Adactio: Links—Tagged with frontend

Thinking about the past, present, and future of web development – Baldur Bjarnason

The divide between what you read in developer social media and what you see on web dev websites, blogs, and actual practice has never in my recollection been this wide. I’ve never before seen web dev social media and forum discourse so dominated by the US west coast enterprise tech company bubble, and I’ve been doing this for a couple of decades now.

Baldur is really feeling the dev perception.

Web dev driven by npm packages, frameworks, and bundling is to the field of web design what Java and C# in 2010s was to web servers. If you work in enterprise software it’s all you can see. Web developers working on CMS themes (or on Rails-based projects) using jQuery and plain old JS—maybe with a couple of libraries imported directly via a script tag—are the unseen dark matter of the web dev community.

Smaller HTML Payloads with Service Workers — Philip Walton

This is a great progressive enhancement for performance that uses a service worker to combine reusable bits of a page with fresh content. The numbers are very convincing!

Alas, the code is using the Workbox library, but figuring out the vanilla code to write shouldn’t be too tricky seeing as Philip talks through his logic step by step.

Adding Response Metadata to Cache API Explainer by Aaron Gustafson and Jungkee Song

This is a great proposal that would make the Cache API even more powerful by adding metadata to cached items, like when it was cached, how big it is, and how many times it’s been retrieved.

[css-grid-2] Masonry layout · Issue #4650 · w3c/csswg-drafts

This is an interesting looking proposal for CSS grid to be ever so slightly extended to enable Masonry-style auto placement—something’s that tantalisingly close right now, but still requires some JavaScript to do calculations.

Making a ‘post-it game’ PWA with mobile accelerometer API’s | Trys Mudford

I made an offhand remark at the Clearleft Christmas party and Trys ran with it…

How creating a Progressive Web App has made our website better for people and planet

Creating a PWA has saved a lot of kilobytes after the initial load by storing files on the device to reuse on subsequent requests – this in turn lowers the load time and carbon footprint on subsequent page views, making the website better for both people and planet. We’ve also enabled offline access, which significantly improves user experience for people in areas with patchy connections, such as mobile users on their commute.

Move Fast & Don’t Break Things | Filament Group, Inc.

This is the transcript of a brilliant presentation by Scott—read the whole thing! It starts with a much-needed history lesson that gets to where we are now with the dismal state of performance on the web, and then gives a whole truckload of handy tips and tricks for improving performance when it comes to styles, scripts, images, fonts, and just about everything on the front end.

Essential!

This Page is Designed to Last: A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web

Geocities, LiveJournal, what.cd, now Yahoo Groups. One day, Medium, Twitter, and even hosting services like GitHub Pages will be plundered then discarded when they can no longer grow or cannot find a working business model.

Considering the needs of someone who wants to make and maintain a website, without the ridiculous complexity of “modern” web tooling:

How do we make web content that can last and be maintained for at least 10 years? As someone studying human-computer interaction, I naturally think of the stakeholders we aren’t supporting. Right now putting up web content is optimized for either the professional web developer (who use the latest frameworks and workflows) or the non-tech savvy user (who use a platform).

The Origin Story of Container Queries—zachleat.com

Everyone wants it, but it sure seems like no one is actively working on it.

Zach traces the earliest inklings of container queries to an old blog post of Andy’s—back when he was at Clearleft—called Responsive Containers:

For fun, here’s some made-up syntax (which Jeremy has dubbed ‘selector queries’)…

Why `details` is Not an Accordion - daverupert.com

At the risk of being a broken record; HTML really needs <accordion> , <tabs>, <dialog>, <dropdown>, and <tooltip> elements. Not more “low-level primitives” but good ol’ fashioned, difficult-to-get-consensus-on elements.

Hear, hear!

I wish browsers would prioritize accessibility improvements over things like main thread scheduling optimization to unblock tracking pixels and the Sisyphean task of competing with native.

If we really want to win, let’s make it easy for everyone to access the Web.

How readable—Findings

The results are in for Daniel van Berzon’s most recent experiment into accurately measuring code readability. You can read the results and read about the methodology behind them.

Basil: Secret Santa as a Service | Trys Mudford

Trys writes up the process—and the tech (JAM)stack—he used to build basil.christmas.

Level of Effort | Brad Frost

Brad gets ranty …with good reason.

I <3 the cascade! | Go Make Things

Chris makes the valid observation that JavaScript programmers who bemoan the “global scope” of CSS are handily forgetting that JavaScript also has global scope by default.

JS is also global by default. We use IIFEs and wrapper functions to add scope.

And for all this talk about CSS being global, you can actually scope styles when you need to. It’s more-or-less the same way you do it in JavaScript.

Motion Paths - Past, Present and Future | Codrops

This is superbly in-depth and easy-to-follow article from Cassie—everything you need to know about motion paths in SVG and CSS! It’s worth reading just for the wonderful examples.

Music and Web Design | Brad Frost

I feel my trajectory as a musician maps to the trajectory of the web industry. The web is still young. We’re all still figuring stuff out and we’re all eager to get better. In our eagerness to get better, we’re reaching for more complexity. More complex abstractions, build processes, and tools. Because who wants to be bored playing in 4/4 when you can be playing in 7/16?

I hope we in the web field will arrive at the same realization that I did as a musician: complexity is not synonymous with quality.

Can I get an “Amen!”?

Episode 226 – Create Your Own Website Write about What You Discover and Be Dependable with Jeremy Keith – IT Career Energizer

This was a really fun podcast chat—nice and snappy at just 20 minutes.

Huffduff it.

Link tags: frontend

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