Small, native web tricks worth remembering

(htmlcat.net)

88 points | by marcomezzavilla 3 hours ago

9 comments

  • herrherrmann 1 minute ago
    Neat! I like these opinionated lists, especially when it’s easy to browse and cherry-pick useful stuff. It’d be very good to mention how compatible the features are, though. Especially with newer CSS features, it’s easy to overestimate how ready they are for all browsers.

    For that, there could just be links to the related MDN and/or caniuse.com pages.

  • moontear 2 hours ago
    There are some good descriptions and hints, but what the site really needs is examples. Just looking at the code doesn't help me much. The descriptions are also mostly so short, that they could just as well be tooltips on the homepage. The whole premise of the page is a collection of "web tricks worth remembering" and I can't fathom what bash (e.g. `du -hd 1 . | sort -hr`) is doing there.
    • marcomezzavilla 2 hours ago
      You’re absolutely right, thanks for the feedback. I initially included live examples (mostly through CodePen), but they were taking too much time to maintain, so I stopped.

      The Bash entry was really just a half-finished personal note that I never properly edited. It’s probably out of scope too.

      • alpinisme 29 minutes ago
        Codepen is an awful experience on mobile (and is slow, as you said). But your page is an html page about html tips. Surely you can just embed them in the page itself?
      • sam_lowry_ 1 hour ago
        Please keep it, personal notes are worth it. Maybe less navigation or +/- voting, then ranking would help us navigate your site?

        Like in the good old commandlinefu.

      • ramon156 1 hour ago
        Silly question, why not just render the html on the pages? e.g. the popover is something I wanted to see
  • tylerius 54 minutes ago
    Best resource for proper HTML+CSS development is Jason Knight AKA deathshadow's CUTCODEDOWN (cutcodedown.com at Web archive) and his articles at Medium and CodePen (user Jason Knight).
    • yurishimo 8 minutes ago
      How is an archived web site supposed to be a good resource on modern html and css development exactly?
  • apples_oranges 2 hours ago
    please don't hide scrollbars :)
    • afavour 45 minutes ago
      Only time I've seen that work is when making a carousel. Once you're using scroll snap it's already not going to behave the way you'd expect a scrollable container to, so having a different indicator doesn't feel so egregious to me.
    • chrismorgan 1 hour ago
      Yeah, that was the first one my eyes went to. The only scenarios I can think of where it is acceptable to hide scrollbars are infinite canvases where you’ll draw your own non-linear ones (and even then be disappointed because they can’t look or behave natively), and things like maps where you remap scrolling to zoom and might want to use a backing invisible scroll area for that rather than consuming scroll events (which are somewhat more limited).

      In short: unless the native scroll bar will be wrong, do not under any circumstances hide it.

    • marcomezzavilla 1 hour ago
      If you mean the "Hide scrollbars" note, I agree 100% (:

      There are a few specific situations where it can be useful, but I added the caveat precisely because it’s generally not a good practice.

      • IndySun 1 hour ago
        >There are a few specific situations where it can be useful

        re scrollbars, Can you give an example?

        • archerx 1 hour ago
          An online game for example.
        • marcomezzavilla 1 hour ago
          Sure. I was thinking of fairly narrow cases, not ordinary page scrolling:

          - A swipe/drag carousel with visible arrows or dots, especially a looping carousel where the native scrollbar does not represent a meaningful start and end

          - An accordion or expanding panel that animates to reveal all of its content. During the transition, its intermediate height may briefly produce a scrollbar (and a visual flash), even though the fully expanded state does not need one

          - Highly visual or experimental interfaces where scrolling is communicated through another control, or where the scrollable area is decorative and scrolling is not required to access the content

  • OuterVale 2 hours ago
    They're not really 'tricks' as much of mentions of assorted features of HTML and CSS. You get to discover a similar assortment of things (with much more immediately available detail and many examples) just clicking around MDN.
    • happytoexplain 1 hour ago
      Sure, they're not "tricks", but it's also definitely not the same as what you get randomly browsing formal documentation.
    • marcomezzavilla 2 hours ago
      That’s fair, "tricks" may be overselling it. The website is meant to be a small, opinionated collection of features I want to remember, not a replacement for an authoritative reference like MDN. I can probably make that positioning clearer.
  • hk__2 2 hours ago
    > Each post-it pairs one useful platform feature with a small example

    I can’t find a single example; each post-it just shows some code but not the result of it.

    • happytoexplain 1 hour ago
      The code is the example. "Demo" is probably a better word for what you're thinking of.
  • vortegne 52 minutes ago
    without demos this is mostly useless i think
  • hn9rsvy2gx 13 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • hn5xz7plcj 42 minutes ago
    [dead]