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How to Fetch and Parse RSS Feeds in JavaScript
11.2.2020
Say you have an RSS feed like this one. The goal is to request that RSS feed, parse it, and do something useful with the data in it. RSS is XML, and XML is arguably not as easy to work with than JSON. While a lot of APIs offer JSON responses, it's less typical for RSS, although it does exist.
Let's...
Browser Version Release Spectrum
6.2.2020
Whenever a browser upgrades versions, it's a little marketing event, and rightly so. Looks like for Firefox it's about once a month, Chrome is ~6 weeks, and Safari is once a year.
Chrome 80 just dropped, as they say, and we get a video and blog post. What strikes me about releases like this these...
CSS4
4.2.2020
Tab Atkins in 2012:
There has never been a CSS4. There will never be a CSS4. CSS4 is not a thing that exists.
Rachel Andrew in 2016:
While referring to all new CSS as CSS3 worked for a short time, it doesn’t reflect the reality of where CSS is today. If you read something...
Freezing User-Agent Strings
3.2.2020
There's been news about Chrome freezing their User-Agent string (and all other major browsers are on board). That means they'll still have a User-Agent (UA) string (that comes across in headers and is available in JavaScript as navigator.userAgent. By freezing it, it will be less useful over time...
Get Moving (or not) with CSS Motion Path
3.2.2020
We just linked up the idea that offset-path can be cleverly used to set type on a path. Don't miss Michelle Barker's experimentation either, with drawing paths or animating text along a path.
Dan Wilson has also been following this tech for quite a while and points out why the sudden surge...
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...
Uses This
30.1.2020
A little interview with me over on Uses This. I'll skip the intro since you know who I am, but I'll republish the rest here.
What hardware do you use?
I'm a fairly cliché Mac guy. After my first Commodore 64 (and then 128), the only computers I've ever had have been from Apple. I'm...
Practice GraphQL Queries With the State of JavaScript API
29.1.2020
Learning how to build GraphQL APIs can be quite challenging. But you can learn how to use GraphQL APIs in 10 minutes! And it so happens I've got the perfect API for that: the brand new, fresh-of-the-VS-Code State of JavaScript GraphQL API.
The State of JavaScript survey is an annual survey of...
Use and Reuse Everything in SVG… Even Animations!
28.1.2020
If you are familiar with SVG and CSS animations and started to work with them often, here are some ideas you might want to keep in mind before jumping into the job. This article will be about learning how to build and optimize your code with <use> element, CSS Variables and...
Flexible Captioned Slanted Images
25.1.2020
The end result of Eric Meyer's tutorial on creating this row of slanted images is pretty classy. But it's more about the journey than the destination (there isn't even really an isolated demo for it). Eric does an amazing job at talking it through like a thought process.
We did that recently, only...
Building Multi-Directional Layouts
23.1.2020
There are some new features in CSS that can assist us with building layouts for different directions and languages with ease. This article is about CSS logical properties and values (e.g. margin-inline-start).  These are a W3C working draft that still going under heavy editing, but have...
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...
The Modern Lovers
20.1.2020
I love stuff like this.
The Modern Lovers, a rock band in the 70's, play a show in Boston, probably having some poster of their own for the show.
Mike Joyce is inspired by the music and combines his love of it with the design style of Swiss Modernism to create a new poster for it.
Pete Barr...
Timeless Web Dev Articles
18.1.2020
Pavithra Kodmad asked people for recommendations on what they thought were some of the most timeless articles about web development that have changed their perspective in some way. Fun! I'm gonna scour the thread and link up my favorites (that are actually articles, although not all of them...
Meet the DC Advocacy Org Helping Put Blockchain on the US Military’s Radar
16.1.2020
The D.C.-based Value Technology Association helped lead the charge in requiring the U.S. Department of Defense to consider the benefits of blockchain technology
How We Tagged Google Fonts and Created goofonts.com
16.1.2020
GooFonts is a side project signed by a developer-wife and a designer-husband, both of them big fans of typography. We’ve been tagging Google Fonts and built a website that makes searching through and finding the right font easier.
GooFonts uses WordPress in the back end...
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...
Netlify High-Fives
14.1.2020
We've got Netlify as a sponsor around here again this year, which is just fantastic. Big fan. Our own Sarah Drasner is Head of DX (Developer Experience) over there, if you hadn't heard. And if you haven't heard of Netlify, well, you're in for a treat. It's a web host, but for your jamstack sites...
Understanding Async Await
9.1.2020
When writing code for the web, eventually you'll need to do some process that might take a few moments to complete. JavaScript can't really multitask, so we'll need a way to handle those long-running processes.
Async/Await is a way to handle this type of time-based sequencing. It’s especially great...