Tagged “tool”

Here’s a handy tool from the smart folks at 9elements for making a value – such as a font-size, or margin – fluidly responsive. In their words the tool…

calculates the CSS clamp formula to interpolate between two values in a given viewport range.

It’s inspired by Utopia but is for situations when you only need a single clamp formula rather than one for each interval in a type or spacing scale.

Beyond that, the website for this tool just looks great and is choc-full of tricks. It uses some snazzy CSS, includes Zach Leatherman’s details-utils web component for animated disclosures and is made with Astro, Svelte and PostCSS.

A new animation library, built on the Web Animations API for the smallest filesize and the fastest performance.

This JavaScript-based animation library—which can be installed via npm—leans on an existing web API to keep its file size low and uses hardware accelerated animations where possible to achieve impressively smooth results.

For fairly basic animations, this might provide an attractive alternative to the heavier Greensock. The Motion docs do however flag the limitation that it can only animate “CSS styles”. They also say “SVG styles work fine”. I hope by this they mean SVG presentation attributes rather than inline CSS on an SVG, although it’s hard to tell. However their examples look promising.

The docs website also contains some really great background information regarding animation performance.

There are many colour contrast checking tools but I like this one from Erik Kennedy (of Learn UI Design) a lot. It features an intuitive UI using simple, human language that mirrors the task I’m there to achieve, and it’s great that if your target colour doesn’t have sufficient contrast to meet accessibility guidelines it will intelligently suggest alternatives that do.

I’m sure everyone has their favourite tools; I just find this one really quick to use!

SVG Gobbler is a browser extension that finds the vector content on the page you’re viewing and gives you the option to download, optimize, copy, view the code, or export it as an image.

This is a pretty handy Chrome extension that grabs all the SVGs on a webpage and lets you see them all in a grid.

Astro looks very interesting. It’s in part a static site builder (a bit like Eleventy) but it also comes with a modern (revolutionary?) developer experience which lets you author components as web components or in a JS framework of your choice but then renders those to static HTML for optimal performance. Oh, and as far as I can tell theres no build pipeline!

Astro lets you use any framework you want (or none at all). And if most sites only have islands of interactivity, shouldn’t our tools optimize for that?

People have been posting some great thoughts and insights on Astro already, for example:

• Chris Coyier’s review
• Review in CSS-Tricks Newsletter #255 including links to Chris’s Astro demo site
• The web is too damn complex, by Robin Rendle
• Astro’s introductory blog post

(via @css)

Here’s a handy JS package for “copy to clipboard” functionality that’s lightweight and installable from npm.

It also appears to have good legacy browser support plus a means for checking/confirming support too, which should assist if your approach is to only add a “copy” button to the DOM as a progressive enhancement.

(via @chriscoyier)

Lean, hackable, extensible slide deck framework

I’ve been on the lookout for a lightweight, web standards based slide deck solution for a while and this one from Lea Verou could well be perfect.

It has keyboard navigation, video and code demo support, an index page and much more… and it’s all powered by straightforward HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I need to give this a spin!

Here’s a nice, lightweight and framework-free drag and drop UI solution, that’s sure to come in handy.

Drag and drop so simple it hurts

(via @mxbck)

Here’s a handy-looking tool for the SVG editing toolkit.

Remove blank space from around any SVG instantly.

(via @chriscoyier)

Diffchecker is a diff tool to compare text differences between two text files.

I had cause to use this free diff tool recently to compare two large minified CSS files and it did the trick better than any others I’ve tried. Thumbs up!

A handy tool which lets you type in a URL then inspects that page’s meta tags and shows you how it will be presented on popular websites.

This is really useful for testing how an article will look as a Google search result or when shared on Facebook, Slack and Twitter based on different meta tag values.

A tool for testing how accessible your experience is on various assistive technologies – perhaps “like BrowserStack but for screen readers”?

Assistiv Labs remotely connects you to real assistive technologies, like NVDA, VoiceOver, and TalkBack, using any modern web browser.

I use a Mac for development which means that when I do screen reader testing I use the Mac’s VoiceOver tool. However the majority of screen reader users are using NVDA via Firefox on a PC. Perhaps this tool might let me test on that stack without buying a PC.

Next action: sign up for a free trial and give it a go!

(via Matthew and @paddyduke)

A great tool for automatically generating a visual sitemap (visual because it attaches a screenshot to each node) for any given website.

Simply enter a URL and get a thumbnail-based visual architecture of the entire site.

You can even have it crawl a password-protected website.

A neat online tool (with a positive goal) which lets you paste in a link to one of your Spotify playlists then lets you know which of the tracks or albums are available to buy on Bandcamp.

Support the artists you listen to by buying their stuff.

I like the sound of this performance analysis tool from the clever folks at Cloud Four, especially because it covers your entire site rather than just a single page.

Lighthouse Parade is a Node.js command line tool that crawls a domain and gathers lighthouse performance data for every page. With a single command, the tool will crawl an entire site, run a Lighthouse report for each page, and then output a spreadsheet with the aggregated data.

It was also easy to run with no local installation, via:

npx lighthouse-parade https://fuzzylogic.me

However it was taking a long time to run over all the pages of my statically generated site (there are lots of pages), so much so that I felt I needed to stop it due to my laptop sounding like it was about to take off. So if running it again, I’d probably only do so on a smaller site, or first check the tool’s documentation to see if either scope-limiting or sitemap-based crawling support have been added.

Here’s a (work in progress) list of useful (Mac) Browser DevTools tips, tricks and keyboard shortcuts for my reference and yours. This is a work in progress and I’ll update it as I go.

Console Panel

Return currently selected element to work with

$0

Then you can execute its methods or inspect its attribute values, for example:

$0.offsetParent

Debug event-based behaviour

In Chrome, right-click on the relevant element (e.g. a button) and select “Inspect Element”. By default, the Styles panel is selected but instead select the Event Listeners panel. In there you can see all events (e.g. click) currently being listened for on that element (and its parent elements so as to include instances of event delegation).

Each event can be expanded to show which element has the event listener attached – for example it might be the current element or might be document. From here you can get to the script containing the code. Click a line number within the code to add a breakpoint. This will pause code execution on that line until you click the play button to continue. You might also log the current value of a variable here.

Pause JavaScript execution

Cmd + backslash

Firefox

Get responsive img element’s currentSrc

Inspect the element, right click and select Show DOM Properties from the context menu.

Google Chrome

Open the Command Menu

Command+Shift+P

Disable JavaScript

Open the Command Menu then type “disable” and you’ll see the option.

Get responsive img element’s currentSrc

Inspect the element, click the properties tab, toggle open the top item.

Throttle network/bandwidth

Go to tab Network then change Throttling to your desired setting, for example “Slow 3G”, or “offline”.

References

• How to view and edit JavaScript in your browser's developer tools

Here’s a list of useful Screen Reader commands and tips for my reference and yours. This is a work in progress and I’ll update it as I go.

VoiceOver (Mac)

Initial setup:

1. Open Safari > Preferences > Advanced; then
2. check the checkbox “Press tab to highlight each item on a webpage”.

Usage

• Open the page you want to test in your web browser (you might favour Safari for VoiceOver).
• Cmd-F5 to turn VoiceOver on.
• Cmd-F5 (again) to turn VoiceOver off.

Get Cmd-F5 for “toggling on and off” into your muscle memory!

Then:

• Ctrl-Option-A to have VoiceOver read the entire page.
• Ctrl to pause VoiceOver, and Ctrl again to resume.
• Find any unexpected issues by

Tabbing

Tab through items on the page using the tab key. This will move to the next focusable item (button, link, input). You can verify all interactive elements have a focus style, all interactive elements are reachable by keyboard, all off-screen or hidden elements don’t get focused when they shouldn’t and that the spoken label for each interactive element has sufficient context to understand it (“click here” and “menu” isn’t sufficient).

Navigating with the right-pointing arrow key

Navigate through all the content using Ctrl-Option-→. While this is not how most screen reader users will read the page, it doesn’t take long and lets you confirm that everything VoiceOver announces makes sense.

Using Rotor to scan and jump to specific elements

• Ctrl-Option-U to open Rotor
• Browse categories using left and right arrows. This includes the Landmarks menu.
• Down arrow to browse within the categories
• press Return to select an item

This is a great way to check if your content structure makes sense to a screen reader. Checking the headings illustrates the outline of the page. Viewing the links helps ensure they all have a name that makes sense without visual context. Checking landmarks helps ensure that the proper ARIA roles have been applied. You might find that a list of articles is not titled appropriately or that headings are not properly nested.

Tables

• Navigate to a table using Ctrl-Option-Cmd-T
• It should read a caption and give you info about the size of the table
• Ctrl-Cmd-{arrowkey} to navigate inside the table.

References

• Ethan Marcotte’s Introduction to Screen Readers Using VoiceOver
• Mac VoiceOver testing the simple way on Cloud Four’s blog
• Data Tables on Inclusive Components

docsify generates your documentation website on the fly. Unlike GitBook, it does not generate static html files. Instead, it smartly loads and parses your Markdown files and displays them as a website.

I just completed a training workshop where the course notes were provided in a website created using this software (and hosted on Netlify), and was really impressed.

Here’s an interesting tool for creating and sharing small-ish web pages without having to build a website or organise hosting.

itty.bitty takes html (or other data), compresses it into a URL fragment, and provides a link that can be shared. When it is opened, it inflates that data on the receiver’s side.

While I find this idea interesting, I’m not yet 100% sure how or when I’ll use it! I’m sure it’ll come in handy at some point, though.

Here’s my first “itty bitty” page, just for fun.

(via @chriscoyier)

We’re excited to announce the first beta release and general availability of the Rome linter for JavaScript and TypeScript. This is the beginning of an entire suite of tools. Rome is not only a linter, but also a compiler, bundler, test runner, and more, for JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, JSON, Markdown, and CSS. We aim to unify the entire frontend development toolchain.

A very ambitious project from the creator of Babel.

Scott Jehl of Filament Group demonstrates a one-liner technique for loading external CSS files without them delaying page rendering.

While this isn’t really necessary in situations where your (minified and compressed) CSS is small, say 14k or below, it could be useful when working with large CSS files and want to deliver critical CSS separately and the rest asynchronously.

Today, armed with a little knowledge of how the browser handles various link element attributes, we can achieve the effect of loading CSS asynchronously with a short line of HTML. Here it is, the simplest way to load a stylesheet asynchronously:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="my.css" media="print" onload="this.media='all'">

Note that if JavaScript is disabled or otherwise not available your stylesheet will only load for print and not for screen, so you’ll want to follow up with a “normal” (non-print-specific) stylesheet within <noscript> tags.

Max shows us how to build a colour theme switcher to let users customise your website. He uses a combination of Eleventy, JSON, Nunjucks with macros, a data attribute on the html element, CSS custom properties and a JavaScript based switcher.

Thanks, Max!

Given what we can now do with CSS, do we still need Sass?

Sass was the hare. CSS is the tortoise. Sass blazed the trail, but now native CSS can achieve much the same result.

Jeremy’s post starts by talking about the new CSS clamp function and how it can be used for scalable type, then veers into a question of whether we still need Sass or if modern CSS now covers our needs.

This is really interesting and definitely gives me pause to consider whether I can simplify my development stack by removing a tool.

However I guess one reason (not mentioned in Jeremy’s post) you might want Sass is that many of the CSS functions which provide similar effects to mixins, variables etc are currently only supported in the most modern, standards-compliant browsers. Sass can pre-process its variables and mixins into older, more broadly-supported CSS. So choosing the pure CSS, processor-free option within a progressive enhancement oriented approach might mean that your broadly-supported baseline is more basic than it would be by using Sass. That’s the sort of decision I could take fairly lightly for my personal website, but I could see it being less palatable for stakeholders working on larger sites.

For example, if your site needs to support IE11 and theming which includes custom colour schemes, unfortunately you don’t have the luxury of putting all your eggs in the native CSS custom properties basket.

SVGs enable full-screen hi-res visuals with a file-size near 5KB and
are well-supported by all modern browsers. What's not to love?

A neat tool for selecting, customising and applying SVG backgrounds.

(via @css)

A font pairing app that helps you match fonts – useful for pairing a webfont with a suitable fallback. You can place the fonts on top of each other, side by side, or in the same line. You can adjust your fallback font’s size and position to get a great match.

If you’re using a web font, you're bound to see a flash of unstyled text (or FOUC), between the initial render of your websafe font and the webfont that you’ve chosen. This usually results in a jarring shift in layout, due to sizing discrepancies between the two fonts. To minimize this discrepancy, you can try to match the fallback font and the intended webfont’s x-heights and widths. This tool helps you do exactly that.

Kieth Cirkel explains how using npm to run the scripts field of package.json is a great, simple alternative to more complex build tools. The article is now quite old but because it contains so many goodies, and since I’ve been using the approach more and more (for example to easily compile CSS on my personal website), it’s definitely worth bookmarking and sharing.

npm’s scripts directive can do everything that these build tools can, more succinctly, more elegantly, with less package dependencies and less maintenance overhead.

It’s also worth mentioning that (as far as I can tell so far) Yarn also provides the same facility.

Related references:

• Using scripts, on the npm cli docs
• Yarn package.json docs

I thought it might be interesting to look back through the years at how the tools in Engineering have changed as our company has grown from 3 to over 240 (and engineering to over 100), and to give a shout out to (some of!) those tools that we consider crucial to our workflow today – especially in these most unusual times where most of the world is working remotely.

A great insight from FreeAgent CTO, Olly Heady, describing how the engineering team have benefitted from tools such as G Suite (Google Apps), Github, Trello, Datadog, Humio and Notion.

grep.app searches code from over a half million public repositories on GitHub.

This could be useful when you’re struggling to use a certain new CSS property, or npm package, and want to see how other programmers are using it.

Fast screen sharing with multiplayer control, drawing & video.

An application which allows collaborating (and drawing) on files and could be useful for pair programming. Free during the current COVID-19 situation.

(via @lylo)

Colour contrast and the use of colour is extremely important for certain groups of people with varying levels of visional impairment. Building upon the excellent Colorable, I wanted more context around the result. When you share the outcome with your colleagues, all the results, rules and what you’re aiming for, is easily understandable for when you have those awkward conversations with designers and marketers. Accessibility doesn’t have to be ugly.

An excellent, easy to use tool for checking text-against-background contrast for accessibility and sharing your results with others.

(via @paddyduke)

Here’s a list of useful (Mac-based) VS Code tips for my reference and yours.

Use the Command Palette

Command-Shift-P

Then type your search term, for example “settings”.

Settings

My preferences (in settings.json or via Preferences→Settings):

{
    "workbench.editor.showTabs": true,
    "editor.formatOnSave": true,
    "explorer.confirmDragAndDrop": false,
    "editor.minimap.enabled": false,
    "extensions.ignoreRecommendations": false,
    "explorer.compactFolders": false,
    "explorer.autoReveal": false,
    "editor.accessibilitySupport": "off",
    "ruby.codeCompletion": "rcodetools",
    "emmet.includeLanguages": {
        "nunjucks": "html",
        "erb": "html"
    },
    "emmet.triggerExpansionOnTab": true
}

Note: the Emmet ones are really useful for code autocompletion.

Additional Emmet Settings

To add a keyboard shortcut for adding an arbitrary wrapper element (say, div.wrap) around some selected code:

Open the Command Palette then search “emmet wrap”. When you see the option “Emmet: wrap with abbreviation”, click the settings icon beside it. Enter your preferred keyboard shortcut. I currently use:

Command-Shift-A

Open current terminal directory in VS Code

code .

Toggle Terminal

Ctrl-`

Toggle sidebar visibility

Command-B

Edit multiple rows simultaneously

Select one instance of the text that appears in multiple locations. Use Command-D to select all, then edit.

Open file to side (for side-by-side editing)

Option–click on a file in the Explorer.

A nice list of tips and tools on how to use simpler browser standards and APIs to avoid the added weight of unnecessary JavaScript and libraries.

Lodash, Moment and other similar libraries are expensive and we don’t always need them. This Github repo contains a host of nice tips, snippets and code–analysing tools.

One cautionary note regarding the idea of replacing JS with CSS: although the idea of using CSS rather than JavaScript for components like tabs and modals seems nice at first, it doesn’t properly consider that we often need JS for reasons of accessibility, in order to apply the correct aria attributes when the state of a UI component is modified.

Via Will Matthewson at work (FreeAgent) during our group conversation on JavaScript strategy.

RegExr is an online tool to learn, build, & test Regular Expressions.

This handy, interactive tool is a bit like Postman but for RegEx. You can create RegEx patterns and save them for easy retrieval later.

I also like the way you can start by making a list of example text strings you want your pattern to i) match and ii) not match before starting work on your RegEx pattern, adopting a sort-of “Test Driven RegEx” approach.

Inspired by Tobias Bjerrome’s blog post Smoother & sharper shadows with layered box-shadows

Create and share beautiful images of your source code. Start typing or drop a file into the text area to get started.

I’ve noticed Andy Bell using a really lovely format when sharing code snippets on Twitter. Turns out that it was using this great tool.

(via @hankchizljaw)

The featured article in this week’s Accessibility Weekly newsletter was on recent improvements to the WAVE suite of accessibility testing tools.

I can’t remember using WAVE before, however just one quick test of fuzzylogic.me using their online tool revealed an accessibility issue with the linked SVG logo in the header. A great catch, now fixed, from which I learned something new. I’ll certainly be adding WAVE to my accessibility testing toolbox from here on in.

WAVE is a suite of evaluation tools that help authors make their web content more accessible to individuals with disabilities. WAVE can identify many accessibility and Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) errors, but also facilitates human evaluation of web content. Our philosophy is to focus on issues that we know impact end users, facilitate human evaluation, and to educate about web accessibility.

I’ve been admiring the wave effect at the foot of banners on Netlify’s website and had noted that they were achieved using SVG. So this tool which helps you “make waves” is pretty timely!

The most popular drop-in solution to the EU Cookie Law requirements.

Over the last year I’ve been successfully using Cookie Consent by Osano on a number of commercial websites. Essentially this is a banner which appears at the bottom (or top) of your website and asks the visitor to explicitly give (or decline to give) consent for the cookies your website uses. It’s a great free resource which handles the requisite GDPR requirements (and more) and offers a number of customisation options.

it’s very simple to include and use – you just step through their WYSIWYG generator, include the generated JavaScript-based settings in your site, and point to their CSS and JavaScript libraries. I like self-hosting my own static assets so I integrate the libraries into my code rather than linking to their externally hosted files, but that’s just my personal preference.

Why do we need this?

It’s because In 2018, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect, establishing a number of principles governing the collection of personal information. Any company or individual that processes personal information of European Union citizens must comply with the GDPR, regardless of where data is stored or processed.

Cookies often collect information about their users that is not specifically identified with one individual, but if that information, combined with other data, can be used to identify an individual, it becomes “personal information” for the purposes of the GDPR and must be treated as such.

The clearest and most effective way to notify a user in advance of the collection of information using cookies is to provide a web banner or “pop-up” cookie notice that appears automatically when the home page is accessed for the first time, and requires some affirmative action.

Knowing how best to serve, size and format favicons and other icons for the many different device types and operating systems can be a minefield. My current best practice approach is to create a 260px × 260px (or larger) source icon then upload it to Real Favicon Generator.

This is the tool recommended by CSS-Tricks and it takes care of most of the pain by not only generating all the formats and sizes you need but also providing some code to put in your <head> and manifest.webmanifest file.

webmention.app is a great new project by Remy Sharp. He created it because he noticed that while adding webmentions to your site is relatively straightforward, sending outgoing webmentions is less so.

At the moment my personal website is Perch-based and I have webmentions enabled, so let’s see what happens when I link to Remy’s explainer article.

Automatically compiles SASS/SCSS files to .css and .min.css upon saving. You may also quickly compile all SCSS/SASS files in your project.

As I consider different ways in which to simplify my development stack and avoid excess tooling (much like Michelle Barker did), this might be worth a look.

(via @MicheBarks)

Cloudinary is a very handy tool for image and video upload, storage, optimisation and CDN.

Store, transform, optimize, and deliver all your media assets with easy-to-use APIs, widgets, or user interface.

This was brought to my attention by Jason Grigsby at An Event Apart. We were discussing his article series on Responsive Images and I asked if he could recommend a tool which auto-generated all of the images you needed for your responsive image code, if you provide a single source image.

I’ve been trying Cloudinary out and so far, so good.

(via @grigs)

A handy tool for identifying colours – provided in numerous different CSS-ready formats – and creating a complimentary colour palette from an image you upload or provide as a URL.

When watching presentations recently I’ve noticed that a few speakers use this tool to generate animated images for their slides.

Gifox is a menu bar app that records your screen into animated GIFs – a great compromise between static images and full-size videos.

I was introduced to this smile-inducing website by Val Head’s An Event Apart Talk “Building more expressive projects”.

TunnelBear describes itself as “A more secure way to browse the web” and it does this by encrypting your internet connection to keep your online activity private on any network.

More interestingly to me, it succeeds at making a techy subject friendly by the use of illustrated and animated bears. And who doesn’t like bears?