Articles By: Louis Lazaris

384 Pages of CSS

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CSS E-BooksDue to the prevalence of ad-blockers, ads as a means to support online content is becoming a less effective method with each passing month.

Selling ads on a blog like this one is not easy, and resorting to backfilling missing ad-spots for ugly Google Ads is less than satisfying. I hope I can one day remove all ads from this website and still continue to produce content regularly.

To begin the process of reaching that goal, I’ve put together 3 CSS E-Books in PDF format containing a collection of CSS-based articles that I’ve published here on this website. Below are links to view a description and table of contents for each e-book:

Language-wide Features in CSS

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Language-wide Features in CSSIn addition to the unique property/value pairs that CSS offers, there are also a small handful of language-wide features that can come in handy, including a few that are brand new in the spec.

These often go unnoticed, especially by beginners, because when CSS properties and their possible values are discussed (in tutorials, books, or even in the spec), these features are usually omitted for brevity.

The Minimum Code for a CSS Transition

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transition-durationHere’s something interesting that you may not have realized about CSS3 transitions. Normally, you’ll see a transition declared by utilizing three different properties, either in longhand or shorthand.

In both cases, we’re explicitly declaring three of the four transition-related properties (leaving out transition-delay). Can a transition occur with less code than that? Well, yes.

What’s the Status of the ::selection Pseudo-element?

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::selection pseudo-elementEver since HTML5 Boilerplate put the ::selection pseudo-element on the map, so to speak, most CSS developers nowadays have been including this selector as part of their universal styles.

To get cross-browser support, the ::selection pseudo-element (which is used to change styles on highlighted, or selected, text) is declared like this:

Launching Soon: Web Tools Weekly

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Web Tools WeeklyOff and on over the past few months, I’ve been planning and working on a new project that is now ready to launch: Web Tools Weekly, a (you guessed it) weekly email newsletter targeted at front-end developers, with a special focus on tools.

This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a unique idea. As many of us know, there are lots of options in the recent web dev newsletter boom.

HTML5 History API: A Syntax Primer

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History WheelAs most of us probably are aware, a significant part of the HTML5 spec is the expansion of the History API.

This post will not be a super extensive discussion of this subject, especially since it’s something that I’m only now just getting into understanding better. But I thought I would put down the main components of the API, for my own quick reference, and I hope it will prove useful to my readers and those searching via Google.

Good Code Solves Problems

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ProblemIt should be a coder’s goal to make sure that every character in every line of code serves some purpose.

The quality of code is not dependent on good form, prettiness, or theoretical benefits. Code should solve problems.

HTML5 lets you omit closing paragraph tags and closing tags for list items. Some cringe at the thought of this, but it’s perfectly valid code. So if omitting extra tags helps your code become leaner and faster, then you’re solving a problem and that makes it good code.

Using tabindex with :focus

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Tabindex with :focusFor those who have studied web site accessibility, this is probably old hat. Admittedly, I haven’t spent enough time thinking about accessibility, so this is one of those things I didn’t even realize until recently. So shame on me. :)

Let’s say you have the following page, with various elements, starting with maybe a form field:

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