WDRL — Edition 297: Carbon footprint of ads, JS sorting, PHP the right way and using what we have.

Celý článek

Hey,

from time to time my intro isn’t entirely web-focused. I always struggle a bit when this is the case because usually it’s about sensitive topics which aren’t easy to discuss in public but this is a personal newsletter. And you can always skip the next paragraph.

personal intro

When I sent out the last edition, we were in a pandemic. Now, there’s also a new war between multiple political forces, creating fear and uncertainty around the people of the world. As if the pandemic situation wouldn’t be stressful enough, this adds up to anxiety, feelings of helplessness and »what the hell is happening in the world?« thoughts. Things aren’t normal since two years now and I the only way I currently see is people finding an arrangement with their inner self to deal with this. Which isn’t really a solution, more a compromise. I wish you all out there a lot of strength, passion, empathy and enough energy to find your own path and solution, to build your own opinion on things. If you’re directly affected of the war situation, I send you all the best wishes and my hope is for a peaceful together in near future again. At home, we have new neighbours since two weeks — a mother with her child. We try our best to keep them in a normal life, playing and talking with them while the husband/father is in danger and far away from them.

web intro

Speaking about the web we have much nicer topics to talk about, such as new iOS/Safari 15.4 with image lazy loading, Chrome and Firefox version 100, new Roboto Serif font and how to get better at achieving your goals. But if we don’t and make an exception, even then we have a cooler option than being annoyed about ourselves and instead accept the situation. And finally I’ve been surprised this morning to read that CSS-Tricks, one of my all time favorite sites is now part of Digital Ocean and I had to give Chris who built this site a public shoutout and thank you for all what he’s done so far for the web dev community.

News

• Both Chrome and Firefox will soon reach version 100. First congrats for that. But if you rely on user agent sniffing better check your code as it may break with the first three-digit version out there.
• iOS 15.4 has finally added icon support in the manifest, Web Push, AR, and VR experiments, being a big improvement for web apps on Apple devices. Here’s what’s new in Safari 15.4, including the <dialog> element :has() selector, Cascade Layers, new viewport units, CSP Level 3 and more.
• With Safari 15.4 we’ll get accent-color everywhere and so we can style our form inputs in a nice way cross-browser.
• There is a new design for one of the best – or maybe the best – websites on frontend developer resources. Make sure to check out the MDN Web Docs.

Generic

• PHP: The Right Way is an easy-to-read, quick reference for modern coding standards in PHP, trying to fight all the outdated and partially wrong solutions found on the web.
• When creating REST APIs we can make so many mistakes. Therefore it is a good idea to learn some basics. Ronald Blüthl provides a good starting point to learn about REST API design.

UI/UX

• You know the Roboto font family? Here’s great news: In addition to the sans-serif there’s now the serif variant of the font family and it’s pretty cool.
• A well-written headline, a perfectly descriptive label, or the accurate text on a button makes all the difference. Andy Hertzfeld wrote a fun little story about choosing proper text in a user interface.

Tooling

• There are good reasons (e. g. security and maintainability) to keep your programming languages, operating systems, frameworks, or libraries up to date. We can check the end-of-life dates of software on a new well-documented website.

Web Performance

• What is the environmental impact of visiting a website and what part do advertising, and analytics, play? It may be up to 70%. Here’s this interesting research saying using ad blockers could save a lot of CO2.

JavaScript

• Rupert McKay shares common ways to do sorting in JavaScript.
• Here’s the guide to upgrade your apps to React v18 which is soon going to be released.

CSS

• Did you know you can set up wrapper width with min() and margin-inline much cleaner these days than we’re used to? See the link for the code example.

Work & Life

• The software development industry is growing and growing. For new software developers, it is helpful that experienced people share their learnings. Ivan Stoev teaches us seven lessons he has learned as a software engineer.

Go beyond…

• Adam has some nice ideas on how to manage your personal goal setting with a tiny “framework”.
• On the topic of personal goal setting I found this interesting thesis that you should »never set a goal that a dead person can do better than you«. It’s about setting realistic goals that we can really achieve, not like “stop eating chocolate” which is unrealistic in so many points.
• So we’ve learned that we shouldn’t just buy things and we should aim for minimalism in our lives. But well, what if we still bought something in an impulse? Stop being annoyed with yourself and make the best out of it: Use the thing now that you have it and enjoy it.

If you like this newsletter, you can contribute here. Thank you!

Anselm