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Holographic Trading Card Effect

Simon Goellner (@simeydotme)’s collection of Holographic Trading Cards have captured our attention.

Under the hood there is a suite of filter(), background-blend-mode(), mix-blend-mode(), and clip-path() combinations that have been painstakingly tweaked to reach the desired effect. I ended up using a little img { visibility: hidden; } in DevTools to get a better sense of each type of holographic effect.

Josh Dance (@JoshDance) replied with a breakdown of the effects that lets you manually control the inputs.

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Removing jQuery from GOV.UK

The GOV.UK team recently published “How and why we removed jQuery from GOV.UK“. This was an insightful look at how an organization can assess its tooling and whether something is still the best tool for the job. This is not a nudge to strip libraries out of your current project right now! Many of us may still be supporting legacy projects and browser requirements that prevent this from being a viable option.

Some of the criticism appears to be that the library size argument is negligible on modern network speeds and caching.

GOV.UK posted an update to address this criticism with metrics – “The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance“.

This article also makes the case for improving maintenance. Instead of upgrading disparate outdated versions of code and having to address security updates in a piecemeal approach, removing the dependency reduces this footprint. This is the dream of having the luxury for addressing technical debt.

Previously, GitHub also documented how they incrementally decoupled jQuery from their front-end code. Improving maintenance and developer experience played a role into their decision.

What caught my eye in particular was the link to the documentation on how to remove jQuery. Understanding how to decouple and perform migration steps are maintenance tasks that will continue to come up for websites and it’s reassuring to have a guide from someone that had to do the same.

Further musing on this subject turned up the old chestnuts “You Might Not Need jQuery” (2014), “(Now More Than Ever) You Might Not Need jQuery” (2017), “Is jQuery still relevant? (1)” (2016), and “Is jQuery still relevant? (2)” (2017).

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Committing CSS Crimes

The time for CSS-Tricks is over. Now is the time for CSS Crimes!

In this current landscape of content service providers, users are often limited to expressing themselves in text, links, and images. Sanitization rules tend to strip out HTML, JavaScript, and various attributes.

Social media service Cohost allows users to have greater freedom with markup and inline styles than we may be typically used to. Some users have taken advantage of this freedom to commit CSS Crimes! It has resulted in creative recreations of familiar interfaces and interactive games by using properties in unconventional ways.

Blackle Mori created a contraption where pulling a handle slowly turns a series of gears, pulleys, and chains. Eventually an aperture opens to reveal the site’s mascot (“eggbug”) and the proclamation “Good Job!”. I have stared at this in Developer Tools and it is an amazing combination of grid, resize, transform, and calc(). I ended up adding a border to all <div>s to try and get a better understanding of how each individual element moved.

There have been situations in the past where I have been restricted from using the full toolkit of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. There have been many instances of using decorative CSS shapes to get around images. I have used :hover as a workaround for mouseenter and mouseleave. I have used input:checked as a sibling selector for toggling.

While CSS Crimes are probably not something you would want to employ on a regular basis, we should embrace experiments within constraints that can foster creative solutions.

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