Edwin Martin’s weblog

Vibe coding with Firebase Studio

Edwin Martin — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 22:02:00 GMT

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…

Autofill with the autocomplete attribute

Edwin Martin — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 09:06:00 GMT

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…

Using SVG icons on the web

Edwin Martin — Sun, 20 Oct 2024 11:43:00 GMT

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…

Creating an SVG icon sprite

Edwin Martin — Sun, 20 Oct 2024 10:18:00 GMT

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…

Stop shitting on JavaScript

Edwin Martin — Fri, 31 May 2024 12:39:00 GMT

Take this tweet from Theo Browne, with 140k followers. Math.max() is true and Math.min() < Math.max() is false" style="--height: 743"> 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…

Introducing BlendBlastCSS

Edwin Martin — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

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…

Security for frontend webdevelopers

Edwin Martin — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 15:00:00 GMT

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…

Introduction to Intl, the ECMAScript internationalization API

Edwin Martin — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 15:24:00 GMT

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…

How can machine learning help a frontend developer?

Edwin Martin — Sun, 04 Dec 2022 16:03:00 GMT

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…

Introduction to Web Components

Edwin Martin — Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Web components is a W3C web standard that allows you, simply put, to create your own HTML tags. Adding a map to your web page can be as simple as adding this tag: <g-map latitude="52.3812258" longitude="4.9001255"></g-map> With web components, you can work in a component-based way without…

Carbonium, a lightweight library to manipulate the DOM

Edwin Martin — Thu, 27 Aug 2020 15:24:00 GMT

This summer, I’ve been working on updating my Game of Life site. I looked at several JavaScript frameworks, but was not satisfied with the performance of any of them. I could’ve used my own miq lilbrary, but that mimicks the jQuery API too much. When you write in native DOM, you probably use…

Practical CSS variables

Edwin Martin — Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:31:00 GMT

In HTML and JavaScript, you can easily apply some styling with the style attribute or property. But if you just want to pass a value, like a color, style falls short. Fortunately, there is a solution for this, which has now been adopted by all modern browsers: CSS Custom Properties for Cascading…

The JavaScript engineer and the front-end UI developer

Edwin Martin — Sun, 18 Aug 2019 14:14:00 GMT

Before the year 2000, people who made websites did it all: designing, programming, deployment, SEO et cetera. It didn’t take long to figure out that programmers weren’t great designers and designers weren’t great programmers. Some people where great at both, but they where rare and a statistical…

Prettier, the Opinionated Code Formatter

Edwin Martin — Sat, 19 Jan 2019 15:41:00 GMT

With HTML, CSS and JavaScript, it’s not prescribed how to format your code. Everything on one line or not, lots of spaces, tabs or everything packed together, for the computer it doesn’t really matter. The result is that everybody will develop its own style. On itself, that isn’t bad, but when…

testproxy: testing sites on devices without configuration

Edwin Martin — Sat, 01 Jul 2017 16:22:00 GMT

A while ago I was working on several websites in a Vagrant container. The problem was that we couldn’t test the sites on mobile devices. The IP address of the Vagrant box was known inside my computer, but not outside, on other devices. I could use a proxy like Squid, but it was too big, had to be…

twitterFetch: show your tweets the way you want

Edwin Martin — Sun, 01 May 2016 12:12:00 GMT

A nice way to let visitors of your website know about your twitter feed, is to show your latest tweet. Fortunately, Twitter provides several means to do this. One is the Twitter Widget. Aside from changing some colours, you can’t change much of the layout. The second is the Twitter REST API, which…

Miq, the micro jQuery like library

Edwin Martin — Wed, 30 Mar 2016 12:59:00 GMT

Today I released miq, a tiny jQuery like library. Since the first release of jQuery a lot has changed: lots of array functions, promises, querySelectorAll, CSS transformations… and jQuery can only partially use them because the makers want to keep it backwards compatible. I created miq to combine…

Push the web forward

Edwin Martin — Sun, 17 Jan 2016 21:59:00 GMT

On January 12th, 2016, Microsoft stopped supporting Internet Explorer 9 and 10. As a webdeveloper, it might be time to stop supporting IE9 and IE10 too. At the time of writing, in January 2016, the worldwide market share of IE9 and IE10 is less than 1.3% for each browser. Check the statistics from…

You are not a webdesigner

Edwin Martin — Sun, 30 Aug 2015 01:27:00 GMT

“The saddest thing of being a frontend developer is getting designs that could’ve been for print. Every time.” When I started making websites in 1994, all designs I got could just as well been used for print. Okay, there where some buttons and a form, but that’s as far as it got regarding…

CSS Secrets book review

Edwin Martin — Tue, 04 Aug 2015 14:23:00 GMT

Lea Verou’s new book CSS Secrets is for frontend webdevelopers who use CSS in their daily work. The book assumes you already know, for example, CSS2 selectors, transforms and ::before/::after pseudo elements. But the book is still useful if you don’t. You do need to have a basic understanding of…