Archive for category: Random Stories

Original Source: https://css-tricks.com/animating-border/

Transitioning border for a hover state. Simple, right? You might be unpleasantly surprised.

The Challenge

The challenge is simple: building a button with an expanding border on hover.

This article will focus on genuine CSS tricks that would be easy to drop into any project without having to touch the DOM or use JavaScript. The methods covered here will follow these rules

Single element (no helper divs, but psuedo-elements are allowed)
CSS only (no JavaScript)
Works for any size (not restricted to a specific width, height, or aspect ratio)
Supports transparent backgrounds
Smooth and performant transition

I proposed this challenge in the Animation at Work Slack and again on Twitter. Though there was no consensus on the best approach, I did receive some really clever ideas by some phenomenal developers.

Method 1: Animating border

The most straightforward way to animate a border is… well, by animating border.

.border-button {
border: solid 5px #FC5185;
transition: border-width 0.6s linear;
}

.border-button:hover { border-width: 10px; }

See the Pen CSS writing-mode experiment by Shaw (@shshaw) on CodePen.

Nice and simple, but there are some big performance issues.

Since border takes up space in the document’s layout, changing the border-width will trigger layout. Nearby elements will shift around because of the new border size, making browser reposition those elements every frame of the animation unless you set an explicit size on the button.

As if triggering layout wasn’t bad enough, the transition itself feels “stepped”. I’ll show why in the next example.

Method 2: Better border with outline

How can we change the border without triggering layout? By using outline instead! You’re probably most familiar with outline from removing it on :focus styles (though you shouldn’t), but outline is an outer line that doesn’t change an element’s size or position in the layout.

.border-button {
outline: solid 5px #FC5185;
transition: outline 0.6s linear;
margin: 0.5em; /* Increased margin since the outline expands outside the element */
}

.border-button:hover { outline-width: 10px; }

A quick check in Dev Tools’ Performance tab shows the outline transition does not trigger layout. Regardless, the movement still seems stepped because browsers are rounding the border-width and outline-width values so you don’t get sub-pixel rendering between 5 and 6 or smooth transitions from 5.4 to 5.5.

Strangely, Safari often doesn’t render the outline transition and occasionally leaves crazy artifacts.

Method 3: Cut it with clip-path

First implemented by Steve Gardner, this method uses clip-path with calc to trim the border down so on hover we can transition to reveal the full border.

.border-button {
/* Full width border and a clip-path visually cutting it down to the starting size */
border: solid 10px #FC5185;
clip-path: polygon(
calc(0% + 5px) calc(0% + 5px), /* top left */
calc(100% – 5px) calc(0% + 5px), /* top right */
calc(100% – 5px) calc(100% – 5px), /* bottom right */
calc(0% + 5px) calc(100% – 5px) /* bottom left */
);
transition: clip-path 0.6s linear;
}

.border-button:hover {
/* Clip-path spanning the entire box so it’s no longer hiding the full-width border. */
clip-path: polygon(0 0, 100% 0, 100% 100%, 0 100%);
}

clip-path technique is the smoothest and most performant method so far, but does come with a few caveats. Rounding errors may cause a little unevenness, depending on the exact size. The border also has to be full size from the start, which may make exact positioning tricky.

Unfortunately there’s no IE/Edge support yet, though it seems to be in development. You can and should encourage Microsoft’s team to implement those features by voting for masks/clip-path to be added.

Method 4: linear-gradient background

We can simulate a border using a clever combination of multiple linear-gradient backgrounds properly sized. In total we have four separate gradients, one for each side. The background-position and background-size properties get each gradient in the right spot and the right size, which can then be transitioned to make the border expand.

.border-button {
background-repeat: no-repeat;

/* background-size values will repeat so we only need to declare them once */
background-size:
calc(100% – 10px) 5px, /* top & bottom */
5px calc(100% – 10px); /* right & left */

background-position:
5px 5px, /* top */
calc(100% – 5px) 5px, /* right */
5px calc(100% – 5px), /* bottom */
5px 5px; /* left */

/* Since we’re sizing and positioning with the above properties, we only need to set up a simple solid-color gradients for each side */
background-image:
linear-gradient(0deg, #FC5185, #FC5185),
linear-gradient(0deg, #FC5185, #FC5185),
linear-gradient(0deg, #FC5185, #FC5185),
linear-gradient(0deg, #FC5185, #FC5185);

transition: all 0.6s linear;
transition-property: background-size, background-position;
}

.border-button:hover {
background-position: 0 0, 100% 0, 0 100%, 0 0;
background-size: 100% 10px, 10px 100%, 100% 10px, 10px 100%;
}

This method is quite difficult to set up and has quite a few cross-browser differences. Firefox and Safari animate the faux-border smoothly, exactly the effect we’re looking for. Chrome’s animation is jerky and even more stepped than the outline and border transitions. IE and Edge refuse to animate the background at all, but they do give the proper border expansion effect.

Method 5: Fake it with box-shadow

Hidden within box-shadow’s spec is a fourth value for spread-radius. Set all the other length values to 0px and use the spread-radius to build your border alternative that, like outline, won’t affect layout.

.border-button {
box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px 5px #FC5185;
transition: box-shadow 0.6s linear;
margin: 0.5em; /* Increased margin since the box-shado expands outside the element, like outline */
}

.border-button:hover { box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px 10px #FC5185; }

The transition with box-shadow is adequately performant and feels much smoother, except in Safari where it’s snapping to whole-values during the transition like border and outline.

Pseudo-Elements

Several of these techniques can be modified to use a pseudo-element instead, but pseudo-elements ended up causing some additional performance issues in my tests.

For the box-shadow method, the transition occasionally triggered paint in a much larger area than necessary. Reinier Kaper pointed out that a pseudo-element can help isolate the paint to a more specific area. As I ran further tests, box-shadow was no longer causing paint in large areas of the document and the complication of the pseudo-element ended up being less performant. The change in paint and performance may have been due to a Chrome update, so feel free to test for yourself.

I also could not find a way to utilize pseudo-elements in a way that would allow for transform based animation.

Why not transform: scale?

You may be firing up Twitter to helpfully suggest using transform: scale for this. Since transform and opacity are the best style properties to animate for performance, why not use a pseudo-element and have the border scale up & down?

.border-button {
position: relative;
margin: 0.5em;
border: solid 5px transparent;
background: #3E4377;
}

.border-button:after {
content: ”;
display: block;
position: absolute;
top: 0; right: 0; bottom: 0; left: 0;
border: solid 10px #FC5185;
margin: -15px;
z-index: -1;
transition: transform 0.6s linear;
transform: scale(0.97, 0.93);
}

.border-button:hover::after { transform: scale(1,1); }

There are a few issues:

The border will show through a transparent button. I forced a background on the button to show how the border is hiding behind the button. If your design calls for buttons with a full background, then this could work.
You can’t scale the border to specific sizes. Since the button’s dimensions vary with the text, there’s no way to animate the border from exactly 5px to 10px using only CSS. In this example I’ve done some magic-numbers on the scale to get it to appear right, but that won’t be universal.
The border animates unevenly because the button’s aspect ratio isn’t 1:1. This usually means the left/right will appear larger than the top/bottom until the animation completes. This may not be an issue depending on how fast your transition is, the button’s aspect ratio, and how big your border is.

If your button has set dimensions, Cher pointed out a clever way to calculate the exact scales needed, though it may be subject to some rounding errors.

Beyond CSS

If we loosen our rules a bit, there are many interesting ways you can animate borders. Codrops consistently does outstanding work in this area, usually utilizing SVGs and JavaScript. The end results are very satisfying, though they can be a bit complex to implement. Here are a few worth checking out:

Creative Buttons
Button Styles Inspiration
Animated Checkboxes
Distorted Button Effects
Progress Button Styles

Conclusion

There’s more to borders than simply border, but if you want to animate a border you may have some trouble. The methods covered here will help, though none of them are a perfect solution. Which you choose will depend on your project’s requirements, so I’ve laid out a comparison table to help you decide.

My recommendation would be to use box-shadow, which has the best overall balance of ease-of-implementation, animation effect, performance and browser support.

Do you have another way of creating an animated border? Perhaps a clever way to utilize transforms for moving a border? Comment below or reach me on Twitter to share your solution to the challenge.

Special thanks to Martin Pitt, Steve Gardner, Cher, Reinier Kaper, Joseph Rex, David Khourshid, and the Animation at Work community.

Animating Border is a post from CSS-Tricks

Original Source: http://mediatemple.net/blog/tips/big-list-typography-books/

For your holiday gift shopping needs! These my picks for some of the most popular books out there on typography, with a tilt toward web typography. Plus a couple of bonus picks by our own Robin Rendle.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

A Big List of Typography Books is a post from CSS-Tricks

Original Source: https://www.24a11y.com/2017/three-developers-and-the-insightful-user-tester/

A story by Scott O’Hara:

The first of the developers, why he thought he knew best.
“I’ll get this done ever so quick!” he said, puffing out his chest.

“While the others review wikis, knowledge bases, and specifications,
I’ll lean on my deep knowledge of CSS to circumvent such onerous proclamations.

Specificity will be lax, and BEM classes will be king!
Everyone will marvel at the CSS of this thing.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

The Three Developers and the Insightful User Tester is a post from CSS-Tricks

Original Source: https://css-tricks.com/front-end-developers-guide-graphql/

No matter how large or small your application is, you’ll have to deal with fetching data from a remote server at some point. On the front end, this usually involves hitting a REST endpoint, transforming the response, caching it, and updating your UI. For years, REST has been the status quo for APIs, but over the past year, a new API technology called GraphQL has exploded in popularity due to its excellent developer experience and declarative approach to data fetching.

In this post, we’ll walk through a couple of hands-on examples to show you how integrating GraphQL into your application will solve many pain points working with remote data. If you’re new to GraphQL, don’t panic! I’ll also highlight some resources to help you learn GraphQL using the Apollo stack, so you can start off 2018 ahead of the curve.

GraphQL 101

Before we dive into how GraphQL makes your life as a front end developer easier, we should first clarify what it is. When we talk about GraphQL, we’re either referring to the language itself or its rich ecosystem of tools. At its core, GraphQL is a typed query language developed by Facebook that allows you to describe your data requirements in a declarative way. The shape of your result matches the shape of your query: in the example below, we can expect to receive back an object with a currency property and a rates property containing an array of objects with both currency and rate keys.

{
rates(currency: “USD”) {
currency
rates {
currency
rate
}
}
}

When we talk about GraphQL in a broader sense, we’re often referring to the ecosystem of tools that help you implement GraphQL in your application. On the backend, you’ll use Apollo Server to create a GraphQL server, which is a single endpoint that parses a GraphQL request and returns data. How does the server know which data to return? You’ll use GraphQL Tools to build a schema (like a blueprint for your data) and a resolver map (just a series of functions that retrieve your data from a REST endpoint, database, or wherever else you choose).

This all sounds more complicated than it actually is — with Apollo Launchpad, a GraphQL server playground, you can create a working GraphQL server in your browser in less than 60 lines of code! 😮 We’ll reference this Launchpad I created that wraps the Coinbase API throughout this post.

You’ll connect your GraphQL server to your application with Apollo Client, a fast and flexible client that fetches, caches, and updates your data for you. Since Apollo Client isn’t coupled to your view layer, you can use it with React, Angular, Vue, or plain JavaScript. Not only is Apollo cross-framework, it’s also cross-platform, with React Native & Ionic supported out of the box.

Let’s give it a try! 🚀

Now that you’re well-versed in what GraphQL is, let’s get our hands dirty with a couple of practical examples that illustrate what it’s like to develop your front end with Apollo. By the end, I think you’ll be convinced that a GraphQL-based architecture with Apollo can help you ship features faster than before.

1. Add new data requirements without adding a new endpoint

We’ve all been here before: You spend hours building a perfect UI component when suddenly, product requirements change. You quickly realize that the data you need to fulfill these new requirements would either require a complicated waterfall of API requests or worse, a new REST endpoint. Now blocked on your work, you ask the backend team to build you a new endpoint just to satisfy the data needs for one component.

This common frustration no longer exists with GraphQL because the data you consume on the client is no longer coupled to an endpoint’s resource. Instead, you always hit the same endpoint for your GraphQL server. Your server specifies all of the resources it has available via your schema and lets your query determine the shape of the result. Let’s illustrate these concepts using our Launchpad from before:

In our schema, look at lines 22–26 where we define our ExchangeRate type. These fields list out all the available resources we can query in our application.

type ExchangeRate {
currency: String
rate: String
name: String
}

With REST, you’re limited to the data your resource provides. If your /exchange-rates endpoint doesn’t include name, then you’ll need to either hit a different endpoint like /currency for the data or create it if it doesn’t exist.

With GraphQL, we know that name is already available to us by inspecting our schema, so we can query for it in our application. Try running this example in Launchpad by adding the name field on the right side panel!

{
rates(currency: “USD”) {
currency
rates {
currency
rate
name
}
}
}

Now, remove the name field and run the same query. See how the shape of our result changes?

Your GraphQL server always gives you back exactly the data you ask for. Nothing more. This differs significantly from REST, where you often have to filter and transform the data you get back from the server into the shape your UI components need. Not only does this save you time, it also results in smaller network payloads and CPU savings from loading and parsing the response.

2. Reduce your state management boilerplate

Fetching data almost always involves updating your application’s state. Typically, you’ll write code to track at least three actions: one for when the data is loading, one if the data successfully arrives, and one if the data errors out. Once the data arrives, you have to transform it into the shape your UI components expect, normalize it, cache it, and update your UI. This process can be repetitive, requiring countless lines of boilerplate to execute one request.

Let’s see how Apollo Client eliminates this tiresome process altogether by looking at an example React app in CodeSandbox. Navigate to `list.js` and scroll to the bottom.

export default graphql(ExchangeRateQuery, {
props: ({ data }) => {
if (data.loading) {
return { loading: data.loading };
}
if (data.error) {
return { error: data.error };
}
return {
loading: false,
rates: data.rates.rates
};
}
})(ExchangeRateList);

In this example, React Apollo, Apollo Client’s React integration, is binding our exchange rate query to our ExchangeRateList component. Once Apollo Client executes that query, it tracks loading and error state automatically and adds it to the data prop. When Apollo Client receives the result, it will update the data prop with the result of the query, which will update your UI with the rates it needs to render.

Under the hood, Apollo Client normalizes and caches your data for you. Try clicking some of the currencies in the panel on the right to watch the data refresh. Now, select a currency a second time. Notice how the data appears instantaneously? That’s the Apollo cache at work! You get all of this for free just by setting up Apollo Client with no additional configuration. 😍 To see the code where we initialize Apollo Client, check out `index.js`.

3. Debug quickly & painlessly with Apollo DevTools & GraphiQL

It looks like Apollo Client does a lot for you! How do we peek inside to understand what’s going on? With features like store inspection and full visibility into your queries & mutations, Apollo DevTools not only answers that question, but also makes debugging painless and, dare I say it, fun! 🎉 It’s available as an extension for both Chrome and Firefox, with React Native coming soon.

If you want to follow along, install Apollo DevTools for your preferred browser and navigate to our CodeSandbox from the previous example. You’ll need to run the example locally by clicking Download in the top nav bar, unzipping the file, running npm install, and finally npm start. Once you open up your browser’s dev tools panel, you should see a tab that says Apollo.

First, let’s check out our store inspector. This tab mirrors what’s currently in your Apollo Client cache, making it easy to confirm your data is stored on the client properly.

Apollo DevTools also enables you to test your queries & mutations in GraphiQL, an interactive query editor and documentation explorer. In fact, you already used GraphiQL in the first example where we experimented with adding fields to our query. To recap, GraphiQL features auto-complete as you type your query into the editor and automatically generated documentation based on GraphQL’s type system. It’s extremely useful for exploring your schema, with zero maintenance burden for developers.

Try executing queries with GraphiQL in the right side panel of our Launchpad. To show the documentation explorer, you can hover over fields in the query editor and click on the tooltip. If your query runs successfully in GraphiQL, you can be 100% positive that the same query will run successfully in your application.

Level up your GraphQL skills

If you made it to this point, awesome job! 👏 I hope you enjoyed the exercises and got a taste of what it would be like to work with GraphQL on the front end.

Hungry for more? 🌮 Make it your 2018 New Year’s resolution to learn more about GraphQL, as I expect its popularity to grow even more in the upcoming year. Here’s an example app to get you started featuring the concepts we learned today:

React: https://codesandbox.io/s/jvlrl98xw3
Angular (Ionic): https://github.com/aaronksaunders/ionicLaunchpadApp
Vue: https://codesandbox.io/s/3vm8vq6kwq

Go forth and GraphQL (and be sure to tag us on Twitter @apollographql along the way)! 🚀

A Front End Developer’s Guide to GraphQL is a post from CSS-Tricks