Code ◆ 24 ways

24 ways to impress your friends
Poetry? Not likely (though Dan Cederholm wrote some doggerel back in 2006). Here are articles on hypertext markup language, its attributes and other minutiae; crafty hacks tips for your cascading style sheets; JavaScript legerdemain; and tinkering with application programming interfaces.
Chris Ferdinandi turns the heat down low and lets the sauce reduce while we take a look at how to add spice to our source with a sprinkling of Array.reduce(). Just a little ingenuity with the humblest of functions.
18 Dec 2019 No comments
Chris Mills brushes up his shorthand and shows how the MediaStream Recording API in modern browsers can be used to capture audio directly from the user’s device. Inching ever closer to the capabilities of native software, it truly is an exciting time to be a web developer.
17 Dec 2019 No comments
Rachel Andrew guides us through a tour of the last fifteen years in CSS layout, as manifested in articles here on 24 ways. From the days when Internet Explorer 6 was de rigueur, right up to the modern age of evergreen browsers, the only thing you can be sure of is that the web never stands still for long.
16 Dec 2019 No comments
Colin Bendell gets into the minutia of microbrowsers - the small previews of your site that are pervasive all around the web and through social media apps and search engines whenever an item of content on your site is referenced.
15 Dec 2019 No comments
Mandy Michael turns the corner on our variable font adventure and stumbles into a grotto of wonder and amazement. Not forgetting the need for a proper performance budget, Mandy shows how variable fonts can free your creativity from bygone technical constraints.
5 Dec 2019 No comments
Jason Pamental forges a path through the freshly laid snowy landscape of variable fonts. Like a brave explorer in a strange new typography topology let Jason show you the route to some fantastic font feats. Everything you thought you knew has changed.
4 Dec 2019 No comments
Alan Dalton uses this, the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, to look back at where we’ve come from, to evaluate where we are, and to look forward to what’s coming next in the future of accessibility guidelines.
3 Dec 2019 No comments
Amy Kapernick sings us through numerous ways of improving the robustness and reliability of our front end code with a comprehensive rundown of ideas, tools, and resources. The girls and boys won’t get any toys until all the tests are passing.
2 Dec 2019 No comments
Julie Grundy kicks off this, our fifteenth year, by diving headlong into the snowy issue of customising form inputs. Nothing makes a more special gift at Christmas that something you’ve designed and customised yourself. But can it be done while staying accessible to every user?
1 Dec 2019 4 comments
Drew McLellan draws this, our fourteenth season to a gentle close by getting a little Inside Snowball and gives an account of how we put the robots to work in generating custom dynamic social media sharing images for each of the articles here on the site. Christmas is a time to share what you have, even if it’s just a grid of pixels.
24 Dec 2018 1 comment
Andy Clarke tells a tale as old as time, a tale of tables, framesets, fixed widths and spacer GIFs (ask your parents). Harking back to the methods that were appropriate to used to build cutting-edge websites twenty years ago, not only can we see how far we’ve come but can be excited for what lies ahead.
23 Dec 2018 2 comments
Eric Portis remembers that images on the web, just like presents under the tree, come in different shapes and sizes. There’s little more disappointing than unwrapping a large-looking gift to find that it’s mostly packaging. Avoid expectation-jank with some great enhancements coming to the web platform soon.
21 Dec 2018 3 comments
Dan Wilson throws some Christmas shapes and gives us a run down of different ways to use CSS polygon clip paths to create interesting a flexible shapes with less code that you might have thought. It may be the time of year to follow a star, but was the star plotted with five or ten points?
20 Dec 2018 No comments
Simon Willison searches for the true meaning of Christmas, but settles on making a search engine for our articles on 24 ways. In doing he so demonstrates how a little bit of JavaScript, some open source tools and a sprinkling of database magic can make your festive dreams come true.
19 Dec 2018 No comments
Natalie Downe gathers the forest creatures in from the cold and shows them how some clever combining of an inquisitive mind and a JavaScript API can produce some amazing results.
18 Dec 2018 1 comment
Anna Debenham picks up the reins to continue our journey of understanding in the dark forest of web security. With so many packages the reindeer are struggling to pull the sleigh against the weight of all those dependancies. The question is, which packages hold wonderful gifts, and which just coal?
17 Dec 2018 No comments
Rachel Andrew shows us which direction is up on a gift that looks great but comes with complex instructions. Like most operating manuals CSS specifications can seem overwhelming, but it turns out that some of the most daunting tasks can be simple when you know what you’re doing.
14 Dec 2018 1 comment
Scott O’Hara hogs the remote while he looks into the ever-present issue of custom form controls. We might brute-force an element to take on the styling we’re looking for, but will that interaction still make sense for all users? Let’s give the batteries a rub and find out.
13 Dec 2018 No comments
David Khourshid pops the cookies in the oven, and while they bake, introduces the concept of state machines and how they can help in the design of user interfaces. Pour yourself a glass of mulled wine to mull it over with, but careful not to drink too much and get yourself into a state.
12 Dec 2018 2 comments