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 Web Animations API has great browser support, and you should be using it to animate DOM elements from JavaScript, or to control or wait for CSS animations.

Here is a quick overview of a few useful features:

Animating elements from JavaScript

Use the Element#animate() function to perform animations on an element.

Its API probably a bit different from how your...

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 ...

Up until Chrome 120, scrollbars could only be styled using the various -webkit-scrollbar-* pseudo elements, e.g. to make the scrollbars have no arrows, be rounded, or with additional margin towards their container.

Starting with version 121, Chrome now also supports the spec-compliant properties scrollbar-width and scrollbar-color.
These allow less styling. You may only specify the track and thumb colors, and a non-specific width like auto, thin, or none.

Any form fields where users enter numbers should be an <input type="number">.

Numeric inputs have several benefits over <input type="text">:

• On mobile or tablet devices, number fields show a special virtual keyboard that shows mostly digit buttons.
• Decimal values will be formatted using the user's language settings.
  For example, German users will see 1,23 for <input type="number" value="1.23">.
• Values in the JavaScript API or when submitting forms to the server will always use a point as decimal separator (i.e. "1.23" eve...

tl;dr

We recommend configuring Selenium's unhandled prompt behavior to "ignore".

When running tests in a real browser, we use Selenium. Each browser is controlled by a specific driver, e.g. Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome for Chrome.

There is one quirk to all drivers (at least those following the W3C webdriver spec) that can be impractical:
When any user prompt (like an alert) is encountered when trying to perform an action, they will [dismiss the dialog by default](https://w3c....

Adding a unit

Multiply by 1x the unit:

$number = 13
$length = $number * 1px // => 13px

Removing a unit

Divide by 1x the unit:

$length = 13px
$number = $length / 1px // => 13

Converting a unit

the result of an addition or subtraction between two numbers of different units is expressed in the first member’s unit

Thus, to convert a number, add it to 0 of the desired unit:

$duration: .21s
$duration-in-milliseconds: 0ms + $duration // => 210ms

An example is storing a transition duration as CS...

Getting CSS (and JS) live reloading to work in a esbuild / Rails project is a bit of a hassle, but the following seems to work decently well.

We assume that you already use a standard "esbuild in Rails" setup, and have an esbuild watcher running that picks up your source code in app/assets and compiles to public/assets; if not change the paths below accordingly.

Basic idea

We will

• use the guard-livereload gem as the livereload server (which send updates to the browser),
• use the livereload-js npm package in the browser to con...

Make sure that you use the correct property when editing an HTML attribute. Using innerHTML with unsafe arguments makes your application vulnerable to XSS.

• textContent: Sets the content of a Node (arguments are HTML-safe escaped)
• innerHTML: Sets the HTML of an Element (arguments are not escaped and may not contain user content)

Hierarchy

This hierarchy gives you a better understanding, where the textContent and the innerHTML properties are defined. It also includes (just for completeness) the innerText property, whi...

Every modern Rails app should have a Content Security Policy enabled.

Very compatible default

The following "default" is a minimal policy that should

• "just work" for almost all applications
• give you most of the benefits of a CSP

In your config/initializers/content_security_policy.rb, set

Rails.application.config.content_security_policy do |policy|
  policy.object_src :none
  policy.script_src :unsafe_eval, :strict_dynamic, :https # Browsers with support for "'strict-dynamic'" will ignore "https:"
  po...

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...

For my computer science bachelor's thesis I programmed and evaluated a CLI Test Case Prioritization (TCP) tool for makandra. It has been written as a Ruby Gem and was tested and evaluated against one Ruby on Rails project. This card will summarize and present the research results, the evaluation and the programmed CLI tool.

The code has been published for educational purposes on GitHub. The german bachelor's thesis has also been included for download at the end.

...

An introduction to mangling

When you minify ("compress", "optimize") your JavaScript for production, the names of your functions and variables will be renamed for brevity. This process is often called mangling.

E.g. if this is your source code:

function function1() {
  function2()
}

After mangling it would look like this:

function a() {
  b()
}

Object properties are not mangled by default

Minfiers never mangle properties by default, as this can be an unsafe transformation. This leads to larger file sizes if...

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...

Note: You won't need this for single lines of text. In this case it is better to just use the text-overflow property: Use CSS "text-overflow" to truncate long texts

You can use -webkit-line-clamp in your CSS/SASS to natively render an ellipsis (...) after a specific amount of lines for a multi-line text in your HTML.
Earlier, it was necessary to implement JavaScript solutions like Superclamp.js to enable this because the browser support has been rather limited...

Suppose you want to implement a publish/subscribe pattern in your Frontend application to react to data changes and events. First, you might be looking for an event emitter library.

Today I learned that vanilla JavaScript comes with a native event emitter, which I've been indirectly using forever. There's no need for extra code!

const emitter = new EventTarget()

emitter.addEventListener('YOLO', () => {
  console.log('YOLO');
})

// invoke attached event listeners
emitter.dispatchEvent(new Event('YOLO'));

Using querySelector or querySelectorAll in JavaScript, you can easily find descendants of a node that match a given selector.

But what if you want to find only children (i.e. direct descendants) of an element?
Easy: use :scope. It references the element on which DOM API methods are being called:

element.querySelectorAll(':scope > .your-selector')

Example

Consider this HTML

<body>
  <div id="container1">
    <div id="container1a">foo</div>
    <div id="container1b">bar</div>
    <div id="container1c">baz</...

Code splitting is a feature of esbuild that can keep huge libraries out of the main bundle.

How code splitting works

Like Webpack esbuild lets you use the await import() function to load code on demand:

// application.js
const { fun } = await import('library.js')

fun()

However, esbuild's code splitting is disabled by default. The code above would simply inline (copy) `l...

As we are slowly switching from Cucumber scenarios to RSpec feature specs, you might be tempted to write assertions like this one:

feature 'authorization for cards management' do
  let(:guest_user) { create(:user, :guest) }

  scenario "rejects guest users from adding new cards", js: true do
    sign_in guest_user

    expect { visit new_cards_path }.to raise_error(Consul::Powerless)
  end
end

While this might work under certain circumstances¹, there is a good chance you'll see two exceptions when running this single spec:

• ...

When you allow file uploads in your app, a user might upload content that hurts other users.

Our primary concern here is users uploading .html or .svg files that can run JavaScript and possibly hijack another user's session.

A secondary concern is that malicious users can upload executables (like an .exe or .scr file) and use your server to distribute it. However, modern operating systems usually warn before executing files that were downloaded from t...

Every Rails response has a default ETag header. In theory this would enable caching for multiple requests to the same resource. Unfortunately the default ETags produced by Rails are effectively random, meaning they can never match a future request.

Understanding ETags

When your Rails app responds with ETag headers, future requests to the same URL can be answered with an empty response if the underlying content ha...

tl;dr

asdf allows you to manage multiple runtime versions with a single CLI tool and is backwards compatible by supporting existing config files, like e.g. .nvmrc or .ruby-version.

Getting Started

1. Disable rbenv
   1.1 Delete or comment out source /home/$user/.rbenvrc in ~/.profile
   1.2 Delete or comment our eval "$(rbenv init -)" in ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc
   1.3 To take effect you may have to restart your shell or log out and log in again from your current linux session
2. Install asdf by following the official ...

When you use native smooth scrolling there is no built-in method to detect the end of the scrolling animation. Methods like scrollTo() don't return a promise. We may eventually get a scrollend event, but that is still some time away.

Until then I'm using the ...

Let's say we have posts with an attribute title that is mandatory.

Our example feature request is to tag these posts with a limited number of tags. The following chapters explain different approaches in Rails, how you can assign such an association via HTML forms. In most cases you want to use Option 4 with assignable values.

The basic setup for all options looks like this:

config/routes.rb

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  root "posts#index"
  resources :posts, except: [:show, :destroy]
end

**db/migrate/...