So you client has asked you to implement a row of buttons to like the URL on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Here are some things you should know about this.

0. Security considerations

Each "like" button is implemented by including a Javascript on your site. This means you are running fucking remote code on your page. You are giving Facebook, Twitter and Google+ full permission to e. g. copy user cookies. Check with your client if she is cool with that. Also note that if you're site is suggesting security by operating under HTTPS ...

When using Rails to truncate strings, you may end up with strings that are still too long for their container or are not as long as they could be. You can get a prettier result using stylesheets.

The CSS property text-overflow: ellipsis has been around for quite a long time now but since Firefox did not support it for ages, you did not use it. Since Firefox 7 you can!

Note that this only works for single-line texts. If you want to truncate tests across multiple lines, use a JavaScript solution like...

Font Awesome 5 is a comprehensive solution for vector icons on your website.

Originally, Font Awesome came as an icon font (plus stylesheets), but recently it can also be used as a pure JavaScript solution (which will render icons as inline <svg> tags), or even as SVG sprites.

All solutions have their pros and cons:

Icon font:

• little CPU load (no JavaScript)
• fonts are relatively large
• 1 extra HTTP request

Javascript + inline SVG:

• higher CPU load (needs to watch the DOM via mutation observers to ad...

I recently stumbled over a quirk in the way Ruby handles local variables that I find somewhat dangerous.

Consider:

def salutation(first_name, last_name = nil)
  if last_name
    full_name = "#{first_name} #{last_name}"
  end 
  "Hi #{full_name}"
end 

This is obviously wrong, full_name is unset when last_name is nil.

However, Ruby will not raise an exception. Instead, full_name will simply be nil, and salutation('Bob') returns 'Hi '.

The same would happen in an else branch:

def salutation(fi...

It is quite easy to migrate from CoffeeScript to ES6. You can use decaffeinate to convert your CoffeeScript source to modern JavaScript.

Install decaffeinate globally:

npm install -g decaffeinate

Call decaffeinate on each .coffee file, relaxing some options to get the most modern (and concise) JS:

decaffeinate file.coffee --use-cs2 --loose --optional-chaining --logical-assignment

Tip

If you use Babel and see errors while decaffeinati...

• Plot graphs in Ruby
• WebGraphviz renders in your browser via JavaScript (to store the rendered graph, extract the SVG using your browser's DOM inspector)
• GraphViz with DOT: Online http://graphs.grevian.org/graph https://graphviz.christine.website/ or offline https://makandracards.com/makandra/1589-auto-generate-state_machine-graphs-as-png-images
• Balsamiq
• Draw.io
• [Excalidraw](https:...

All browsers implement an event named beforeunload. It is fired when the active window is closed and can be used to display an alert to warn the user about unsaved changes.

To trigger the alert, you have to call preventDefault() on the event.

Note

The beforeunload event is only dispatched when the user navigation makes a full page load, or if it closes the tab entirely. It will not be dispatched when navigating via JavaScript. In this case you need to ...

tl;dr When browsers start to adapt proposals from Open UI, it might not be necessary to use any 3rd party libraries to have nice components and controls in web applications e.g. selects. It would require only a minimum of CSS and Javascript to get them working and looking good.

The purpose of the Open UI, a W3C Community Group, is to allow web developers to style and extend built-in web UI components and controls, such as <select> dropdowns, checkboxes, radio buttons, and date/color pickers.

To do that, we’ll need to fully speci...

I recently built a screen with a very high and wide table in the center. This posed some challenges:

• Giving the table a horizontal scroll bar is very unergonomic, since the scrollbar might be far off screen.
• Making the whole page scrollable looks bad, since I don't want the rest of the UI to scroll.
• Giving the table its own vertical scrollbar and a limited height would have solved it, but felt weird, since the table was 90% of the page.

What I ended up doing is reusing the horizontal page scrollbar (which is naturally fixed at t...

The linked GitHub repository is a bit like our "dev" cards deck, but groomed from a single person (Josh Branchaud). It includes an extensive list of over 900 TILs on many topics that might be interesting for most of us. (e.g. Ruby, Rails, Git, Unix..)

Ruby

Here is an excerpt of all the Ruby TILs that were new to me. I encourage you to take your time to skim over the original list as well!

• Assoc For Hashes
  • `Hash#ass...

Use option:checked to find the currently selected option:

select.querySelector('option:checked')

Yes, :checked, not :selected.

This is the same as finding an option with the { selected: true } property in JavaScript:

select.querySelectorAll('option').find((option) => option.selected)

What about the selected attribute?

Note that option[selected] would only find an <option selected> tag. This may be the selected option right after loading the page, but not once the user switched to a different value. ...

Jasmine comes with two matchers that test for equality. The first is toBe:

expect(first).toBe(second)

toBe passes when first === second. Unfortunately this is useless for non-primitive values because JavaScript is a horrible language.

However, Jasmine comes with another matcher toEqual:

expect(first).toEqual(second)

This matcher behaves as a human would expect for types like the following:

• Arrays
• Objects
• Nested array/object constructs
• Regular expressions...

Your commit messages should include the ID of the issue your code belongs to.
Our preferred syntax prefixes the issue title with its ID in brackets, e.g. [FOO-123] Avatars for users.
Here is how to generate that from an issue in Linear.

Add a new link to your browser's bookmarks bar with the following URL.

javascript:(() => {
  if (document.querySelector('[data-view-id="issue-view"]')) {
    const [id, ...words] = document.title.split(' ') ;
    prompt('Commit message:', `[${id}] ${words.join(' ')}`)
  } else {
    alert('Open issue...

If you want to collapse/expand elements with dynamic content (and thus unknown height), you can not transition between height: 0 and height: auto.

Doing it properly, with modern CSS features

In the past, you might have resorted to bulky JavaScript solutions or CSS hacks like transitioning between max-height: 0 and max-height: 9999px. All of them were awkward and/or have several edge cases.

With modern CSS, there is actually a way to do it properly:
Just use a display: grid container which transitions its grid row height betwe...

Browsers blocks abusable JavaScript API calls until the user has interacted with the document. Examples would be opening new tab or start playing video or audio.

E.g. if you attempt to call video.play() in a test, the call will reject with a message like this:

NotAllowedError: play() failed because the user didn't interact with the document first. https://goo.gl/xX8pDD

Workaround

To pretend document interaction in a test you can create an element, click on it, and remove the element again. This unblocks the entire JavaSc...

As a web developer, you know Google Analytics (GA). Probably you've dropped the GA snippet into more than one website, maybe you've even used its Javascript API to implement tracking at the event level.

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a related tool, but on a higher level and thus with much more power. GTM is not a replacement for GA. Rather, it can make GA configurable without changing anything in the application's code base (and much more beyond, see below).

Only prefer GTM if the customer requests it, or if he is updating his tracking r...

Chromedriver (or selenium-webdriver?) will not reliably scroll elements into view before clicking them, and actually not click the element because of that.

We've seen this happen for elements which are just barely in the viewport (e.g. the upper 2px of a 40px button). Our assumption is that the element is considered visible (i.e. Capybara::Selenium::ChromeNode#visible? returns true for such elements) but the Selenium driver wants to actually click the center of the element which is outside of the viewport.

We don't know who exactly i...

# Basic HTML example
<video poster="preview_image.png" controls>
  <source src="or_here.webm" type="video/webm" />
  <source src="alternative_if_browser_cant_pay_first_source.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
  <track src="optional_subtitles.vtt" kind="subtitles" srclang="de" label="Deutsch" default>
</video>

# Javascript API (notable methods and properties)
video = document.querySelector('video')
video.play()
video.pause()
video.load() // Reset to the beginning and select the best available source
video.currentSrc // The selected source
video.c...

Testing file download links in an end-to-end test can be painful, especially with Selenium.

The attached download_helpers.rb provides a download_link method for your Capybara tests. It returns a hash describing the download's response:

details = download_link('Download report')
details[:disposition]  # => 'attachment' or 'inline'
details[:filename]     # => 'report.txt'
details[:text]         # => file content as string
details[:content_type] # => 'text/plain'

Features

Compared to [other approaches](...

If you migrate a Rails application from Sprockets to Webpack(er), you can either transpile your CoffeeScript files to JavaScript or integrate a CoffeeScript compiler to your new process. This checklist can be used to achieve the latter.

1. If you need to continue exposing your CoffeeScript classes to the global namespace, define them on window directly:

-class @User
+class window.User

2. Replace Sprocket's require statement with Webpacker's...

Nearly all jQuery traversal functions ignore elements that are not HTML tags.

To work with other type of nodes (like text, comment or CDATA sections) you need to:

• Retrieve child nodes contents() (which behaves like children() except that it returns all types of child nodes)
• Filter manually using either plain Javascript or jQuery's filter() method

Example

Let's write a function that takes a jQuery element and returns an array of all child nodes that are text nodes:

function selectTextNodes($container) {
  retu...

Applications often show or hide elements based on viewport dimensions, or may have components that behave differently (like mobile vs desktop navigation menus).
Since you want your integration tests to behave consistently, you want to set a specific size for your tests' browser windows.

Using WebDriver options / Chrome device metrics

For Google Chrome, the preferred way is setting "device metrics". This allows you to configure dimensions larger than your display and enable/disable touch behavior.

Simply use register_driver to set up...

Authentication is hard: there are many edge cases, and most users (including yourself) usually only go the "happy path" once and never see the edge cases. If you have rolled your own authentication, or been using older authentication solutions, or resorted to HTTP Basic Authentication, this card will tell you what to do to make your application safe.

Any application that stores sensitive data in the browser

That is: cookies, e.g. by offering a login.

• Ask the admins to [turn on SSL](https://makandracards.com/makandra/1416-integrate-s...

When you have a localized website, you may want to redirect users to their preferred language when they visit the root path.
Here is how to do it without a server-side component (like a Rails application).

• Use JavaScript's navigator.language (real browsers and IE11+) and navigator.userLanguage (old IEs).
• Use a <meta> refresh as fallback
• Provide buttons for paranoid users that disabled JavaScript and meta refreshs.

JavaScript

The following JavaScript will try to auto-detect a user's preferred language.

It understands string...