The Year of Greta

A passion project illustrating the timeline of Greta Thunberg's rise from solo campaigner to the leader of a global movement in 2019.
by via Awwwards - Sites of the day

10 Ways to Hide Elements in CSS

There are multiple ways to hide an element in CSS, but they differ in the way they affect accessibility, layout, animation, performance, and event handling.

Animation

Some CSS hiding options are all or nothing. The element is either fully visible or fully invisible and there’s no in-between state. Others, such as transparency, can have a range of values, so interpolated CSS animations become possible.

Accessibility

Each method described below will visually hide an element, but it may or may not hide the content from assistive technologies. For example, a screen reader could still announce tiny transparent text. Further CSS properties or ARIA attributes such as aria-hidden="true" may be necessary to describe the appropriate action.

Be wary that animations can also cause disorientation, migraines, seizures, or other physical discomfort for some people. Consider using a prefers-reduced-motion media query to switch off animations when specified in user preferences.

Event Handling

Hiding will either stop events being triggered on that element or have no effect — that is, the element is not visible but can still be clicked or receive other user interactions.

Performance

After a browser loads and parses the HTML DOM and CSS object model, the page is rendered in three stages:

1. Layout: generate the geometry and position of each element
2. Paint: draw out the pixels for each element
3. Composition: position element layers in the appropriate order

An effect which only causes composition changes is noticeably smoother than those affecting layout. In some cases, the browser can also use hardware acceleration.

1. opacity and filter: opacity()

The opacity: N and filter: opacity(N) properties can be passed a number between 0 and 1, or a percentage between 0% and 100% denoting fully transparent and fully opaque accordingly.

See the Pen
hide with opacity: 0 by SitePoint (@SitePoint)
on CodePen.

There’s little practical difference between the two in modern browsers, although filter should be used if multiple effects are applied at the same time (blur, contrast, grayscale etc.)

Opacity can be animated and offers great performance, but be wary that a fully transparent element remains on the page and can trigger events.

metric	effect
browser support	good, but IE only supports opacity 0 to 1
accessibility	content not read if 0 or 0% is set
layout affected?	no
rendering required	composition
performance	best, can use hardware acceleration
animation frames possible?	yes
events triggered when hidden?	yes

2. color Alpha Transparency

opacity affects the whole element, but it's also possible to set the color, background-color, and border-color properties separately. Applying a zero alpha channel using rgba(0,0,0,0) or similar renders an item fully transparent:

See the Pen
hide with color alpha by SitePoint (@SitePoint)
on CodePen.

Each property can be animated separately to create interesting effects. Note that transparency can’t be applied to elements with image backgrounds unless they're generated using linear-gradient or similar.

The alpha channel can be set with:

• transparent: fully transparent (in-between animations are not possible)
• rgba(r, g, b, a): red, green, blue, and alpha
• hsla(h, s, l, a): hue, saturation, lightness, and alpha
• #RRGGBBAA and #RGBA

metric	effect
browser support	good, but IE only supports transparent and rgba
accessibility	content still read
layout affected?	no
rendering required	painting
performance	good, but not as fast as opacity
animation frames possible?	yes
events triggered when hidden?	yes

3. transform

The transform property can be used to translate (move), scale, rotate, or skew an element. A scale(0) or translate(-999px, 0px) off-screen will hide the element:

See the Pen
hide with transform: scale(0); by SitePoint (@SitePoint)
on CodePen.

transform offers excellent performance and hardware acceleration because the element is effectively moved into a separate layer and can be animated in 2D or 3D. The original layout space remains as is, but no events will be triggered by a fully hidden element.

metric	effect
browser support	good
accessibility	content still read
layout affected?	no — the original dimensions remain
rendering required	composition
performance	best, can use hardware acceleration
animation frames possible?	yes
events triggered when hidden?	no

The post 10 Ways to Hide Elements in CSS appeared first on SitePoint.

by Craig Buckler via SitePoint

Build a Simple Beginner App with Node, Bootstrap and MongoDB

If you’re just getting started with Node.js and want to try your hand at building a web app, things can often get a little overwhelming. Once you get beyond the “Hello, World!” tutorials, much of the material out there has you copy-pasting code, with little or no explanation as to what you’re doing or why.

This means that, by the time you’ve finished, you’ve built something nice and shiny, but you also have relatively few takeaways that you can apply to your next project.

In this tutorial, I’m going to take a slightly different approach. Starting from the ground up, I’ll demonstrate how to build a no-frills web app using Node.js, but instead of focusing on the end result, I’ll focus on a range of things you’re likely to encounter when building a real-world app. These include routing, templating, dealing with forms, interacting with a database and even basic authentication.

This won’t be a JavaScript 101. If that’s the kind of thing you’re after, look here. It will, however, be suitable for those people who feel reasonably confident with the JavaScript language, and who are looking to take their first steps in Node.js.

What We’ll Be Building

We’ll be using Node.js and the Express framework to build a simple registration form with basic validation, which persists its data to a MongoDB database. We’ll add a view to list successful registration, which we’ll protect with basic HTTP authentication, and we’ll use Bootstrap to add some styling. The tutorial is structured so that you can follow along step by step. However, if you’d like to jump ahead and see the end result, the code for this tutorial is also available on GitHub.

Basic Setup

Before we can start coding, we’ll need to get Node, npm and MongoDB installed on our machines. I won’t go into depth on the various installation instructions, but if you have any trouble getting set up, please visit our forums and ask for help there.

Node.js

Many websites will recommend that you head to the official Node download page and grab the Node binaries for your system. While that works, I would suggest that you use a version manager instead. This is a program which allows you to install multiple versions of Node and switch between them at will. There are various advantages to using a version manager. For example, it negates potential permission issues which would otherwise see you installing packages with admin rights.

If you fancy going the version manager route, please consult our quick tip: Install Multiple Versions of Node.js Using nvm. Otherwise, grab the correct binaries for your system from the link above and install those.

npm

npm is a JavaScript package manager which comes bundled with Node, so no extra installation is necessary here. We’ll be making quite extensive use of npm throughout this tutorial, so if you’re in need of a refresher, please consult A Beginner’s Guide to npm — the Node Package Manager.

MongoDB

MongoDB is a document database which stores data in flexible, JSON-like documents. If you’ve never worked with Mongo before, you might like to check out our beginner-friendly introduction to MongoDB.

The quickest way to get up and running with Mongo is to use a service such as mLabs. They have a free sandbox plan which provides a single database with 0.5GB of storage running on a shared virtual machine. This is more than adequate for a simple app with a handful of users. If this sounds like the best option for you, please consult their quick-start guide.

You can also install Mongo locally. To do this, please visit the official download page and download the correct version of the community server for your operating system. There’s a link to detailed, OS-specific installation instructions beneath every download link, which you can consult if you run into trouble.

A MongoDB GUI

Although not strictly necessary for following along with this tutorial, you might also like to install Compass, the official GUI for MongoDB. This tool helps you visualize and manipulate your data, allowing you to interact with documents with full CRUD functionality.

Check that Everything is Installed Correctly

To check that Node and npm are installed correctly, open your terminal and type:

node -v

followed by:

npm -v

This will output the version number of each program (12.14.1 and 6.13.6 respectively at the time of writing).

If you installed Mongo locally, you can check the version number using:

mongo --version

This should output a bunch of information, including the version number (4.2.2 at the time of writing).

Check the Database Connection Using Compass

If you’ve installed Mongo locally, you start the server by typing the following command into a terminal:

mongod

Next, open Compass. You should be able to accept the defaults (server: localhost, port: 27017), press the CONNECT button, and establish a connection to the database server.

MongoDB Compass connected to localhost

Note that the databases admin, config and local are created automatically.

Using a Cloud-hosted Solution

If you’re using mLabs, create a database subscription (as described in their quick-start guide), then make a note of the connection details.

Open Compass, click New Connection, then Fill in connection fields individually. Select Username / Password as the authentication method, then fill out the rest of the details. Finally, click CONNECT and you should be off to the races.

Note: if you wish to use a connection string, it should look like this: mongodb://<dbuser>:<dbpassword>@ds211709.mlab.com:11709/?authSource=<dbname>.

MongoDB Compass connected to mLabs

Note that I called my database sp-node-article. You can call yours what you like.

Initialize the Application

With everything set up correctly, the first thing we need to do is initialize our new project. To do this, create a folder named demo-node-app, enter that directory and type the following in a terminal:

npm init -y

This will create and auto-populate a package.json file in the project root. We can use this file to specify our dependencies and to create various npm scripts, which will aid our development workflow.

Install Express

Express is a lightweight web application framework for Node.js, which provides us with a robust set of features for writing web apps. These features include such things as route handling, template engine integration and a middleware framework, which allows us to perform additional tasks on request and response objects. There’s nothing you can do in Express that you couldn’t do in plain Node.js, but using Express means we don’t have to re-invent the wheel and it reduces boilerplate.

So let’s install Express. To do this, run the following in your terminal:

npm install express

This will see Express added to the dependencies section of the package.json file. This signals to anyone else running our code that Express is a package our app needs to function properly.

Install nodemon

nodemon is a convenience tool. It will watch the files in the directory it was started in, and if it detects any changes, it will automatically restart your Node application (meaning you don’t have to). In contrast to Express, nodemon is not something the app requires to function properly (it just aids us with development), so install it using:

npm install --save-dev nodemon

This will add nodemon to the dev-dependencies section of the package.json file.

Create Some Initial Files

We’re almost through with the setup. All we need to do now is create a couple of initial files before kicking off the app.

In the demo-node-app folder create an app.js file and a start.js file. Also create a routes folder, with an index.js file inside. After you’re done, things should look like this:

.
├── app.js
├── node_modules
│   └── ...
├── package.json
├── package-lock.json
├── routes
│   └── index.js
└── start.js

Now, let’s add some code to those files.

In app.js:

const express = require('express');
const routes = require('./routes/index');

const app = express();
app.use('/', routes);

module.exports = app;

Here, we’re importing both the express module and (the export value of) our routes file into the application. The require function we’re using to do this is a built-in Node function which imports an object from another file or module. If you’d like a refresher on importing and exporting modules, read Understanding module.exports and exports in Node.js.

After that, we’re creating a new Express app using the express function and assigning it to an app variable. We then tell the app that, whenever it receives a request from forward slash anything, it should use the routes file.

Finally, we export our app variable so that it can be imported and used in other files.

In start.js:

const app = require('./app');

const server = app.listen(3000, () => {
  console.log(`Express is running on port ${server.address().port}`);
});

Here we’re importing the Express app we created in app.js. (Note that we can leave the .js off the file name in the require statement.) We then tell our app to listen on port 3000 for incoming connections and output a message to the terminal to indicate that the server is running.

And in routes/index.js:

const express = require('express');

const router = express.Router();

router.get('/', (req, res) => {
  res.send('It works!');
});

module.exports = router;

Here, we’re importing Express into our routes file and then grabbing the router from it. We then use the router to respond to any requests to the root URL (in this case http://localhost:3000) with an “It works!” message.

Kick off the App

Finally, let’s add an npm script to make nodemon start watching our app. Change the scripts section of the package.json file to look like this:

"scripts": {
  "watch": "nodemon ./start.js"
},

The scripts property of the package.json file is extremely useful, as it lets you specify arbitrary scripts to run in different scenarios. This means that you don’t have to repeatedly type out long-winded commands with a difficult-to-remember syntax. If you’d like to find out more about what npm scripts can do, read Give Grunt the Boot! A Guide to Using npm as a Build Tool.

Now, type npm run watch from the terminal and visit http://localhost:3000.

You should see “It works!”

The post Build a Simple Beginner App with Node, Bootstrap and MongoDB appeared first on SitePoint.

by James Hibbard via SitePoint

Google’s Upcoming Update will Clear All Your Google Translate History

In the coming update, Google Translate will remove all the translation history saved locally. Your translation history will only be saved when you sign in through your Google Account to allow it to be centrally managed. Google has already rolled out a message to warn users to save translations that...

[ This is a content summary only. Visit our website https://ift.tt/1b4YgHQ for full links, other content, and more! ]

by Madiha via Digital Information World

You Might Soon Be Able to Stream Android Games Through Facebook Live

Facebook has been moving into a lot of other territories these past few years. It is no longer satisfied with just being a social media platform, it also wants to start moving into the entertainment field and it is doing this by directly competing with YouTube. Facebook has been offering videos for...

[ This is a content summary only. Visit our website https://ift.tt/1b4YgHQ for full links, other content, and more! ]

by Zia Muhammad via Digital Information World

CSS Timeline Style 95

The post CSS Timeline Style 95 appeared first on Best jQuery.

by Admin via Best jQuery

Product Grid Style 110

The post Product Grid Style 110 appeared first on Best jQuery.

by Admin via Best jQuery