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Jamstack Conf
22.9.2020
Here’s an important detail here: It’s free!
Jamstack Conf Virtual is coming up October 6th and 7th, 2020. The sessions are on October 6th. That’s the free part (register here). Then on October 7th there are a variety of workshops (they all look great to me) that are $100 USD each....
Accessible Web Animation: The WCAG on Animation Explained
22.9.2020
It’s true, web animation can be accessible! Sometimes it just takes a little extra effort to make sure that it is. There are strategic things we can do to make sure our animations have a positive impact on accessibility, like planning how they contribute to the overall UX and ease of use of...
ztext.js
22.9.2020
Super cool project from Bennett Feely! It makes any web type into 3D lettering with a mouseover effect that moves the 3D objects in space. It’s reminiscent of Zdog, but for type. It works its magic by stacking a bunch of copies of the glyphs on top of each other that are offset by some...
Thinking About Power Usage and Websites
22.9.2020
Gerry McGovern asked if I had any insight into energy consumption and websites. He has a book, after all, about the digital costs on the planet. He was wondering about the specifics of web tech, like…
If you do this in HTML it will consume 3× energy but if you do it in JavaScript it will...
Nova
21.9.2020
Nova is a new (vehemently macOS-only) code editor from Panic, the folks behind Coda. It’s like “Coda 3” except this was such a major re-write that they gave it a whole new name.
I played with some of the betas as they were building it. I got a little discount as it went live, so...
Pre-Caching Image with React Suspense
21.9.2020
Suspense is an exciting, upcoming feature of React that will enable developers to easily allow their components to delay rendering until they’re “ready,” leading to a much smoother user experience. “Ready,” in this context, can mean a number of things. For example, your data loading...
Vue 3
19.9.2020
It’s out! Congrats to the Vue team for getting it done, I know it was a massive effort and a long time coming. All new docs, as well.
I like it’s still a priority that Vue can be used with just a <script tag with no build process at all. But it’s ready for build processes...
Enforcing performance budgets with webpack
18.9.2020
As you probably know, a single monolithic JavaScript bundle — once a best practice — is no longer the way to go for modern web applications. Research has shown that larger bundles increase memory usage and CPU costs, especially on mid-range and low-end mobile devices.
webpack has a lot of features...
Optimizing CSS for faster page loads
18.9.2020
A straightforward post with some perf data from Tomas Pustelnik. It’s a good reminder that CSS is a crucial part of thinking web performance, and for a huge reason:
Any time [the browser] encounters any external resource (CSS, JS, images, etc.) it will assign it a download priority...
Changing Emoji Skin Tones Programmatically
17.9.2020
So, you know how many emoji have different skin tones? Emoji skin tones are extremely popular, especially over text and on social media. The raised black fist emoji (✊🏿) was voted “The Most 2020 Emoji” by Emojipedia’s World Emoji Awards.
Each tone is a modifier and many emoji...
Weaved Webs
17.9.2020
There is a bit of an irony with Jamstack.
The concept is simple: you put pre-rendered, static files on web hosting (a CDN) designed to do that well. That’s it. If you need to do more, anything you do from there is done with client-side JavaScript, which is likely talking to serverless...
Lessons Learned from Sixty Days of Re-Animating Zombies with Hand-Coded CSS
16.9.2020
I’ll be linking to individual Pens as I discuss the lessons I learned, but if you’d like to get a sense of the entire project, check out 60 days of Animation on Undead Institute. I started this project to end on August 1st, 2020, coinciding with the publication of a book I wrote featuring...
Inclusive Design 24
16.9.2020
Totally free.
No sign-up. No registration. All sessions are streamed live and publicly on the Inclusive Design 24 YouTube channel – see the entire playlist for the event.
Quite the lineup.
I’ve got a couple of other accessibility links burning a hole in my pocket as well:
Matt Stobbs:...
Editing HTML Like A Boss In VS Code
16.9.2020
Here’s a seven minute video from Caleb Porzio that focuses on some of Emmet‘s HTML editing features. You might think of Emmet as that thing that expands abbreviations like table.stats>tr*3>td*3 into glorious, expanded, and perfect HTML. But Emmet has other HTML editing trickery...
Chapter 4: Search
15.9.2020
Previously in web history…
After an influx of rapid browser development following the creation of the web, Mosaic becomes the popular choice. Recognizing the commercial potential of the web, a team at O’Reilly builds GNN, the first commercial website. With something to browse with,...
What is the Value of Browser Diversity?
15.9.2020
In 2018, Rachel Nabors made the point that browser diversity is similar to biological ecosystem diversity. There are literal advantages to more diversity. That article was before the Edge engines were shut, and now the big shakeups at Mozilla have the topic of browser diversity on people’s...
Virtual Event Registrations with Wufoo Forms
15.9.2020
(This is a sponsored post.)
We’ve seen many events shift from in-person to online this year. That may have required a huge change to how you collect attendee registrations in the past, but with a paid Wufoo account and Zoom — along with a sprinkle of Zapier — it’s easier than ever to...
Form design
15.9.2020
A very digestable guide from Geri Reid on building forms. Not the code, but the design and UX principles that should guide the code.
Working on a design system for a bank has taught [me] a lot about forms. I’ve watched testing in our labs. I’ve worked alongside experts from specialist...
Winamp Skin Museum
15.9.2020
65,000 skins, they say. That’s extraordinary, especially considering how creative and well done many of them are. MySpace was an even bigger creative explosion of customization.
What’s the next product that will inspire this kind of user ownership through theming? Allowing...
content-visibility: the new CSS property that boosts your rendering performance
14.9.2020
Una Kravets and Vladimir Levin:
[…] you can use another CSS property called content-visibility to apply the needed containment automatically. content-visibility ensures that you get the largest performance gains the browser can provide with minimal effort from you as...