WDRL — Edition 298: Email tech stacks, less CSS duplicates, simple color systems, a custom highlight API, UUID6 and more.

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Hey,

if you read this email, it’ll be technically different from the previous. When I recently updated my newsletter service server software nearly everything broke into pieces. I was using mailtrain v1 for a long time now but it’s deprecated and using old node versions. Upgrading to v2 wasn’t easy enough for me and I also wanted to have an easier to maintain mailer anyway. The new email is sent via Spatie’s Laravel Mailcoach. So far it’s a pretty manual process again since it doesn’t support RSS-campaigns. At some point in future I want to publish the newsletter via Kirby to the Mailcoach API.

But at this point I now changed my template as well to a modern MJML based template code. This should hopefully fix all the rendering issues you reported to me recently. I tried to support light and dark mode in the emails but that utterly failed and the new template does not support it, too. It’s a bit sad but mail clients once again do what they believe is right, leading to white on white text in some cases. It’s a good reminder to caniemail and that email templating isn’t coding for a browser.

Please report any issues to me if you find one. Now enjoy the new content:

News

• UUID6-8 will be a standard soon for unique identifiers, solving a lot of the common issues with UUID formats (e.g. UUIDv4). Quite nice options ahead!
• If macOS is your operating system of choice and if you use Docker for your local development environment, there might be good news. The Docker team finally reports promising performance improvements for file synchronization.

Generic

• When creating websites and web applications, we have to define deployment and integration processes, think about different environments, and learn more about tooling. The internet is full of complex methods and heavy approaches. Therefore it is nice to read about an alternative. Lewis Monteith writes about why he is not using staging environments.

UI/UX

• The Open Source Color System is a nice preset for web apps.

HTML & SVG

• »You may not think about images as part of your web dev work, but they can affect your web app's performance more than any other part of your code«, says Addy Osmani in Picture perfect images with the modern <img> element. A great summary of what and how to optimize delivery of image content on the web.
• There is so much we can do by just using HTML. Louis Lazaris created a list with a lot of lesser-known but awesome HTML attributes.

JavaScript

• Mark shares a nice example of how to build a mobile scroll navigation that automatically scrolls active links into view. A menu principle I’ve been using more often lately as it’s super simple and effective.
• The CSS Custom Highlight API which will be a webstandard soon makes it possible to style arbitrary text ranges from JavaScript. Pretty cool to highlight dynamic search results or similar things.

CSS

• css-checker checks your css for duplications to avoid redundant css.
• Stephanie Eckles shares how we can animate a newly added element with CSS. And since we cannot animate easily a dynamic height just with CSS, Stephanie has a nice design hack for this to make it look like that.
• The more experienced we get, the deeper we can dive. Josh Comeau writes about CSS layout algorithms, and there is a lot to learn from him.

Go beyond…

• David Cain elaborates on why we want problems to be someone else’s fault and why it’s natural for humans to think like that, yet not always the best thing to do. Knowing about it definitely helps reconsidering it and stop doing it all the time.

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

Anselm