Blog
Tips for responsive design & developer tools
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Detecting media query support in CSS and JavaScript
Recently I needed a way to detect support for a media query in CSS and JavaScript. To detect if a browser supports a certain CSS feature, you can use @supports () { ... } , but that doesn't work for media queries. In…
Polypane 6.2: HTML validation, robots.txt support, RTL emulation and more
In Polypane 6.2 we focused on improving the app performance and consistency, particularly around updating, pane resizing, tab handling and dark mode. What's Polypane? Polypane is a web browser for developers, designers…
Creating websites with prefers-reduced-data
Even though more and more people get access to the internet every day, not all of them have fast gigabit connections or unlimited data. Using the media query prefers-reduced-data we can keep our sites accessible to…
Fixing contrast issues, on your own site and elsewhere
Insufficient text contrast is the most common accessibility issue on websites today. According to the WebAIM Million report for 2021 , 86.4% of home pages world wide have low contrast text. What's worse, this number has…
A11y tooling in Polypane (video)
On May 25th Kilian Valkhof (the creator of Polypane) joined the Twitch channel of Stephanie Eckles to walk through most of the accessibility options in Polypane. Check out the recording below: If you prefer reading…
Responsive design ground rules (updated for 2021)
Creating a responsive design can be intimidating. There are many moving parts, things might lay out in ways you didn't expect and keeping all various viewports in mind when laying out a design can be daunting. With these…
Polypane 6.1: Readability, Content Chaos and rewritten event sync engine
Polypane 6.1 adds two new debug tools and a much more performant, completely rewritten interaction syncing engine along with numerous smaller improvements and bug fixes. What's Polypane? Polypane is a web browser for…
The perfect responsive menu (2021)
On a desktop, websites have the space to show the full menu or navbar. On a mobile device that space isn't there and you want to hide the menu behind a toggle (like a hamburger icon), then show it when people click that…
Device testing is not enough
When you get started with responsive design, you wouldn't be wrong to think it's all about devices. Questions like "which size to use for mobile" quickly come up, and most testing is done on developers' own devices…
Polypane 6: Peek, Webvitals, new simulators & Chromium 91
Polypane 6 is now available! It's another packed release with new features, simulators, performance improvements and a new version of Chromium powering it all. Read on to learn about all the cool new things we have for…
Don't you forget about me: overlooked breakpoints in responsive design.
We get it, there's infinite breakpoints you need to test on and only so much hours in a day, so some breakpoints just get a little more attention than others. You focus most of your time on the devices you have. At…
How to find broken links with Polypane
Broken links, or "dead links", on your website are links that go to a URL that doesn't work. Sometimes this is because the site you're linking to has gone offline or has a server error, sometimes it's because there is a…