Link tags: frontend

In a Land Before Dev Tools | Amber’s Website

A great little history lesson from Amber—ah, Firebug!

The amazing power of service workers | Go Make Things

So, why would you want to use a service worker? Here are some cool things you can do with it.

Chris lists some of the ways a service worker can enhance user experience.

this vs that - What is the difference between ___ and ___ in the front-end development?

A handy reference for explaining the differences between confusingly similar bits of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Smashing Podcast Episode 21 With Chris Ferdinandi: Are Modern Best Practices Bad For The Web? — Smashing Magazine

I really enjoyed this interview between Drew and Chris. I love that there’s a transcript so you can read the whole thing if you don’t feel like huffduffing it.

Recreating Wildlife Photographer of the Year online – part 1 – Introduction and technical approach – Blogs from the Natural History Museum

You’ve seen the Wildlife Photographer Of The Year project from Clearleft’s viewpoint …and you’ve listened to the podcast episode, right?

Now here’s the story from the team that made the website. It’s a great walkthrough of thoughtfully evaluating technologies to figure out the best approach.

On the origin of cascades

This is a great talk by Hidde, looking at the history and evolution of cascading style sheets. Right up my alley!

Lateral Thinking With Withered Technology · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

What web development can learn from the Nintendo Game and Watch.

The Web now consists of an ever-growing number of different frameworks, methodologies, screen sizes, devices, browsers, and connection speeds. “Lateral thinking with withered technology” – progressively enhanced – might actually be an ideal philosophy for building accessible, performant, resilient, and original experiences for a wide audience of users on the Web.

Pausing a GIF with details/summary | CSS-Tricks

This is such a clever and useful technique! It’s HTML+CSS only, and it’s a far less annoying way to display animated GIFs.

(Does anybody even qualify the word GIF with the adjective “animated” anymore? Does anyone know that there used to be such a thing as non-animated GIFs and that they were everywhere?)

Progressive · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

Progressive enhancement is not yet another technology or passing fad. It is a lasting strategy, a principle, to deal with complexity because it lets you build inclusive, resilient experiences that work across different contexts and that will continue to work, once the next fancy JavaScript framework enters the scene – and vanishes again.

But why don’t more people practice progressive enhancement? Is it only because they don’t know better? This might, in fact, be the primary reason. On top of that, especially many JavaScript developers seem to believe that it is not possible or necessary to build modern websites and applications that way.

A heartfelt look at progressive enhancement:

Some look at progressive enhancement like a thing from the past of which the old guard just can’t let go. But to me, progressive enhancement is the future of the Web. It is the basis for building resilient, performant, interoperable, secure, usable, accessible, and thus inclusive experiences. Not only for the Web of today but for the ever-growing complexity of an ever-changing and ever-evolving Web.

MSEdgeExplainers/explainer.md at main · MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers

This is great! Ideas for allowing more styling of form controls. I agree with the goals 100% and I like the look of the proposed solutions too.

The team behind this are looking for feedback so be sure to share your thoughts (I’ll probably formulate mine into a blog post).

Custom Property Coverup | Amber’s Website

This is a great bit of detective work by Amber! It’s the puzzling case of The Browser Dev Tools and the Missing Computed Values from Custom Properties.

Who do I know working on dev tools for Chrome, Firefox, or Safari that can help Amber find an answer to this mystery?

CSS Vocabulary

This is a nifty visual interactive explainer for the language of CSS—could be very handy for Codebar students.

CSS photo effects - a Collection by Lynn Fisher on CodePen

These wonderfully realistic photo effects from Lynn are quite lovely!

Indexing your offline-capable pages with the Content Indexing API

A Chrome-only API for adding offline content to an index that can be exposed in Android’s “downloads” list. It just shipped in the lastest version of Chrome.

I’m not a fan of browser-specific non-standards but you can treat this as an enhancement—implementing it doesn’t harm non-supporting browsers and you can use feature detection to test for it.

Works offline

How do we tell our visitors our sites work offline? How do we tell our visitors that they don’t need an app because it’s no more capable than the URL they’re on right now?

Remy expands on his call for ideas on branding websites that work offline with a universal symbol, along the lines of what we had with RSS.

What I’d personally like to see as an outcome: some simple iconography that I can use on my own site and other projects that can offer ambient badging to reassure my visitor that the URL they’re visiting will work offline.

An Introduction To Stimulus.js — Smashing Magazine

An intro to Stimulus, the lightweight JavaScript library from Basecamp that takes a progressive enhancement approach, as seen with HEY.

One aspect I really like about the approach Stimulus encourages, is I can focus on sending HTML down the wire to my users, which is then jazzed up a little with JavaScript.

I’ve always been a fan of using the first few milliseconds of a user’s attention getting what I have to share with them — in front of them. Then worrying setting up the interaction layer while the user can start processing what they’re seeing.

Furthermore, if the JavaScript were to fail for whatever reason, the user can still see the content and interact with it without JavaScript.

Your blog doesn’t need a JavaScript framework /// Iain Bean

If the browser needs to parse 296kb of JavaScript to show a list of blog posts, that’s not Progressive Enhancement, it’s using the wrong tool for the job.

A good explanation of the hydration problem in tools like Gatsby.

JavaScript is a powerful language that can do some incredible things, but it’s incredibly easy to jump to using it too early in development, when you could be using HTML and CSS instead.

A little bit of plain Javascript can do a lot

I decided to implement almost all of the UI by just adding & removing CSS classes, and using CSS transitions if I want to animate a transition.

Yup. It’s remarkable how much can be accomplished with that one DOM scripting pattern.

I was pretty surprised by how much I could get done with just plain JS. I ended up writing about 50 lines of JS to do everything I wanted to do.

What is CSS Specificity? Sarah Chima - Front-End Developer

An excellent and clear explanation of specificity in CSS.

We need more inclusive web performance metrics | Filament Group, Inc.

Good point. When we talk about perceived performance, the perception in question is almost always visual. We should think more inclusively than that.