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Hi! I'm Kevin

When someone tells me it's easier with JavaScript...

Published about 2 months ago • 3 min read

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Hello Reader,

From my experience, there are a few reasons people push back on new things, but the most common one I see revolves around people preferring the old way of doing things.

This makes sense, because they are comfortable with what they are used to, rather than the new way, which is different. When something new comes along, that means they have to learn it, which for a lot of people means that it’s slower.

The thing is, in web development, most new things make things easier, and once you get used to them, often much faster as well.

The reason I mention this at all is that I put out a video this week showing how to create popovers without any JavaScript, including a nice little fade-in and slide-in/out effect.

video preview​

If there were any pushback to this, you’d think it would be about browser support (which isn’t bad!), but instead, one of the first comments on the video was that it would be faster and easier to do it with JavaScript.

Anyway, that comment triggered me a little, so I made a Short to prove them wrong 😅.

video preview​

If you’re going to say it’s faster or easier with something, at least say it’s with AI these days 😆 (and even then, I don't know if writing the prompt and then waiting for it would be under 2 minutes?).

📝 Quiz time!

You have a block element with padding on it. It has a width: 100%, and margin: 1rem as well. It's currently overflowing its parent element. You add box-sizing: border-box but it is still overflowing. Why?

  1. box-sizing only applies to elements with a declared height
  2. margin is added outside the border box, so it isn’t included in the 100%
  3. There is padding on the parent, which is included in the 100% of the child
  4. width: 100% resolves against the viewport, not the parent

As per usual, you'll have to head on over to YouTube to take a stab at the quiz, and once you answer, you'll see if you were right or not.

​

🏁

With summer in full swing and the kids home, the newsletter might be slightly shorter than usual, with some of the regular sections missing. We’ll see how it goes from week to week, though 🙂.

Have a fantastic week!
Kevin

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Hi! I'm Kevin

Helping people fall in love with CSS

Weekly newsletter, where I talk about tangentially-related front-end development topics and share what I've been up to in the last week, plus any cool/fun/interesting/useful links I come across as well.

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