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Edwin Martin about frontend webdevelopment

Don't use a dark-light toggle at all

I am old enough to remember that when background images on websites became possible, suddenly a lot of websites got background images. When (i)frames became possible, a lot of websites got (i)frames. And you see the same thing over the past few years with scroll-based animations. What you also see increasingly in recent years: dark-light toggles. For a few years now, browsers have supported dark and light mode, allowing you to display a website in both a dark or a light version. With a toggle, …

Vibe coding with Firebase Studio

Last April (2025), Google introduced Firebase Studio. It is an AI tool that allows you to create (web) apps by giving prompts, just like with ChatGPT. There are other vibecoding tools, such as Bolt and Lovable, but unlike Firebase Studio, they are limited to a number of prompts/tokens per day or month in the free versions. In this article, I share my experiences with Firebase Studio. Experiences I didn’t really know what to expect. Getting metadata of an image would be an easy start, I thought.…

Autofill with the autocomplete attribute

You probably know this: some registration forms are completed in no time, while others are a tedious process in which you have to manually enter your phone number, address, etc. The first type will probably use autofill, with the autocomplete attribute. Autofill allows a browser to automatically fill in form fields. Using autofill makes filling in forms easier, safer, and increases the conversion rate. You can turn on autofill by setting autocomplete to on. <input type="text" name="name" aut…

Using SVG icons on the web

This article describes how to give monochrome SVG icons different colors with CSS and how to apply some effects. Why do you want to use SVG icons? SVG is an ideal format for stylized icons. SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is made out of vectors which makes them very small (as in file size) and are scalable, which makes them look sharp even at high resolutions. Styling SVG icons You can use SVG icons in an img tag or as a background image. In this article, however, we will use mask-image, which h…

Creating an SVG icon sprite

If you use a lot of SVG icons on your website, it is better for the performance of the site to merge them into one file: the SVG sprite. You can do this with the powerful svg-sprite package by Joschi Kuphal. See svg-sprite Install svg-sprite with npm: npm install --save-dev svg-sprite Next, we put all configuration data in a configuration file called svg-sprite.config.json: { "path": "out", "mode": { "view": { "dest": "assets/icons", "sprite": "sprite.s…

Stop shitting on JavaScript

Take this tweet from Theo Browne, with 140k followers. Math.max() is true and Math.min() In the next tweet he explains it, but his “Javascript was a mistake” still stands. It’s not about Theo, but about the general sentiment that JavaScript is a terrible language. If it’s not the social media posts about JavaScript, it’s the comments below them that are shitting on JavaScript. Is JavaScript really that bad? Let’s investigate this. I’ve analysed many posts claiming JavaScript is a bad langua…

Introducing BlendBlastCSS

Released today… BlendBlastCSS, the revolutionary new visual CSS color framework. Prepare to have your world ROCKED and your screens SIZZLED with the most electrifying CSS color framework to ever grace the digital universe! Say goodbye to boring old RGB and HEX codes. Who knows which colors #d2691e and rgb(153, 50, 204) are? Exactly: nobody! We’re taking CSS color to the NEXT LEVEL with our mind-bending, eye-popping, jaw-dropping CSS color system: BlendBlastCSS. BlendBlastCSS’s color system is s…

Security for frontend webdevelopers

Should frontend web developers worry about security? A backend developer once told me that as a frontend developer I didn’t have to worry about security. All security would be handled on the backend. He did have a point. Topics such as injection, path traversal and DDoS attacks take place on the backend. If you look at the OWASP Top 10 Web Application Security Risks, you only see server side vulnerabilities. And also, a browser cannot be trusted. Someone’s computer may have been compromised or …

Introduction to Intl, the ECMAScript internationalization API

Developers often complain when they have to support time zones or daylight saving time. The time they want to show differs by one (or more) hours from the time in the data. Sometimes they solve this by adding the difference themselves, not knowing that this only made the problem worse and the time after the next summer-winter time change is probably incorrect again. While the solution is very simple. Always save time as GMT, so without time zone offset and without daylight saving time. You can …

How can machine learning help a frontend developer?

Machine learning is a subfield of artificial intelligence that focuses on developing algorithms that are able to automatically learn and improve based on data. This technology can help front-end web developers by providing them with powerful tools and techniques to solve complex problems and improve and accelerate their work. There are several ways machine learning can help front-end developers. For example, machine learning algorithms can be used to analyze and predict data, which can help opt…