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“CSS4” Update
16.2.2020
Since I first chimed in on the CSS4¹ thing, there's been tons of more discussion on it. I'm going to round up my favorite thoughts from others here. There is an overwhelming amount of talk about this, so I'm going to distill it here down as far as I can, hopefully making it easier to follow.
Jen...
While You Weren’t Looking, CSS Gradients Got Better
14.2.2020
One thing that caught my eye on the list of features for Lea Verou's conic-gradient() polyfill was the last item:
Supports double position syntax (two positions for the same color stop, as a shortcut for two consecutive color stops with the same color)
Surprisingly, I recently discovered most...
Collective #589
13.2.2020
Toward Responsive Elements * The wonderful sound of an atomic commit * OpenChakra * drop.lol * GitHub CLI beta
Collective #589 was written by Pedro Botelho and published on Codrops
Ethereum vs Tron: Comparing Data, Defi and Stablecoins from Both Chains After Viral Tweet
9.2.2020
On February 7, Cold Card and Opendime creator, Rodolfo Novak (also known as NVK), tweeted a picture of himself with Tron founder Justin Sun and Blockstream’s CEO Adam Back. Novak said “Ethereum was over” and the three had a plan to move Tron to Liquid, a network that leverages...
Guillermo’s 2019 in Review
7.2.2020
Of all the tech-focused year-in-review posts I read, Guillermo Rauch's is my favorite. There is a lot in there, jumping from topics like modern architectures, high-fiving specific apps, and philosophical movements.
I'll pick one quote about the rise of "deploy previews":
A salient feature is...
Innovation Can’t Keep the Web Fast
31.1.2020
Every so often, the fruits of innovation bear fruit in the form of improvements to the foundational layers of the web. In 2015, HTTP/2 became a published standard in an effort to update an aging protocol. This was was both necessary and overdue, as HTTP/1 rendered web performance as an arcane sort...
Going Beyond Automatic SVG Compression With the “use” Element
27.1.2020
If you draw your own SVG files or if you download them from the internet, tools like this SVG-Editor or SVGOMG are your friends. Compressing the files with those tools takes only few seconds and reduces your file size a lot. But if you need to use your SVG inline to animate or interact with...
Simple Image Placeholders with SVG
27.1.2020
A little open-source utility from Tyler Sticka that returns a data URL of an SVG to use as an image placeholder as needed.
I like the idea of self-running utilities like that, rather than depending on some third-party service, like placekitten or whatever. Not that I'd advocate for feature...
“Browser Functions”
26.1.2020
Serverless functions are fairly straightforward. Put a bit of back-end language code, like Node, in the cloud and communicate with it via URL. But what if that URL didn't run a back-end language, it ran an actual browser? Richard Young:
We can now do full stack development using just Web APIs....
Playwright
24.1.2020
So Microsoft launches a Node-based browser automation project called Playwright. It allows you to spin up a headless version of a browser and control it. Go here! Click something! Take a screenshot! That kind of stuff. Particularly useful for testing.
It's just like Google's Puppeteer, only...
JAMstack vs. Jamstack
21.1.2020
It's just a word to evoke the idea that serving as much as you can statically while using client-side code and hitting serverless APIs for any needs after that.
The "official website" changed their language from JAMstack (evoking the JavaScript, APIs, and Markup acronym) to Jamstack. It's nothing...
Getting Started with Front End Testing
20.1.2020
Amy Kapernick covers four types of testing that front-end devs could and should be doing:
Linting (There's ESLint for JavaScript and Stylelint or Prettier for CSS.)
Accessibility Testing (Amy recommends pa11y, and we've covered Axe.)
Visual Regression Testing (Amy recommends Backstop, and we've...
Eleventy Love
17.1.2020
Been seeing a lot of Eleventy action lately. It's a smaller player in the world of static site generators, but I think it's got huge potential because of how simple it is, yet does about anything you'd need it to do. It's Just JavaScript™.
Jason Lengstorf and Zach Leatherman did a Learn...
Autumn (macOS window manager)
17.1.2020
I love how nerdy this is. Autumn allows you to write JavaScript to control your windows. Get this window, move it over here. Nudge this window over. There are all sorts of APIs, like keyboard command helpers and doing things on events, like waking up from sleep.
I love that it exists, but for...
How many CSS properties are there?
15.1.2020
Tomasz Łakomy posted a joke tweet about naming all the CSS attributes and Tejas Kumar replied with a joke answer, going as far as making an npm module. You can even run a terminal command to see them:
npx get-all-css-properties
You'll get 259 of them. The source code uses the website quackit.com...
Water.css
11.1.2020
It's notable that Water.css was the #1 clicked thing from Louis Lazaris' Web Tools Weekly in 2019. It's from a 13-year old developer named Felix!
It's just a little bit of CSS you apply to class-free semantic HTML to give it nice basic responsive styles — the perfect kind of thing for a...
Things you can do with a browser in 2020
10.1.2020
I edit a good amount of technical articles about the web, and there is a tendency for authors to be super broad in their opening sentence, like "What we're able to do on the web has expanded greatly over the years."
I tend to remove stuff like that because it usually doesn't serve the article well...
A CSS Tribute to SVG
31.12.2019
This demo from Jérémie Patonnier is incredible. Make sure to look at it in Firefox because some Chrome bug apparently prevents the entire thing from working.
The big idea is that the entire demo is one <rect> element. That's it. It is duplicated with <use> elements when needed,...
Meet Snowglobe: An Avalanche-Based Pre-Consensus Protocol for BCH
22.12.2019
On December 20, BCHD and Openbazaar developer Tyler Smith published first draft specifications for a protocol he calls “Snowglobe.” Smith’s Github repository says that Snowglobe is a propagation protocol for nodes using Nakamoto Consensus and it uses an Avalanche-based consensus...
Raw GraphQL Querying
20.12.2019
GraphQL has all kinds of awesome tooling built around it. But like everything on the web, it ultimately comes down to data shootin' across the ol' network and responses coming back. If you need to talk to a GraphQL API endpoint, you don't absolutely have to use some kind of framework or library...