Tags: frontend

Paris Web 2019 - 10 octobre après-midi - Amphithéâtre - YouTube

Here’s the livestream of the talk I gave at Paris Web—Going Offline, complete with French live-captioning and simultaneous interpretation in .

The “P” in Progressive Enhancement stands for “Pragmatism” - Andy Bell

With a Progressive Enhancement mindset, support actually means support. We’re not trying to create an identical experience: we’re creating a viable experience instead.

Also with Progressive Enhancement, it’s incredibly likely that your IE11 user, or your user on a low-powered device, or even your user on a poor connection won’t notice that they’re experiencing a “minor” experience because it’ll just work for them. This is the magic, right there. Everyone’s a winner.

You really don’t need all that JavaScript, I promise

The transcript of a fantastic talk by Stuart. The latter half is a demo of Portals, but in the early part of the talk, he absolutely nails the rise in popularity of complex front-end frameworks:

I think the reason people started inventing client-side frameworks is this: that you lose control when you load another page. You click on a link, you say to the browser: navigate to here. And that’s it; it’s now out of your hands and in the browser’s hands. And then the browser gives you back control when the new page loads.

How to be a more productive developer | Go Make Things

Like Michael Pollan’s food rules, but for JavaScript:

1. Plan your scripts out on paper.
2. Stop obsessing over tools.
3. Focus on solving problems.
4. Maintain a library of snippets that you can reuse.

do you know your tags?

Test your knowledge of the original version of HTML—how many elements can you name?

Designing a focus style | Zell Liew

A deep dive info focus styles with this conclusion:

The default focus ring works. There are problems with it, but it can be good enough, especially if you can’t dedicate time and energy to create a custom focus ring.

Why Progressive Web Apps Are The Future of Mobile Web [2019 Research]

PWAs just work better than your typical mobile site. Period.

But bear in mind:

Maybe simply because the “A” in PWA stands for “app,” too much discussion around PWAs focuses on comparing and contrasting to native mobile applications. We believe this comparison (and the accompanying discussion) is misguided.

A Modern CSS Reset - Andy Bell

Some very smart ideas in here for resetting default browser styles, like only resetting lists that have classes applied to them:

ul[class],
ol[class] {
  padding: 0;
}

I select only lists that do have a class attribute because if a plain ol’ <ul> or <ol> gets used, I want it to look like a list. A lot of resets, including my previous ones, aggressively remove that.

Blog service workers and the chicken and the egg

This is a great little technique from Remy: when a service worker is being installed, you make sure that the page(s) the user is first visiting get added to a cache.

The perfect responsive menu (2019) | Polypane responsive browser

I don’t know about “perfect” but this pretty much matches how I go about implementing responsive navigation (but only if there are too many links to show—visible navigation is almost always preferable).

An HTML attribute potentially worth $4.4M to Chipotle - Cloud Four

When I liveblogged Jason’s talk at An Event Apart in Chicago, I included this bit of reporting:

Jason proceeds to relate a long and involved story about buying burritos online from Chipotle.

Well, here is that story. It’s a good one, with some practical takeaways (if you’ll pardon the pun):

1. Use HTML5 input features
2. Support autofill
3. Make autofill part of your test plans

Keeping it simple with CSS that scales - Andy Bell

The transcript of Andy’s talk from this year’s State Of The Browser conference.

I don’t think using scale as an excuse for over-engineering stuff—especially CSS—is acceptable, even for huge teams that work on huge products.

NoJS Side-by-Side

Drag this to your browser’s bookmark bar now!

Such a useful quick check for resilience—this bookmarklet shows you a side-by-side comparison of a site with JavaScript enabled and disabled.

The Book | The Lean Web

This is such a great little web book from Chris Ferdinandi that you can read online for free.

1. Intro
2. Modern Best Practices
3. How did we get here?
4. Lean Web Principles
5. What now?

5G Will Definitely Make the Web Slower, Maybe | Filament Group, Inc.

The Jevons Paradox in action:

Faster networks should fix our performance problems, but so far, they have had an interesting if unintentional impact on the web. This is because historically, faster network speed has enabled developers to deliver more code to users—in particular, more JavaScript code.

And because it’s JavaScript we’re talking about:

Even if folks are on a new fast network, they’re very likely choking on the code we’re sending, rendering the potential speed improvements of 5G moot.

The longer I spend in this field, the more convinced I am that web performance is not a technical problem; it’s a people problem.

Simplicity (II)

When you ever had to fix just a few lines of CSS and it took two hours to get an ancient version of Gulp up and running, you know what I’m talking about.

I feel seen.

When everything works, it feels like magic. When something breaks, it’s hell.

I concur with Bastian’s advice:

I have a simple rule of thumb when it comes to programming:

less code === less potential issues

And this observation rings very true:

This dependency hell is also the reason why old projects are almost like sealed capsules. You can hardly let a project lie around for more than a year, because afterwards it’s probably broken.

Offline listings

This is brilliant technique by Remy!

If you’ve got a custom offline page that lists previously-visited pages (like I do on my site), you don’t have to choose between localStorage or IndexedDB—you can read the metadata straight from the HTML of the cached pages instead!

This seems forehead-smackingly obvious in hindsight. I’m totally stealing this.

How Web Content Can Affect Power Usage | WebKit

The way you build web pages—using IntersectionObserver, for example—can have a direct effect on the climate emergency.

Webpages can be good citizens of battery life.

It’s important to measure the battery impact in Web Inspector and drive those costs down.

CSS { In Real Life } | How to Accessibly Split Text

This is why we need an nth-letter selector in CSS .

PWA asset generator based on Puppeteer.

Automatically generates icons and splash screens based on Web App Manifest specs and Apple Human Interface Guidelines. Updates manifest.json and index.html files with the generated images.

A handy command line tool. Though be aware that it will generate the shit-ton of link elements for splash screens that Apple demands you provide for a multitude of different screen sizes.