Snippets

This is one of the best responsive navigation menus I’ve seen, implementing the priority+ pattern while mixing in drop-downs and other features.

As someone who has trouble visualizing numbers and coordinates, this tool is awesome to use to visually build CSS clip-path shapes.

From videoconferencing tutorials to inline form help notes, this lists all sorts of useful ways to help clients use the site you built for them.

From the same person that proposed easing linear gradients comes this visual editor for generating them.

Turning raster images into SVG files, one pixel at a time. Yes, really.

What?

The PHP accepts a raster image (GIF, PNG, JPEG, that sort of thing) and creates an SVG image that recreates the raster image. It does this by drawing filled rectangles to recreate the pixels in the image. In many cases, this is literally a 1-by-1 rectangle, but it will check for runs of similar color (similar to GIF compression) and create one rectangle per run. It checks both horizontal and vertical runs to see which approach is more efficient, and returns the better option.

The script requires GD.

Why?

There are situations where people want to take small bitmaps—think primary-color buttons or badges—and make them scalable while still preserving their 8-bit appearance. See, for example, Joe Crawford’s post about upscaling a minitag. For those cases, this script will enable a quick conversion to SVG with at least some minimal attempts at optimization.

This all originally started as a one-off experiment and a bit of a jape. You can see the original at flaming-shame, if you fancy a laugh.

HTML tests for various uses, including HTML5accessibility.com and JAWS tests

For perhaps the first time since the original Macintosh, we can get excited about using system UI fonts. They’re an interesting, fresh alternative to web typography — and one that doesn’t require a web-font delivery service or font files stored on your server. How do we use system UI fonts on a website, and what are the caveats? System UI fonts being amazing kind of snuck up on us. Google has been toiling away at Roboto with great success (including regular updates), Apple made a splash with San Francisco, and Mozilla asked renowned type designer Erik Spiekermann to create Fira Sans.

The first grouping is CSS properties that map to the system’s UI font. That covers a lot of ground, and there is no chance that these fonts will be mistaken for something else:

• -apple-system targets San Francisco in Safari on Mac OS X and iOS, and it targets Neue Helvetica and Lucida Grande on older versions of Mac OS X. It properly selects between San Francisco Text and San Francisco Display depending on the text’s size.
• BlinkMacSystemFont is the equivalent for Chrome on Mac OS X.

The second grouping is for known system UI fonts:

• Segoe UI targets Windows and Windows Phone.
• Roboto targets Android and newer Chrome OS’. It is deliberately listed after Segoe UI so that if you’re an Android developer on Windows and have Roboto installed, Segoe UI will be used instead.
• Oxygen targets KDE, Ubuntu targets… well, you can guess, and Cantarell targets GNOME. This is beginning to feel futile because some Linux distributions have many of these fonts.
• Fira Sans targets Firefox OS.
• Droid Sans targets older versions of Android.
• Note that we don’t specify San Francisco by name. On both iOS and Mac OS X, San Francisco isn’t obviously accessible, but rather exists as a “hidden” font.
• We also don’t specify San Francisco using .SFNSText-Regular, the internal PostScript name for San Francisco on Mac OS X. It only works in Chrome and is less versatile than BlinkMacSystemFont.

The third grouping is our fallback fonts:

• Helvetica Neue targets pre-El Capitan versions of Mac OS X. It is listed close to the end because it’s a popular font on other non-El Capitan computers.
• sans-serif is the default sans-serif fallback font.