An Alternative Voice UI To Voice Assistants

For most people, the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of voice user interfaces are voice assistants, such as Siri, Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant. In fact, assistants are the only context where most people have ever used voice to interact with a computer system. While voice assistants have brought voice user interfaces to the mainstream,...

18h

Client-Side Routing In Next.js

Hyperlinks have been one of the jewels of the Web since its inception . According to MDN, hyperlinks are what makes the Web, a web. While used for purposes such as linking between documents, its primary use is to reference different web pages identifiable by a unique web address or a URL. Routing is an important aspect of each web application as much...

20h

Your Image Is Probably Not Decorative

The img element’s alt attribute can be “nulled,” which is the act of setting it to an empty string instead of a text description. Nulling an alt description means there is no information between the opening and close quotes. If there is an empty space, it will not be considered nulled: <img alt="" src="/images/cat.jpg" /> This image...

1d

A Complete Guide To Accessibility Tooling

Learning to build accessible websites can be a daunting task for those who are just starting to implement accessible practices. We’ve pulled together a wide range of accessibility tooling, ranging from single-use bookmarklets to full-blown applications, in order to help you get started with building more accessible websites. ARIA The WebAIM Million...

2d

Spinning Up Multiple WordPress Sites Locally With DevKinsta

When building themes and plugins for WordPress, we need to make sure they work well in all the different environments where they will be installed. We can sometimes control this environment when creating a theme for our own websites, but at other times we cannot, such as when distributing our plugins via the public WordPress repository for anyone to...

3d

Smashing Podcast Episode 39 With Addy Osmani: Image Optimization

In today’s episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re talking about image optimization. What steps should we follow for performant images in 2021? I spoke with expert Addy Osmani to find out. Show Notes “Image Optimization,” Addy Osmani Addy on Twitter Addy’s personal website Weekly Update Meet :has, A Native CSS Parent Selector (And More)written...

4d

When CSS Isn’t Enough: JavaScript Requirements For Accessible Components

As the author of ModernCSS.dev, I’m a big proponent of CSS solutions. And, I love seeing the clever ways people use CSS for really out-of-the-box designs and interactivity! However, I’ve noticed a trend toward promoting “CSS-only” components using methods like the “checkbox hack”. Unfortunately, hacks like these leave a significant amount of users unable...

4d

Web Design Done Well: Making Use Of Audio

It’s easy to get hyper-focused on how things look on the web. There’s a lot to look at. You’re looking at this right now! However, in the age of touchscreens and home assistants, it’s safe to say sight isn’t the only sense worth caring about. George Lucas once said half of any movie’s magic comes from its sounds. The same could be said of certain...

1w

Useful Front-End Boilerplates And Starter Kits

Today, we’re shining the spotlight on boilerplates and starter kits for all kinds of projects, from static site templates and React/Vue starter kits to favicon and accessibility templates and emergency site templates. This collection is by no means complete, but rather a selection of things that the team at Smashing found useful and hope will make your...

2w

Three Front-End Auditing Tools I Discovered Recently

Is every resource properly minified and compressed? Are all the caching headers set correctly? Does the site load all the resources in the best order to guarantee a fast first paint? These are only a few questions to consider when having the goal of building a fast website. Building for the web is complex these days. But how do you find all these things...

2w