WDRL — Edition 301: CSS on fire, custom maps, text experience and testing

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Hey,

This week is full of awesome CSS stuff that people have dreamt of only some years ago. And we have other articles that I’ve been long waiting for: Great custom maps, a modern end-to-end testing framework and a fast Electron alternative. But first of all, the topic of the week:

People always talk about quality time for work, family, fitness, self-care, or sports… but what about having leisure time that allows you to think about nothing and let your mind pause for a bit?
It’s as important, yet we get the idea of this being wasted time. The problem is that it’s hard to cut the lines between too much and just the right amount.
If you work focused the whole day, have been playing with children in the late afternoon (without hanging on the smartphone), and cooked the meal it’d be just fair to watch TV (or streaming) for a bit in the evening.
Of course, it’s often better to meditate, listen to music, or read a book than to watch TV or get lost on your computer reading and watching. But from time to time we also need this time where we allow ourselves to do nonsensical stuff.

UI/UX

• When we talk about User Experience design we often think about design, a clean UI or similar things. But a lot of the experience has to do with the words and texts chosen for the project and here’s a guide that helps understanding the importance of UX Writing.

Tooling

• Share code snippets in a very nice way with Chalk.ist.
• Felt brings the simple elegance of modern creative software to the world of maps. A very interesting and promising project for custom maps.
• Tauri is an Electron alternative, written in Rust under MIT or MIT/Apache 2.0 license. The advantages of Electron combined with a fast, modern and secure base makes this a really cool project to consider for multi-platform apps. And the list of partners and sponsors makes me confident that it’ll stay at least for a while on the market.
• Playwright enables reliable end-to-end testing for modern web apps and looks like a modern way to test your service thoroughly.

JavaScript

• A tab component built upon Web Components that has a lot of interesting details inside, shared and explained by David Darnes.

CSS

• Robin Rendle tried out what the smallest amount of CSS is to make a website look decent.
• Evgenii Shkodin explains the best way to include variable fonts in the frontend.
• Nils Binder shares his tutorial how to build a combined CSS aspect-ratiogrid, for example for a video or photo gallery masonry layout.
• Jim Nielsen explores how to target previous siblings with a CSS selector. He was exploring this for his Markdown files and actually found a nice solution thanks to the new :has() selector.
• Una Kravets shares what style queries are, how to use them and when this may be useful. My first thought was how useful this is for any CMS editor areas where people enter Markdown or WYSIWG content that is often hard to target with special styling. Now this is much easier, and wow, CSS is on fire these days!

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Anselm