Adactio: Links

What’s the difference between JavaScript event delegation, bubbling, and capturing? | Go Make Things

I can never keep these straight—this is going to be a handy reference to keep on hand.

How Readable? | Clearleft

Cassie and I went to a great Async talk last night all about code readability, which was well-timed because it’s been on our minds all week. Cassie explains more in this post.

Browser diversity starts with us. | Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design

Hear, hear!

When one company decides which ideas are worth supporting and which aren’t, which access problems matter and which don’t, it stifles innovation, crushes competition, and opens the door to excluding people from digital experiences.

So how do we fight this? We, who are not powerful? We do it by doubling down on cross-browser testing. By baking it into the requirements on every project, large or small. By making sure our colleagues, bosses, and clients know what we’re doing and why.

Big ol’ Ball o’ JavaScript | Brad Frost

Backend logic? JavaScript. Styles? We do that in JavaScript now. Markup? JavaScript. Anything else? JavaScript.

Historically, different languages suggested different roles. “This language does style.” “This language does structure.” But now it’s “This JavaScript does style.” “This JavaScript does structure.” “This JavaScript does database queries.”

Introducing Background Fetch | Web | Google Developers

I’m going to have to read through this article by Jake a few times before I begin to wrap my head around this background fetch thing, but it looks like it would be perfect for something like the dConstruct Audio Archive, where fairly large files can be saved for offline listening.

Going Offline First (Video Series)

A five-part video series from Ire on how she built the “save for offline” functionality on her site.

The first one is about getting a set set up on Ghost so you can probably safely skip that one and go straight to the second video to get down to the nitty-gritty of the Cache API and service workers.

Mistletoe Offline ◆ 24 ways

They let me write a 24 Ways article again. Will they never learn?

This one’s a whirlwind tour of using a service worker to provide a custom offline page, in the style of Going Offline.

By the way, just for the record, I initially rejected this article’s title out of concern that injecting a Cliff Richard song into people’s brains was cruel and unusual punishment. I was overruled.

Reluctant Gatekeeping: The Problem With Full Stack | HeydonWorks

The value you want form a CSS expert is their CSS, not their JavaScript, so it’s absurd to make JavaScript a requirement.

Absolutely spot on! And it cuts both ways:

Put CSS in JS and anyone who wishes to write CSS now has to know JavaScript. Not just JavaScript, but —most likely—the specific ‘flavor’ of JavaScript called React. That’s gatekeeping, first of all, but the worst part is the JavaScript aficionado didn’t want CSS on their plate in the first place.

Just markup | justmarkup

Telling other people working on the web and doing a great job building web sites that they are useless because they focus on HTML and CSS is very wrong.

Front-end development is not a problem to be solved | CSS-Tricks

The sentiment is that front-end development is a problem to be solved: “if we just have the right tools and frameworks, then we might never have to write another line of HTML or CSS ever again!” And oh boy what a dream that would be, right?

Well, no, actually. I certainly don’t think that front-end development is a problem at all.

What Robin said.

I reckon HTML and CSS deserve better than to be processed, compiled, and spat out into the browser, whether that’s through some build process, app export, or gigantic framework library of stuff that we half understand. HTML and CSS are two languages that deserve our care and attention to detail. Writing them is a skill.

PushAPI without Notifications | Seblog

Remember when I wrote about using push without notifications? Sebastiaan has written up the details of the experiment he conducted at Indie Web Camp Berlin.

When to use CSS vs. JavaScript | Go Make Things

Chris Ferdinandi has a good rule of thumb:

If something I want to do with JavaScript can be done with CSS instead, use CSS.

Makes sense, given their differing error-handling models:

A JavaScript error can bring all of the JS on a page to screeching halt. Mistype a CSS property or miss a semicolon? The browser just skips the property and moves on. Use an unsupported feature? Same thing.

But he also cautions against going too far with CSS. Anything to do with state should be done with JavaScript:

If the item requires interaction from the user, use JavaScript (things like hovering, focusing, clicking, etc.).

‘Sfunny; I remember when we got pseudo-classes, I wrote a somewhat tongue-in-cheek post called :hover Considered Harmful:

Presentation and behaviour… the twain have met, the waters are muddied, the issues are confused.

Responsive Images on the Apple Watch — ericportis.com

Some tips for getting responsive images to work well on the Apple Watch:

test your layouts down to 136-px wide

include 300w-ish resources in your full-width img’s srcsets

art direct to keep image subjects legible

say the magic meta words

Web workers vs Service workers vs Worklets

A great primer by Ire:

Web workers, service workers, and worklets are all scripts that run on a separate thread. So what are the differences between these three types of workers?

Push and ye shall receive | CSS-Tricks

Imagine a PWA podcast app that works offline and silently receives and caches new podcasts. Sweet. Now we need a permissions model that allows for silent notifications.

Tags: frontend

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