Roger Johansson is a web professional specialising in web standards, accessibility, and usability.
Icon fonts are finally being phased out in favour of a technology that’s more fit for purpose: SVG . There are many tutorials and guides that describe different ways in which you can use SVG icons, which is great. I do however see an issue related to accessibility pop up now and again, so I’d like to share a little tip about that. Many, probably the majority, of articles explaining how to use…
I like to keep my CSS tidy and consistently formatted. One of the tools I use to help with that is stylelint . If anyone’s curious, this post explains how I configure it. You can run stylelint in multiple ways. I use it via the PostCSS plugin , but you can run it from the command line, from within code editors like Atom and Sublime Text, or call it from Node scripts. There are different ways to…
Whenever I mention that I don’t use CSS preprocessors I tend to get strange looks from people who cannot imagine writing CSS without Sass. And so I have to defend my choice and explain why, over and over. Some people will understand, most won’t. Or they don’t want to. But here’s an attempt to explain my reasoning. Back when CSS preprocessors first came into fashion I did try using them. And then…
Most web developers currently use vendor prefixes in CSS to enable certain features in some browsers. That’s fine, but sometimes I see code examples and prefix-adding tools that go a bit overboard with the support and add every possible prefix that has ever been in use (and sometimes even ones that were never used). I think there are a bunch of CSS properties that we can safely stop using vendor…
In a couple of recent projects I’ve faced designs where the main navigation bar gave me more trouble than usual. These are the prerequisites that make the problem tricky to solve: The navbar is full-width and the links have to fill up the entire width regardless of how many of them there are The text in each link needs to be vertically centered and wrap to multiple lines if necessary The entire…
Over six years ago I wrote a short post about preventing HTML tables from becoming too wide . The solutions I offered in that post involve using table-layout:fixed to lock down the width of tables. While that may work in some cases, it often will not be very pleasant to use. Since I wrote that post, many, many small screen devices that you can use to browse the web have been released, which means…
When trying to force an element to always extend to the height of its parent I ran into some peculiar browser behaviour that I thought was worth mentioning. Here’s the situation: The parent element has a min-height specified (in pixels), but no height The child’s height is set to 100% I was expecting the child to get the same height as its parent, but that is not what happens. What happens instead…
Allowing images to scale along with their container is an important part of responsive web design (and was so even before the term “responsive web design” existed). It’s really quite easy – all you need to do is give the image a width (or max-width) in percent: img { max-width:100%; } This will prevent any img element from getting wider than its container. If the container is narrower than the…
A while ago I received a strange bug report for a site I’d been working on. The report mentioned dots appearing on top of a dropdown menu when it was expanded. I had a look in Safari, could not see any dots, but then tried Firefox. And sure enough, there were sets of three dots in the dropdown menu. It didn t take long to find the cause, fortunately. Just below the dropdown menu was a list of news…
It isn’t all that uncommon that, after you’ve polished your print stylesheet to make a site look well on paper as well as on screen, you realise that the logo really doesn’t look its best. It may look blurry or pixelated on paper due to having a pixel density intended for screen viewing, of course. But even worse, its edges may look ugly or it may actually be invisible because whatever is behind…