Mastering API Integrations: Best Practices for Web Developers

It is a long established fact

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters.

1. We want everything to look good out of the box.
2. Really just the first reason, that’s the whole point of the plugin.
3. Here’s a third pretend reason though a list with three items looks more realistic than a list with two items.

Typography should be easy

So that’s a header for you — with any luck if we’ve done our job correctly that will look pretty reasonable.

Something a wise person once told me about typography is:

Typography is pretty important if you don’t want your stuff to look like trash. Make it good then it won’t be bad.

It’s probably important that images look okay here by default as well:

What to expect from here on out

What follows from here is just a bunch of absolute nonsense I’ve written to dogfood the plugin itself. It includes every sensible typographic element I could think of, like bold text, unordered lists, ordered lists, code blocks, block quotes, and even italics.

It’s important to cover all of these use cases for a few reasons:

1. We want everything to look good out of the box.
2. Really just the first reason, that’s the whole point of the plugin.
3. Here’s a third pretend reason though a list with three items looks more realistic than a list with two items.

Now we’re going to try out another header style

Now I’m going to show you an example of an unordered list to make sure that looks good, too:

• So here is the first item in this list.
• In this example we’re keeping the items short.
• Later, we’ll use longer, more complex list items.
  And that’s the end of this section.

Code should look okay by default.

I think most people are going to use highlight.js or Prism or something if they want to style their code blocks but it wouldn’t hurt to make them look okay out of the box, even with no syntax highlighting.

What I’ve written here is probably long enough, but adding this final sentence can’t hurt.

function tick() {
  const element = (
    <div>
      <h1>Hello, world!</h1>
      <h2>It is {new Date().toLocaleTimeString()}.</h2>
    </div>
  );
  ReactDOM.render(element, document.getElementById('root'));
} 

Hopefully that looks good enough to you.

There are other elements we need to style

I almost forgot to mention links, like this link to the Tailwind CSS website. We almost made them blue but that’s so yesterday, so we went with dark gray, feels edgier.

We even included table styles, check it out:

Wrestler	Origin	Finisher
Bret “The Hitman” Hart	Calgary, AB	Sharpshooter
Stone Cold Steve Austin	Austin, TX	Stone Cold Stunner
Randy Savage	Sarasota, FL	Elbow Drop
Vader	Boulder, CO	Vader Bomb
Razor Ramon	Chuluota, FL	Razor’s Edge

We also need to make sure inline code looks good, like if I wanted to talk about <span> elements or tell you the good news about @tailwindcss/typography.

We still need to think about stacked headings though.

Ea nemo et dolorum quidem non est aut. Tempore delectus dolorum delectus omnis velit quia. Nobis eius atque occaeca

Let’s make sure we don’t screw that up h4 elements, either.

Phew, with any luck we have styled the headings above this text and they look pretty good.

Ea nemo et dolorum quidem non est aut. Tempore delectus dolorum delectus omnis velit quia. Nobis eius atque occaeca

Let’s add a closing paragraph.

Let’s add a closing paragraph here so things end with a decently sized block of text. I can’t explain why I want things to end that way but I have to assume it’s because I think things will look weird or unbalanced if there is a heading too close to the end of the document.