Introduction Apps are more complex than ever. You have more tools, APIs, and managed services than you can count, but all that convenience brings new challenges. Microservices sprawl, dependency chains, and flaky CI pipelines can turn simple updates into landmines. How do you scale without everything breaking? How do you stay compliant without drowning in…
Welcome to the first ever What’s !important, a roundup of the best CSS and web development news from the last two weeks. If you’re pressed for time (who isn’t?) or you just can’t stand missing out on anything CSS-related, this is the place to recap: the best CSS/web dev articles from around the web, interesting announcements…
Ever feel like you’re doing the same boring computer tasks over and over? Clicking through folders to hunt for a file. Manually skimming massive logs for one error message. Running the same backup script by hand every Friday. What if you could get that time back? The secret isn’t working harder—it’s working smarter, and it’s…
It’s interesting to me to think about during a lot of the web’s evolution, there were many different browser engines (more than there are now) and they mostly just agreed-on-paper to do the same stuff. We focus on how different things could be cross-browser back then, which is true, but mostly it all worked pretty…
The CSS animation-timeline property accepts a view() function which, in turn, returns a timeline of how much of an element is visible in the part of a scroll container that’s viewable (formally known as a scrollport). In other words, rather than letting an animation run a linear progression based on how much time has elapsed,…
There’s a new term in town: soft navigations. Basically it means “single page app” (SPA) style navigations where page stuff changes, and the URL changes, but the browser didn’t do a traditional full-reload thing. I like the term in the sense that it sounds like a light insult. Whattaya too weak, child, to do a…
Web components, as imagined in 1998 from a never-adopted specification: Componentization is a powerful paradigm that allows component users to build applications using ‘building blocks’ of functionality without having to implement those building blocks themselves, or necessarily understand how the building works in fine detail. This method makes building complex applications easier by breaking them down…
Let’s be real. You’re putting in the hours. You’ve got your tools set up, you’re scoping programs, and you’re firing off scans. But your bug bounty dashboard is still… kinda empty. You see others landing critical vulnerabilities and you’re stuck with maybe a few low-severity “info” findings, if that. It’s frustrating. It feels like a…
Jump to Docs Navigation I’d never heard of a CEM before. That’s a “Custom Elements Manifest” or a custom-elements.json file in your project. It’s basically generated documentation about all the web components your project has. Dave calls them the killer feature of web components. With a Custom Element Manifest, community plugins can use that information to generate…
For the past few months, I’ve been writing a lot of entries on pseudo-selectors in CSS, like ::picker() or ::checkmark. And, in the process, I noticed I tend to use the :open pseudo-selector a lot in my examples — and in my work in general. Borrowing words from the fine author of the :open entry in the Almanac: The CSS :open pseudo-selector targets…