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Retrospective on Fela
21.12.2020
I really appreciate a real-world walkthrough of a technology. Not only in what that technology does, but why it was chosen and how it worked for a team. Anybody can read the docs, but what you know after years of real-world usage is far more valuable. Hugo “Kitty” Giraudel:
I want to properly...
What Makes CSS Hard To Master
18.12.2020
Tim Severien:
I feel we, the community, have to acknowledge that CSS is easy to get started with and hard to master. Let’s reflect on the language and find out what makes it hard.
Tim’s reasons CSS is hard (in my own words):
You can look at a matching Ruleset, and still not have the whole...
MDN on GitHub
14.12.2020
Looks like all the content of MDN is on GitHub now. That’s pretty rad. That’s been the public plan for a while. Chris Mills:
We will be using GitHub’s contribution tools and features, essentially moving MDN from a Wiki model to a pull request (PR) model. This is so much better...
Why I love Tailwind
11.12.2020
Max Stoiber wrote some interesting notes about why he loves Tailwind. (Max created styled-components, so he has some skin in the styling methodology game.) There’s a lot of great history in this post about how Tailwind emerged and became a valuable tool for designers and engineers alike, but...
Web Performance Calendar
7.12.2020
The Web Performance Calendar just started up again this year. The first two posts so far are about, well, performance! First up, Rick Viscomi writes about the mythical “fast” web page:
How you approach measuring a web page’s performance can tell you whether it’s built for speed or whether it feels...
Painting With the Web
1.12.2020
Matthias Ott, comparing how painter Gerhard Richter paints (do stuff, step back, take a look) to what can be the website building process and what can wreck it:
[…] this reminds me of designing and building for the Web: The unpredictability, the peculiarities of the material,...
The Core Web Vitals hype train
24.11.2020
Some baby bear thinking from Katie Sylor-Miller:
my excitement for Core Web Vitals is tempered with a healthy skepticism. I’m not yet convinced that Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) are the right metrics that all sites should...
Firefox 83
19.11.2020
There’s a small line in the changelog that is is big news for CSS:
We’ve added support for CSS Conic Gradients (bug 1632351) and (bug 1175958).
🎉🎉🎉
Conic gradients are circular, just like their radial counterpart, but place color stops...
Measuring Core Web Vitals with Sentry
17.11.2020
Chris made a few notes about Core Web Vitals the other day, explaining why measuring these performance metrics are so gosh darn important:
I still think the Google-devised Core Web Vitals are smart. When I first got into caring about performance, it was all: reduce requests! cache things! Make...
ARIA in CSS
11.11.2020
Jeremey reacting to Sara’s tweet, about using [aria-*] selectors instead of classes when the styling you are applying is directly related to the ARIA state.
… this is my preferred way of hooking up CSS and JavaScript interactions. Here’s [an] old CodePen where you can see...
Bidirectional scrolling: what’s not to like?
6.11.2020
Some baby bear thinking from Adam Silver.
Too hot:
[On horizontal scrolling, like Netflix] This pattern is accessible, responsive and consistent across screen sizes. And it’s pretty easy to implement.
Too cold:
That’s a lot of pros for a pattern that in reality has some critical...
More People Dipping Toes Into Web Monetization
5.11.2020
Léonie Watson:
I do think that Coil and Web Monetization are at the vanguard of a quiet revolution.
Here’s me when I’m visiting Léonie’s site:
Enjoy the pennies!
My Coil subscription ($5/month) doles out money to sites I visit that have monetization set up and installed.
Other...
The CSS Custom Property Toggle Trick
29.10.2020
Back in July 2020, I got an email from James0x57 (I always try to refer to people by their name, but I think I get the sense they prefer to go by screen name) that says:
The entire world of branching conditional logic and bulk feature toggling for custom CSS properties is possible and only exists...
More on content-visibility
28.10.2020
Back in August 2020, when the content-visiblity property in CSS trickled its way into Chrome browsers, Una Kravets and Vladimir Levin wrote about it and we covered it. The weirdest part is that to get the performance value out of it, you pair it with contain-intrinsic-size on these big chunks...
xm
21.10.2020
This is a neat little HTML preprocessor from Giuseppe Gurgone. It has very few features, but one of them is HTML includes, which is something I continue to be baffled that HTML doesn’t support natively. There are loads of ways to handle it. I think it’s silly that it’s been...
The failed promise of Web Components
20.10.2020
Lea has some words:
Perusing the components on webcomponents.org fills me with anxiety, and I’m perfectly comfortable writing JS — I write JS for a living! What hope do those who can’t write JS have? Using a custom element from the directory often needs to be preceded by a ritual of...
People Problems
16.10.2020
Just the other day, Jeremy Keith wrote that problems with performance work isn’t only a matter of optimization and fixing code, but also tackling people problems:
It struck me that there’s a continuum of performance challenges. On one end of the continuum, you’ve got technical issues. These can...
There’s a good reason why experienced devs say “it depends” so often
2.10.2020
I feel like Jerod Santo really understood what I was trying to say in Weaved Webs, when I was trying to cover the emerging WordPress (“versus”) Jamstack conversation.
If you asked El Duderino if you should go Jamstack he’d probably tell you, “It’s a complicated case. Lotta ins. Lotta...
POW
30.9.2020
As a connoisseur of web trickery, this is a must share:
POW stands for Packaged Offline/online Webpage. It turns out the png format includes ways to save metadata alongside the image file. A powfile has a metadata entry that contains a zip file that contains a full website.
So a PNG file...
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...