Terence Eden on using text-wrap: balance for more than headings:

But the name is, I think, slightly misleading. It doesn’t only work on text. It will work on any content. For example – I have a row of icons at the bottom of this page. If the viewport is too narrow, a single icon might drop to the next line. That can look a bit weird.

There’s a lot of math behind fluid typography. CSS does make the math a lot easier these days, but even if you’re comfortable with that, writing the full declaration can be verbose and tough to remember. I know I often have to look it back up, despite having written it maybe a hundred times.

Silvestar made a little VS Code helper to abstract all that. Type in the target values you’re aiming for and the helper expands it on the spot.

Change can certainly be scary whenever a beloved, independent software library becomes a part of a larger organization. I’m feeling a bit more excitement than concern this time around, though.

If you haven’t heard, GSAP (GreenSock Animation Platform) is teaming up with the visual website builder, Webflow. This mutually beneficial advancement not only brings GSAP’s powerful animation capabilities to Webflow’s graphical user interface but also provides the GSAP team the resources necessary to take development to the next level.

I totally get the goal here: make CSS more modular and scalable in WordPress. Put all your global WordPress theme styles in a single file, including variations. JSON offers a nicely structured syntax that’s easily consumable by JavaScript, thereby allowing the sweet affordance of loading exactly what we want when we want it.

It’s always a gas when a good person doing good work gets a good deal. In this case, Jason’s viral WPGraphQL plugin has not only become a canonical WordPress plugin, but creator Jason Bahl is joining Automattic as well.

I sat down with Heydon Pickering in the most recent episode of the Smashing Hour. Full transparency: I was nervous as heck. I’ve admired Heydon’s work for years, and even though we run in similar circles, this was our first time meeting. You know how you build some things up in your mind and sorta psyche yourself out? Yeah, that.

Kate Kaplan hits on something over at Nielsen Norman Group’s blog that’s been bugging me:

The challenge with this icon is sparkle ambiguity: Participants in our recent research study generally agreed that it represented something a little special. But, what was that something? And why was it special? That was less obvious. We encountered widely and wildly varied interpretations.

Miriam Suzanne’s in the middle of a redesign of her personal website. It began in August 2022. She’s made an entire series out of the work that’s worth your time, but I wanted to call out the fifth and latest installment because she presents a problem that I think we can all relate to:

But the walls got in my way. Instead of minimal renovation, I got just far enough to live with it and then started a brand new Eleventy repo.

The plan was to prototype […] and bring back well-formed solutions. To echo Dave Rupert, prototyping is useful. It’s easier to play with new ideas when you’re not carrying a decade of content and old code along with you.

But prototyping evolved into what I would call tinkering (complimentary). Maybe I mean procrastinating (also complimentary), but it’s a wandering process that also helps me better understand what I want from a website. I might not make visible progress over two years, but I start to form a point of view […]. Keeping things easy is always where things get complicated. And it brings me back to where my redesign started – a desire to clarify the information architecture. Not only for visitors, but for myself.

A new tool from Eric Meyer, Brian Kardell, and Stephanie Stimac backed with Igalia’s support. Brian announced it on his blog, as did Eric, describing it like this:

I was looking over an older article Patrick Brosset penned for us introducing <selectmenu>, a new proposal at the time for a more style-able cousin to <select>. From there, I clicked the linked-up <selectmenu> explainer and got… this:

OK, link rot is a thing and happens all the time. Perhaps the site needs a little URL designing? But no, it’s not that at all. I searched a bit and found Jared White’s post saying that <selectmenu> is no more, which came by way of Una’s post over at the Chrome Developer Blog seeking feedback on a “customizable select”. And Adam Argyle’s got a wonderful demo dedicated to it, no surprise there.