WDRL — Edition 287: A new year, a new start and nothing ground changing.

Celý článek

Hey,

Welcome to another new year, 2021. WDRL is now seven and a half year old already and the first edition had about twenty email subscribers. What was in there? We had webfont loading behaviour, Speedcurve, a HTML validator, GrumpIcon which created PNG fallbacks for SVG icons via Grunt (remember?), and we moved away from jQuery and started using native JS functions instead. This throwback was quite interesting for me this week. Some topics are still relevant today while others have completely disappeared or solved.
Coming 2021 we now get the ability to slowly replace old hacky code for aspect-ratio with Chrome supporting it now in the latest stable (88), Firefox as well behind flags and in Safari Tech Preview. But we still heavily need CanIUse as project to lookup browser compatibility — thanks so much for building it, Fyrd!

Not every new year needs new habits, new spectacular projects. It’s enough to realign our minds, our goals, our perspectives. It’s a good time to reconsider active or stale projects, clean up old stuff, declutter or start one new thing.
I’m personally dedicating a lot of time currently into my Market Gardening business as well as playing with my son in spare time. Besides that, I started organizing my web development business and declutter it. There’s no time to hold on to projects that aren’t in active development or I don’t like anymore but also don’t bring me joy or money.

I’m also actively looking for small website projects currently so if you know something or need someone building a small company/project website, email me.
If you know about an environmental, social or humanity project that needs my help and could hire me (reduced rate possible) for a limited time, connect me.

I wish you all the best, health and joy.

News

• Chrome 88 is out and brings CSS aspect-ratio to all users, it defaults target="_blank" to treat as rel="no-opener" always by default (which is now the web standard).

Generic

• The Sustainable Web Manifesto is a statement we can all sign to make the web less of a CO2 polluter and more sustainable, in all regards.

UI/UX

• Oliver Schöndorfer shares how to choose a typeface for apps and UIs. It’s a great read that shows the difference between normal, good and excellent app design. He also has a new YouTube channel for Better Type.

Tooling

• Integrating Stripe can be quite a complex task and switching between documentation and code editor can be annoying. So Stripe now has a VS Code extension that brings the Stripe environment into your code editor and makes this task so much more comfortable.

JavaScript

• Addy Osmani wrote another insightful guide how to import code on interaction to save traffic and improve performance on web apps. It’s definitely the gold standard of blog articles, and probably gold standard for web apps, if you implement this.
• Mathias Schäfer with a new article on maintaining javascript applications in the long term, describing the approach for an app built in 2014. Describing why they still use Backbone.js instead of their agency standard React, how they moved from CoffeeScript to TypeScript, handle documentation and maintain a test suite, Mathias concludes why abstractions may bite you in future.

CSS

• Bramus Van Damme shares that we can nest Media Queries. Interesting that most of us have never heard about it.
• Melanie Richards writes how we can integrate sticky elements into CSS Grid layouts without many hacks or side-effects.

Go beyond…

• Exxon, the oil company, knows its carbon future and keeps the data from view. They know that they’re one of the biggest polluters in the world, yet they’re not ready to change something. But given our business and economical system, can we judge them? At least not fully, simply stepping out of the business would make them bankrupt. So it remains an interesting, challenging issue of our generation to solve the economical and ecological problems of this industry so save our society.

I hope you’re doing fine and have a way to stay positive, find your way to make an impact and help build a better society, better friendships and make our world a little better.
If you want to support my work, you can give back via PayPal or Stripe. Thank you!

—Anselm