Search
Zero hands up.
2.10.2019
Asked an entire room full of webdevs yesterday if any of them knew that FF/Chrome/Opera/Brave/etc. for iOS weren't allowed to compete on engine quality.
Zero hands up.
— Alex Russell (@slightlylate) September 25, 2019
It's worth making this clear then. On iOS, the only browser engine...
Thinking in React Hooks
25.9.2019
Amelia Wattenberger has written this wonderful and interactive piece about React Hooks and details how they can clean up code and remove all those troubling lifecycle events:
React introduced hooks one year ago, and they've been a game-changer for a lot of developers. There are tons of how-to...
Web Developer Search History
18.9.2019
Sophie Koonin blogged "Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer," which was a fascinating look into the mind of a web developer and what they need to look up during day-to-day work. We all joke that we just Google stuff (or StackOverflow stuff) we don't know off the...
(Why) Some HTML is “optional”
16.9.2019
Remy Sharp digs into the history of the web and describes why the <p> tag doesn’t need to be closed like this:
<p>Paragraphs don’t need to be closed
<p>Pretty weird, huh?
Remy writes:
Pre-DOM, pre-browsers, the world's first browser was being written by Sir...
5G Will Definitely Make the Web Slower, Maybe
16.9.2019
Scott Jehl has written this wonderful piece about how 5G is on the horizon and how it could cause problems for users. But first, he starts by talking about the overwhelming positive news about it:
[...] as it matures 5G is predicted to improve network speeds dramatically. Carriers are predicting...
caniemail.com
15.9.2019
As long as I can remember the main source for feature support in HTML email clients is Campaign Monitor's guide. Now there is a new player on the block: caniemail.com.
HTML email is often joked about in how you have to code for it in such an antiquated way (<table>s! really!) but that's...
Simplicity
12.9.2019
Earlier this week, Bastian Allgeier published some interesting thoughts about complexity in web development and how changing simple things can often feel far more difficult than they need to be:
You want to build a JS file? Please update Webpack first. Oh, that new version of Webpack is no longer...
“Off The Main Thread”
10.9.2019
JavaScript is what they call "single-threaded." As Brian Barbour puts it:
This means it has one call stack and one memory heap.
We all feel a symptom of that regularly in the form of performance jank and non-interactivity on elements or entire sites. If we give JavaScript lots of jobs and it gets...
Firefox blocks third-party tracking cookies and cryptominers
4.9.2019
This is super interesting stuff from Mozilla: the most recent update of Firefox will now block cryptominers and third-party tracking scripts by default. In the press release they write:
For today’s release, Enhanced Tracking Protection will automatically be turned on by default for all users...
Styling Links with Real Underlines
30.8.2019
Before we come to how to style underlines, we should answer the question: should we underline?
In graphic design, underlines are generally seen as unsophisticated. There are nicer ways to draw emphasis, to establish hierarchy, and to demarcate titles.
That’s clear in this advice from Butterick’s...
Using rel=”preconnect” to establish network connections early and increase performance
20.8.2019
Milica Mihajlija:
Adding rel=preconnect to a <link> informs the browser that your page intends to establish a connection to another domain, and that you'd like the process to start as soon as possible. Resources will load more quickly because the setup process has already been completed...
Accessibility and web performance are not features, they’re the baseline
16.8.2019
This week I’ve been brooding about web performance and accessibility. It all began when Ethan Marcotte made a lot of great notes about the accessibility issues that are common with AMP:
In the recordings above, I’m trying to navigate through the AMP Story. And as I do, VoiceOver describes a page...
SSCCE
6.8.2019
You know what a "reduced test case" is, right? We've talked about it here. I imagine the concept is useful in many walks of life, but in the world of front-end development, you can think of it like:
A reduced test case is a demo/example page you create which reproduces the problem you are having...
The Real Dark Web
5.8.2019
Here’s a wonderful reminder from Charlie Owen that everyone in the web design industry isn’t using the latest and greatest technology. And that’s okay! Charlie writes:
Most web developers are working on very "boring" teams. They're producing workhorse products that serve the organisation needs....
The Simplest Way to Load CSS Asynchronously
30.7.2019
Scott Jehl:
One of the most impactful things we can do to improve page performance and resilience is to load CSS in a way that does not delay page rendering. That’s because by default, browsers will load external CSS synchronously—halting all page rendering while the CSS is downloaded...
Lessons Learned from a Year of Testing the Web Platform
30.7.2019
Mike Pennisi:
The web-platform-tests project is a massive suite of tests (over one million in total) which verify that software (mostly web browsers) correctly implement web technologies. It’s as important as it is ambitious: the health of the web depends on a plurality of interoperable...
What I Like About Vue
25.7.2019
Dave Rupert digs into some of his favorite Vue features and one particular issue that he has with React:
I’ve come to realize one thing I don’t particularly like about React is jumping into a file, reading the top for the state, jumping to the bottom to find the render function, then following...
Unsuck It
23.7.2019
Julia Carrie Wong and Matthew Cantor's How to speak Silicon Valley: 53 essential tech-bro terms explained was pretty hilarious. A little something in there to offend everyone.
Speaking of kinda douchey words, I'm reminded of one of my favorite sites on the internet: Unsuck It. Not only does...
Pseudo Code
23.7.2019
Yonatan Doron wrote a post on Medium not long ago called "Art of Code — Why you should write more Pseudo Code." Love that title, as a fan of pseudo code myself. That is, writing "code" that describes something you want to do or communicate, but that isn't of any particular language and doesn't...
Improving Video Accessibility with WebVTT
17.7.2019
"The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect."
- Tim Berners-Lee
Accessibility is an important element of web development, and with the ever-growing prevalence of video content, the necessity for captioned content is growing...