've been getting a lot of practice, and wanted to write up some of the techniques I've been using.

A very clever technique of using combinations of flex-basis, asymmetrical flex-grow, or (for Grid) some quirky minmax() magic to generate flexible layout shifts that, in practice, …

Have you noticed something a little bit different around here?