2021 JavaScript Rising Stars

Say hello to the era of the meta frameworks.

The web doesn’t have version numbers

Terms like ‘Web 2.0’ and ‘web3’ are just for marketing.

Be plainspoken

The power of communicating in an unadorned manner.

Codrops 2021

Last year’s highlights from the inspirational blog for front-end developers.

web3 is centralized

“web3 is actually more centralized than the web it seeks to replace.”

Hook, line, and sinker

A model for crafting successful, viral content.

MenubarX

A Mac browser with which you can pin webpages to the menu bar.

Pastel

A command-line tool to generate, analyze, convert and manipulate colors.

Pounx

A browser-based 3D design tool with real-time collaboration.

Unlock

A platform for developers to sell, license and distribute their software.

Accessible heading structure

What is good for your reader is also good for your SEO.

Positive friction

How you can use it to create better user experiences.

Why might you run your own DNS server?

There are many reasons to run a DNS server or resolver.

Creating great content is a process, not a project

The pressure to “get it right” doesn’t have to be so rough.

Bad ideas in visualization

Thought-provoking analysis of some data visualization practices.

The many methods for using SVG icons

Techniques for particular situations and use-cases.

Tauri

A toolkit to build desktop applications with a web frontend.

COLRv1 color gradient vector fonts in Chrome 98

Chrome now helps to make color fonts widespread.

Washed up

Are technologies marketed under "web3" an evolution of the web?

Crypto: the good, the bad and the ugly

What to expect from cryptocurrencies in the world wide web?

My first impressions of web3

The promise, pitfalls, and opportunities of the “crypto” space.

The 2021 Web Almanac

HTTP Archive’s latest web report is now available as Google Book.

Your CSS reset needs text-size-adjust (probably)

How to prevent an odd rendering issue in Mobile Safari.

Non Boring Gradients

Generate beautiful gradients with different interpolation spaces.

The future of color in CSS

New ways to create designs with brighter and more vibrant colors.

“Empathy as an engineer is a superpower. Caring about those you work with will do more for your career than writing beautiful defect-free code.”

Learn to implement SEO in your CMS

Guides, resources, and tips for popular content management systems.

AngularJS reaches end of life

Users can move forward with the TypeScript-based Angular framework.

“The most effective presentation skill is backchanneling, which is where you shop your idea to each stakeholder well ahead of time and get verbal buy-in. Presenting then becomes a cake walk because it’ll essentially be a formality.”

Shapefest

A comprehensive library of high resolution 3D shapes.

Web Accessibility Cheat Sheet

Guidelines to make your website more usable.

New on the web: programmatically open a native date picker

Say hello to elem.showPicker().

Gradient Generator

A tool to create vivid gradients with different color modes.

What I learnt from analyzing 7 million log file events

SEO insights from a ten months project.

Lottie Animations

A huge collection of ready to use interactive animations.

This is WCAG

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines in plain language.

Video to GIF converter

Adobe’s online converter to transform your videos into GIFs.

Chrome will disable modifying ‘document.domain’ to relax the same-origin policy

If your website relies on it, your action is required.

How not to learn TypeScript

What to keep in mind when getting started with TypeScript.

“I’m concerned when I see someone’s title looking like UX Designer, Service Designer and Content Designer. Each one is already a full time job, how can someone do the three?”

Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue

The original blue was chosen with care and through testing.

Autonomy, relatedness, and competence in UX design

Design from the perspective of three basic psychological needs.

From TypeScript to ReScript

Advantages and drawbacks of the ReScript programming language.

Latest Remote Jobs Trends and Stats

Insights on remote jobs trends, updated daily.

PHP in 2022

Exciting times, let’s take a look at modern-day PHP.

Top pens of 2021

100 amazing design and front-end creations.

Announcing Parcel CSS

A new CSS parser, compiler, and minifier written in Rust.

Figma to Framer

A plugin to copy and paste designs from Figma to Framer.

What is the future of UX?

Jesse James Garrett about the evolution of UX design.

Boolean attributes in HTML and ARIA: what’s the difference?

There are some important distinctions to keep in mind.

Convert SVG to Lottie

A tool to transform your SVG icons or illustrations to Lottie animations.

“Writing good release notes is one of the most important steps of a release: distilling everything down to save others time and giving proper credit and thanks.“

Add RSS feeds to your website to keep your core readers engaged

The power of a well established web technology.

Flow and Redacted

Google Fonts for your wireframes and other early-stage designs.

What even is a web browser?

The question seems silly at first but is surprisingly interesting.

Safari 15 IndexedDB leaks

The leak lets any website track your web activity and even reveal your identity.

Some facts about Google Analytics data privacy

Google’s statement after Austrian accusations of GDPR violations.

IndexNow: announcing sharing of submitted URLs

One API to get your URLs into all IndexNow-enabled search engines.

Cascade Layers

Quick show and tell on CSS cascade layers and the @layer property.

Using the CSS Me Not bookmarklet to see (and disable) CSS files

A tiny tool helps to diagnose unnecessary CSS files.

Debug guide for web analytics and tag management

How to identify where things go wrong.

CSS Speedrun

A fun way to test your knowledge about CSS selectors.

Passwordless.dev

Fingerprint and Face ID sign-ins for your website.

Edit Photo

Browse, paste, or drop your photo and start editing.

Shottr

Screenshot app for designers and UI developers.

Microsoft lets you follow YouTube creators in Edge browser test

Edge is getting a new modern RSS feed.

What were the hottest front-end tools in 2021?

Last year’s most interesting front-end tools, according to Web Tools Weekly.

Unlighthouse

An entire site audit tool for scanning live and development sites.

Memegine

A full-text search engine for internet memes.

Framer

Design websites right on the canvas, and it’s ready to be published.

“Why refactor your code and keep up with dependency deprecations when you can get a new job every 3 years to avoid your own technical debt?”

The case against UX testing

“UX testing almost always works, but it is only profitable at scale.”

SQLime

An SQLite playground that runs in your browser.

Building UI components with SVG and CSS

Use-cases where using SVG and CSS shine.

The importance of inclusive content design

What to keep in mind when creating content for different communities.

Your future self will thank you

Building your personal documentation.

Quick accessibility tests anyone can do

Simple ways to identify key accessibility issues with your content.

GPS

An in-depth article with interactive illustrations on how GPS works.

Animate anything along an SVG path

Creative coding with SVG paths and the getPointAtLength() function.

“Linux isn't magic, it's sudo science.”

My favorite fonts of 2021

“2021 wasn’t a bad year for type design.”

Vue 3 as the new default

The path from a runtime library to a full-featured framework for web developers.

Font-independent pixel-perfect negative CSS text-indents

A smart solution for hanging bullets, numbers, and punctuation marks.

In pursuit of the perfect blog

Advantages and drawbacks of popular blogging platforms.

Responsive Viewer

A Chrome extension to show multiple screens in one view.

Release notes for Safari Technology Preview 138

CSS ‘:focus-visible’ pseudo-class, enabled NavigationPreloadManager, and more.

New robots tag: indexifembedded

Google Search now lets you control if your embedded content is indexed.

“When I was a kid I wanted to be a vet, and look at me now fixing bugs all day. Mission achieved.”

CSS Flexbox or CSS Grid

What to choose?

UX Research Resources

Communities, people, books, blogs, podcasts, tools, and more.

Porting USB applications to the web

How low-level libraries like libusb can be ported to the web.

The future of CSS

Detect at-rule support with @supports at-rule(@keyword).

Image Compress

Bulk conversion of images without sending them to the server.

Charm

A collection of command-line tools that will make you smile.

Getting started with CSS cascade layers

An incoming method to orchestrate the “C” in CSS.

“10 years ago my Twitter feed was full of people striving to make the web better. Now it feels like everyone is out to make a quick buck.”

Designing multiplayer apps with patterns from architecture

The design of social spaces on the web increasingly matters.

Div divisiveness

Guidelines for using the HTML ‘div’ element in different use cases.

TM2122 Responsive Lettering Experiments

A gallery of box-fitting, breathing, jumping, and flipping lettering.

CSS-only external link favicons

A simple way to show favicons on external links on a site.