CSS selectors never cease to amaze me in how powerful they can be in matching complex patterns. Most of that flexibility is in parent/child/sibling relationships, very seldomly in value matching. Consider my surprise when I learned that CSS allows matching attribute values regardless off case! Adding a {space}i to the attribute selector brackets will make the attribute value search case insensitive: /* case sensitive, only matches "example" */ [class=example] { background: pink; } /* case insensitive, matches "example", "eXampLe", etc. */ [class=example i] { background: lightblue; } The ..read more

Working on a web extension that ships to an app store and isn’t immediately modifiable, like a website, can be difficult. Since you cannot immediately deploy updates, you sometimes need to bake in hardcoded date-based logic. Testing future dates can be difficult if you don’t know how to quickly change the date on your local machine. To change the current date on your Mac, execute the following from command line: # Date Format: MMDDYYYY sudo date -I 06142024 This command does not modify time, only the current date. Using the same command to reset to current date is easy as well! The post How ..read more

Remembering the WiFi password when on a guest network is never easy. Even worse is when it’s no longer posted and someone else is asking you for it. Luckily there’s a built in Windows command to recover the password of a given WiFi network. The Shell Code Open cmd and execute the following command: netsh wlan show profile name="David Walsh's Network" key=clear The result of the command, assuming the network is found, is a long text output with a variety of information about the network. To get the see the password for the network, look under the “Security settings” heading which will look li ..read more

This past weekend I had the opportunity to be what every father wants, if only for a moment: the “cool dad”. My wife was out of town and my youngest son wanted to play PUBG. I caved in, taught him the basic FPS key binds, and he was having a great time. While he was fragging out, he pressed a bunch of random keys and ended up changing movement buttons. Suddenly the traditional WASD movement keys were useless and the arrow keys triggered movement. Of course, this was a degradation of player experience. After struggling to figure out what my son did, I found the solution. To restore the WASD key ..read more

Modals have been an important part of websites for two decades. Stacking contents and using fetch to accomplish tasks are a great way to improve UX on both desktop and mobile. Unfortunately most developers don’t know that the HTML and JavaScript specs have implemented a native modal system via the popover attribute — let’s check it out! The HTML Creating a native HTML modal consists of using the popovertarget attribute as the trigger and the popover attribute, paired with an id, to identify the content element: <!-- "popovertarget" attribute will map to "id" of popover contents --> ..read more

AI media creation has expanded to incredible video art and a host of other important improvements, and LimeWire is leading the way in creating an awesome interface for the average user to become an AI artist. Limewire has just released its Developer API, a method for engineers like us to create dynamic AI art on the fly! Quick Hits Free to sign up! Provides methods to create a variety of quality images from any number of AI services and algorithms Create images based on text and other images Modify existing images to scale them, remove backgrounds, and more Use JavaScript, PHP, Python, or an ..read more

Anyone is capable of having their caps lock key on at any given time without realizing so. Users can easily spot unwanted caps lock when typing in most inputs, but when using a password input, the problem isn’t so obvious. That leads to the user’s password being incorrect, which is an annoyance. Ideally developers could let the user know their caps lock key is activated. To detect if a user has their keyboard’s caps lock turn on, we’ll employ KeyboardEvent‘s getModifierState method: document.querySelector('input[type=password]').addEventListener('keyup', function (keyboardEvent) { const c ..read more

One of the HTML elements that frequently comes into collision with CSS is the img element. As we learned in Request Metrics’ Fixing Cumulative Layout Shift Problems on DavidWalshBlog article, providing image dimensions within the image tag will help to improve your website’s score. But in a world where responsive design is king, we need CSS and HTML to work together. Most responsive design style adjustments are done via max-width values, but when you provide a height value to your image, you can get a distorted image. The goal should always be a display images in relative dimensions. So how do ..read more

Over 50 thousand developers visit DavidWalshBlog every month from around the world to learn JavaScript tricks and fix problems in their code. Unfortunately, some of them have a slow experience on the site. David tracks the performance of his Core Web Vitals and overall performance with Request Metrics. Recently, we noticed that his CLS performance score was trending pretty slow for both desktop and mobile users. Wait, what is CLS? Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is one of the Core Web Vital performance metrics. It doesn’t measure load time directly, instead it measures how much a page shifts whi ..read more

Ask any software engineer and they’ll tell you that coding date logic can be a nightmare. Developers need to consider timezones, weird date defaults, and platform-specific date formats. The easiest way to work with dates is to reduce the date to the most simple format possible — usually a timestamp. To get the immediate time in integer format, you can use Date.now: const now = Date.now(); // 1705190738870 I will oftentimes employ Date.now() in my console.log statements to differentiate likewise console.log results from each other. You could also use that date as a unique identifier for an ev ..read more