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Weekly Platform News: Upgrading Navigations to HTTPS, Sale of .org Domains, New Browser Engine
5.12.2019
In this week's roundup: DuckDuckGo gets smarter encryption, a fight over the sale of dot org domains, and a new browser engine is in the works.
Let's get into the news!
DuckDuckGo upgrades and open-sources its encryption
DuckDuckGo has open-sourced its “Smarter Encryption” technology that enables...
“Headless Mode”
2.12.2019
A couple of months ago, we invited Marc Anton Dahmen to show off his database-less content management system (CMS) Automad. His post is an interesting inside look at templating engines, including how they work, how CMSs use them, and how they impact the way we write things, such as loops.
Well...
Highlights from Chrome Dev Summit 2019
22.11.2019
Ire Aderinokun has made another round-up summary of some things that piqued her attention during this year’s Chrome Dev Summit and there’s a lot of exciting news! There’s the :is selector (which Geoff wrote about a while back) as well as logical properties, updates to standard form elements,...
Weekly Platform News: Contrast Ratio Range, replaceAll Method, Native File System API
22.11.2019
In this week's roundup: Firefox's new contrast checker, a simpler way to lasso substrings in a string, and a new experimental API that will let apps fiddle with a user's local files.
Firefox shows the contrast ratio range for text on a multicolored background
According to Success Criterion 1.4.3...
Create Amazingly Stable Tests Your Way — Coded and Code-Less
21.11.2019
Testim’s end-to-end test automation delivers the speed and stability of AI-based codeless tests, with the power of code. You get the flexibility to record or code tests, run on third-party grids, fit your workflow and tools including CI, Git and more. Join the Dev Kit beta to start writing stable...
JAMstack CMSs Have Finally Grown Up!
15.11.2019
This article is based on Brian's presentation at Connect.Tech 2019. Slides with speaker notes from that presentation are available to download.
In my experience, developers generally find the benefits of the JAMstack easy to comprehend. Sites are faster because the resources are static and served...
Making an Audio Waveform Visualizer with Vanilla JavaScript
12.11.2019
As a UI designer, I’m constantly reminded of the value of knowing how to code. I pride myself on thinking of the developers on my team while designing user interfaces. But sometimes, I step on a technical landmine.
A few years ago, as the design director of wsj.com, I was helping to re-design...
Netlify CMS Open Authoring
6.11.2019
I like the term "Git-backed CMS." That term works for an emerging style of CMS that looks and behaves much like any other CMS, with a fascinating twist: it doesn't actually store any data for you. These CMSs are connected to a Git repo where the data lives in flat files (e.g. Markdown). You teach...
Making a Chart? Try Using Mobx State Tree to Power the Data
5.11.2019
Who loves charts? Everyone, right? There are lots of ways to create them, including a number of libraries. There’s D3.js, Chart.js, amCharts, Highcharts, and Chartist, to name only a few of many, many options.
But we don’t necessary need a chart library to create charts. Take Mobx-state-tree (MST)...
A Look at JAMstack’s Speed, By the Numbers
1.11.2019
People say JAMstack sites are fast — let’s find out why by looking at real performance metrics! We’ll cover common metrics, like Time to First Byte (TTFB) among others, then compare data across a wide section of sites to see how different ways to slice those sites up compare.
First, I’d like...
Weekly Platform News: WebAPK Limited to Chrome, Discernible Focus Rectangles, Modal Window API
25.10.2019
In this week's roundup: "Add to home screen" has different meanings in Android, Chrome and Edge add some pop to focus rectangles on form inputs, and how third-party sites may be coming to a modal near you.
Let's get into the news.
WebAPKs are not available to Firefox on Android
On Android, both...
Digging Into the Preview Loading Animation in WordPress
22.10.2019
WordPress shipped the Block Editor (aka Gutenberg) back in version 5.0 and with it came a snazzy new post preview screen that shows the WordPress logo drawing itself while the preview loads.
That's what you get when saving a post draft and clicking the "Preview" button in the editor. How'd they...
Weekly Platform News: CSS column-span Property, ADA applies to Websites, Auto-generated Image Descriptions
17.10.2019
In this week's roundup: multi-column layouts gain wide support, the ADA means more A11y for retailers, and Google is doing something about all the empty image alt attributes in the wild.
The CSS column-span property will soon be widely supported
The CSS column-span property, which has been...
Static First: Pre-Generated JAMstack Sites with Serverless Rendering as a Fallback
23.9.2019
You might be seeing the term JAMstack popping up more and more frequently. I’ve been a fan of it as an approach for some time.
One of the principles of JAMstack is that of pre-rendering. In other words, it generates your site into a collection of static assets in advance, so that it can be served...
Automatically compress images on Pull Requests
19.9.2019
Sarah introduced us to GitHub Actions right after it dropped about a year ago. Now they have improved the feature and are touting its CI/CD abilities. Run tests, do deployment, do whatever stuff computers do! It's essentially a YAML file that says run this, then this, then this, etc., with...
Need to scroll to the top of the page?
2.9.2019
Perhaps the easiest way to offer that to the user is a link that targets an ID on the <html> element. So like...
<html id="top">
<body>
<!-- the entire document -->
<a href="#top">Jump to top of page</a>
...
The Best (GraphQL) API is One You Write
30.8.2019
Listen, I am no GraphQL expert but I do enjoy working with it. The way it exposes data to me as a front-end developer is pretty cool. It's like a menu of available data and I can ask for whatever I want. That's a massive improvement over REST and highly empowering for me as a front-end developer...
Maskable Icons: Android Adaptive Icons for Your PWA
29.8.2019
There is a new web feature called maskable icons that is coming soon to Firefox Preview and other web browsers. This new icon format will let your PWAs have their own adaptive icons on Android.
The post Maskable Icons: Android Adaptive Icons for Your PWA appeared first on CSS-Tricks
Multiplayer Tic Tac Toe with GraphQL
23.8.2019
GraphQL is a query language for APIs that is very empowering for front-end developers. As the GraphQL site explains it, you describe your data, ask for what you want, and get predictable results.
If you haven’t worked with it before, GraphQL might be a little confusing to grok at first glance....
Weekly Platform News: Improving UX on Slow Connections, a Tip for Writing Alt Text and a Polyfill for the HTML loading attribute
23.8.2019
In this week's roundup, how to determine a slow connection, what we should put into alt text for images, and a new polyfill for the HTML loading attribute, plus more.
Detecting users on slow connections
Algolia is using the Network Information API (see the API’s Chrome status page) to detect users...