Printing pages directly from the browser is an experience that can lead to frustration with enormous images being printed out. We have covered print stylesheets in the past here on Smashing Magazine, but in this article, Rachel Andrew takes a look at the state of printing from the browser today. She will show you how you should include print styles in your web pages, and look at the specifications that really come into their own once printing.| Smashing Magazine
Dependencies are everywhere. They’re unavoidable. They aren’t inherently bad, but if you don’t consider the possibility a given dependency might not be met, you run the risk of frustrating your users. Reducing dependencies improves the likelihood that your site will be usable by the greatest number of people in the widest variety of scenarios. Even knowing this, however, it’s easy to overlook the most basic dependencies our projects have, undermining their resilience in the process. T...| Smashing Magazine
In more recent years, design systems and component libraries have gained popularity. There is also a desire to build once, deploy anywhere. Meaning a component developed in isolation is intended to work in any number of contexts to make building complex interfaces more efficient and consistent. CSS container queries have landed and are now available for experimentation. Let’s look at what problem is being solved, learn how container queries work, and see how they compare with and complement...| Smashing Magazine
There are so many websites out there that have not considered the overall usability of their visually impaired users. When it comes to designing better links and sending better emails, Slava Shestopalov has a few tips on how to improve your website’s experience while accessibility in mind.| Smashing Magazine
The placeholder attribute contains a surprising amount of issues that prevent it from delivering on what it promises. The presence of a placeholder attribute won’t be flagged by automated accessibility checking software. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s usable. Ultimately, accessibility is about people, not standards, so it is important to think about your interface in terms beyond running through a checklist. In this article, Eric Bailey will clarify why you need to stop us...| Smashing Magazine
Interface designers use affordances all the time. They have to. Unlike physical objects, web and mobile interfaces must gain all of their affordance through design. For most designers, this is intuitive and instinctive, based on the thousands of design patterns we see every day. But have you ever thought about the qualities that make an object afford clicking, sliding, pulling or pushing? By deeply understanding how affordance works, you’ll better master interface or product design. Better...| Smashing Magazine
Accessibility is often overlooked or bolted on to the end of a project from the experiences in Todd’s career in web development and design. The case for accessibility is something we as people who create and build things for the web should be implementing and advocating for from the inception of a project to the release or handoff and beyond.| Smashing Magazine
You may not have thought much about lists, although we use them frequently in our markup. Many things can be marked up quite logically as a list. There is more to styling lists in CSS than you might think. In this article, Rachel Andrew starts by looking at lists in CSS, and moving onto some interesting features defined in the CSS Lists specification — markers and counters.| Smashing Magazine
After almost five years in development, the new HTTP/3 protocol is nearing its final form. In this second part, Robin Marx will zoom in on the performance improvements that QUIC and HTTP/3 bring to the table for web-page loading. We will, however, also be somewhat skeptical of the impact we can expect from these new features in practice.| Smashing Magazine
What is that preload? What does it do? And how can it help you? Preload gives developers the ability to define custom loading logic without suffering the performance penalty that script-based resource loaders incur. In human terms, it’s a way to tell a browser to start fetching a certain resource, because you as authors know that the browser is going to need that particular resource pretty soon.| Smashing Magazine
We all have run into CSS collisions and sudden regressions in our codebases when new styles are written or 3rd-party styles are added. This is because of the interdependence of styles due to source order, specificity, and inheritance. Some ways to control the cascade have included methodologies like ITCSS and BEM and other newer native features. Cascade layers will be the ultimate native solution for resolving conflicts between multiple sources of styles. Cascade layers introduce the new at...| Smashing Magazine