Adactio: Links—Tagged with frontend

Fading out siblings on hover in CSS | Trys Mudford

Well, the clever CSS techniques just keep on comin’ from Trys—I’m learning so much from him!

Limitation Breeds Creativity - Cassie Evans [Bytes Conf 2019] - YouTube

Cassie’s terrific talk from Bytes Conf, featuring some wild CSS experiments.

(Conference organisers—you want Cassie on your stage!)

HTML Includes That Work Today | Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA

Scott writes up that super smart transclusion trick of his.

Offline fallback page with service worker - Modern Web Development: Tales of a Developer Advocate by Paul Kinlan

Paul describes a fairly straightforward service worker recipe: a custom offline page for failed requests.

Inline an SVG file in HTML, declaratively & asynchronously!

Woah! This is one smart hack!

Scott has figured out a way to get all the benefits of pointing to an external SVG file …that then gets embedded. This means you can get all the styling and scripting benefits that only apply to embedded SVGs (like using fill).

The fallback is very graceful indeed: you still get the SVG (just not embedded).

Now imagine using this technique for chunks of HTML too …transclusion, baby!

Disenchantment - Tim Novis

I would urge front-end developers to take a step back, breathe, and reassess. Let’s stop over engineering for the sake of it. Let’s think what we can do with the basic tools, progressive enhancement and a simpler approach to building websites. There are absolutely valid usecases for SPAs, React, et al. and I’ll continue to use these tools reguarly and when it’s necessary, I’m just not sure that’s 100% of the time.

Improving accessibility with accessibility acceptance criteria — Paul Hayes

Wouldn’t it be great if every component in your design system had accessibility acceptance criteria? Paul has some good advice for putting those together:

Start with accessibility needs

Don’t be too generic

Don’t define the solution

Iterate criteria

Web Components will replace your frontend framework

I’ve often said that the goal of a good library should be to make itself redundant. jQuery is the poster child for that, and this article points to web components as the way to standardise what’s already happening in JavaScript frameworks:

Remember when document.querySelector first got wide browser support and started to end jQuery’s ubiquity? It finally gave us a way to do natively what jQuery had been providing for years: easy selection of DOM elements. I believe the same is about to happen to frontend frameworks like Angular and React.

The article goes on to give a good technical overview of custom elements, templates, and the Shadow DOM, but I was surprised to see it making reference to the is syntax for extending existing HTML elements—I’m pretty sure that that is, sadly, dead in the water.

Defining Productivity — Jeremy Wagner

We have a tendency in our line of work to assume that what benefits us as developers translates to a benefit for those who use what we make. This is an unsafe assumption.

Building accessible websites and apps is a moral obligation | Go Make Things

Morality is not always relative.

You’re a web professional.

The web is accessible out-of-the-box. We break it.

It’s not on people with disabilities to tell you how you screwed up.

It should be easier. This is our job.

Why you should learn vanilla JS first | Go Make Things

Frameworks (arguably) make building complex applications easier, but they make doing simple stuff more complex.

And that’s why I think people should learn vanilla JS first. I’ve had many students who tried to learn frameworks get frustated, quit, and focus on vanilla JS.

Some of them have gone back to frameworks later, and told me that knowing vanilla JS made it a lot easier for them to pick up frameworks afterwards.

AddyOsmani.com - Native image lazy-loading for the web!

The loading attribute for images and iframes is coming to Chrome. The best part:

You can also use loading as a progressive enhancement. Browsers that support the attribute can get the new lazy-loading behavior with loading=lazy and those that don’t will still have images load.

Break out of the echo chamber - Andy Bell

So much of my echo chamber is consumed by people, including myself, who have a very dim view of JavaScript frameworks being thrown at everything, arguing with the people who are in the process of throwing JavaScript frameworks at everything. We forget one very important thing, though: we represent the minority of the web community and our arguments probably look very pointless and silly to the majority.

You probably don’t need that hip web framework - Charged

This is a bit ranty but it resonates with what I’ve been noticing lately:

I’ve discovered how many others have felt similarly, overwhelmed by the choices we have as modern developers, always feeling like there’s something we should be doing better.

Not only does the differentiation of terms create a divide within the industry, the term ‘web app’ regularly acts as an excuse for corner cutting and the exclusion of users.

Straight-talkin’ Trys:

We kid ourselves into thinking we’re building groundbreakingly complex systems that require bleeding-edge tools, but in reality, much of what we build is a way to render two things: a list, and a single item. Here are some users, here is a user. Here are your contacts, here are your messages with that contact. There ain’t much more to it than that.

Benjamin Parry Home-brew

I love the way that Benjamin is documenting his activities at Homebrew Website Club Brighton each week:

Another highly productive 90 mins.

Homebrew website club is on every Thursday evening 6.00-7.30pm at Clearleft. You should come along!

CSS { In Real Life } | Building a dependency-free site in 2019

I think we’re often guilty of assuming that because our tools are great solutions for some things, they’re automatically the solution for everything.

Responsible JavaScript: Part I · An A List Apart Article

As I pick apart yet another bundle not unlike a tangled ball of Christmas tree lights, it’s become clear that the web is drunk on JavaScript. We reach for it for almost everything, even when the occasion doesn’t call for it. Sometimes I wonder how vicious the hangover will be.

I love everything about this article and I can’t wait for part two.

What we tend to forget is that the environment websites and web apps occupy is one and the same. Both are subject to the same environmental pressures that the large gradient of networks and devices impose. Those constraints don’t suddenly vanish when we decide to call what we build “apps”, nor do our users’ phones gain magical new powers when we do so.

Needless to say, I endorse this message:

Whether you think of your site as an “app” or not, adding a service worker to it is perhaps one of the most responsible uses of JavaScript that exists today.

Tags: frontend

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