Jeff Triplett

CSS and HTML Resources

Filed under: friyay

Despite spending most of my professional time working on backend Python and API code, I try when possible to keep current on HTML5 and CSS trends. This week, I wanted to highlight some good resources which I found to be useful.


What I’m learning

Grid Garden by Thomas H. Park is a CSS game which teaches you how to learn CSS grid.

I don’t normally care for these types of games but I wanted an excuse to learn CSS grid and Thomas does a great job of teaching in a way that your mistakes are even educations which the grid doesn’t quite work how I thought it should.


What I’m learning

Flexbox Froggy by Thomas H. Park is another CSS game which focuses on learning CSS flexbox. It’s fun and I played this all the way through over lunch.


What I’m reading

A Field Guide to Flexbox by Joni Trythall is a great pocket guide for learning CSS flexbox. My copy came in this last week and Joni teaches flexbox in a straightforward and beautifully designed visual guide.


Library I’m using

I used html-proofer on this year’s DjangoCon US website to help spot errors in our rendered HTML files. html-proofer integrates easily with Travis CI so that we can verify that a pull request doesn’t contain a broken link, image, or cause any common accessibility issue.

Since one broken link on a header can impact dozens of pages, it’s easy to start with 100s of errors. We started with almost 300 errors on the DjangoCon US website, but after 20 to 30 minutes I was down to only a few dozen errors.

I have started using html-proofer in all of my projects as a result.


Terminal application I’m using

While not exactly a frontend tool, I have found tiny-care-terminal to be inspiring. tiny-care-terminal is “a little dashboard that tries to take care of you when you’re using your terminal.” Close enough ;)