WDRL — Edition 294: Floating UI, Aria not allowed, Open Props, Mercy and Opinion overload reduction

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Hey,

every year towards the end of it I want to remind you that if you like my work, you can help financing this newsletter by giving a contribution. I want to say thank you to everyone here who reads or supports this project.

This year has been challenging for many. For me, it definitely was. Thankfully, I made a very good decision three years ago that enables me to be outside in nature most of the days. It helps me a lot dealing with the many challenges that are in everyone’s heads right now. Especially now as a father of a young child, it’s not always easy to stay positive, to not be stressed out or discuss, talk about certain topics all the time. But nature has helped me, my child has helped me, meditation and focusing on my own opinion, on my own body, on my own health helps me staying sane. A big reveal was during my Covid infection: Once I realised how “pre-informed” I was about the disease, I stripped out this bias and listened to my body instead, my health improved next day and recovery was very quick from then on while it stalled over some days before. I share this because I think it’s very important to listen to yourself, to keep track on your own health instead of being drawn down by everyday TV shows that don’t even offer any solution but only share how bad everything is.

My wish for the future is to empower you to be your own you. You already have the ability, now to find out how to enable it. It may not be the easiest but probably worth it.

There’s a new year coming and I’d love to see that more people will trust their own mind and body again and work towards this goal. Read you next year!

News

• Do you like or do you not like Tailwind CSS? No matter which camp we are in, we should give love and respect to Adam and the team. The output, communication, and quality are impressive. Tailwind CSS v3.0 was released.

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• It feels like there is an unstoppable unhealthy business around web analytics. Jeremy Keith points out why he thinks tracking users is wrong.
• Some small tips to make it easy for newcomers to join your team and participate in your codebase.
• David Heinemeier Hansson is known for his absolute statements. This time he writes about not celebrating incompetence. We are competent professionals, and we should act like it.

UI/UX

• There is so much to learn about writing and formatting text. Also, there is so much to achieve by using just words and HTML. Slava Shestopalov teaches us all about setting better links for websites and emails.
• Floating UI is a small and modern library that offers you elements floating to another element (e.g. tooltips).

Accessibility

• Martin Underhill shows us a real-world example of the difficulties between user experience, technical complexity, and valid ARIA.

CSS

• Open Props is a set of open source CSS Custom Properties that are providing a consistent set of defaults working with dark and light and various other theme options.

Go beyond…

• I know this comes too late for Christmas but it doesn’t come too late to put these tips into action. Giving gifts that matter shares some nice examples of gifting your beloved ones with something that really comes from your heart and isn’t just something that we buy to have a gift because we’re used to this habit.
• How to feel gratitude as perfectionist is important to so many people and helped me better understand why it’s so hard for me to accept things, to feel real gratitude in so many situations. But training helps a lot once you try to understand and change this.
• A heart of Mercy describes how we can transform other people’s lives and our own by being open-minded and trying to understand other people even if we disagree, by showing and telling mercy and empathy.

• We're blasted with views from others everywhere we look. It seems everyone has an opinion on how best we should conduct our lives, spend our money, and other things.

  Dr. Egypt Iredia gives some great tips on how we can reduce opinion overload.

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 like this newsletter, you can contribute to financing the project. Thank you!

Anselm