Link tags: frontend

Will Serving Real HTML Content Make A Website Faster? Let’s Experiment! - WebPageTest Blog

Spoiler: the answer to the question in the title is a resounding “hell yeah!”

Scott brings receipts.

Remix Icon - Open source icon library

I love how easy it is to use these icons: you can copy and paste the SVG or even get it encoded as a data URL.

Web UI Engineering Book - toheeb.com

I like the way this work-in-progress is organised—it’s both a book and a personal website that’ll grow over time.

CSS { In Real Life } | Web Sustainability and the Ethical Dilemma

But is it always the case that faster websites are greener websites? We reluctantly have to consider another facet: if making a website for a car manufacturer faster leads to an increase in the number of cars sold, can we really say that our website is greener?

This is very timely for me, given that Clearleft is currently engaged on a project that’s making me decidedly queasy for this exact reason—the success metrics of the project would be net negative for the world.

A long-term plan for logical properties? | Miriam Eric Suzanne

Well, now I’m really glad I wrote that post about logical properties!

We’re not there yet. So how do we get there?

Well, I don’t know for sure – but articles like this are very helpful as we try to work it out!

The self-fulfilling prophecy of React - Josh Collinsworth blog

Matcalfe’s Law in action:

Companies keep choosing React because they know there’s a massive pool of candidates who know it; candidates keep learning React because they know companies are hiring for it. It’s a self-sustaining cycle.

But the problem is:

React isn’t great at anything except being popular.

Giving your future self a little credit with progressive enhancement - Blog - Pixo | Apps, websites, and software development

We often talk about technical debt — the costs we’ll need to pay in the future when we make short-term compromises. Progressive enhancement is the opposite of that — a sort of technical credit that will make things easier for us in the future.

A good explanation of how progressive enhancement works perfectly with the idea of a minimal viable product:

We focus first on a core experience that delivers what your users are looking for, and then we start adding enhancements that will delight them.

How To Improve Largest Contentful Paint for Faster Load Times - Calibre

A no-nonsense checklist of good performance advice from Karolina.

as days pass by — Farmbound, or how I built an app in 2022

Stuart writes up the process up making a mobile game as a web app—not a native app. The Wordle effect reverberates.

It’s a web app. Works for everyone. And I thought it would be useful to explain why it is, why I think that’s the way to do things, and some of the interesting parts of building an app for everyone to play which is delivered over the web rather than via app stores and downloads.

TIL: You Can Access A User’s Camera with Just HTML

The capture attribute is pretty nifty—and I just love that you get so much power in a declarative way:

<input type="file" accept="image/*" capture="environment">

Why your website should work without Javascript. | endtimes.dev

The obvious answer to why you should build a website that doesn’t need js is… because some people don’t use js. But how many?!

Complex conditional width using flex-basis with clamp: Every Layout

Okay, combining flex-basis and clamp() is pretty cool!

Bring Focus to the First Form Field with an Error :: Aaron Gustafson

A handy little script from Aaron to improve the form validation experience.

html energy

Can you feel the energy?

Lean Web Club

New from Mr. Vanilla JS himself, Chris Ferdinandi:

A learning space for people who hate the complexity of modern web development.

It’ll be $29 a month or $299 a year (giving you two months worth for free).

Using :has() as a CSS Parent Selector and much more | WebKit

A terrific tour of just some of the fantastic ways you can use :has() in CSS.

The section on using it with sibling selectors blew my mind:

How often have you wanted to adjust the margins on a headline based on the element following it? Now it’s easy. This code allows us to select any h2 with a p immediately after it.

h2:has(+ p) { margin-bottom: 0; }

Amazing.

The web is a harsh manager - daverupert.com

Dave laments the increasing number of complex jobs involved in front-end (or “full-stack”) development.

But whereas I would just leave at that, Dave does something constructive and points to a potential solution—a corresponding increase of more thinsliced full-time roles like design engineering, front-end ops, and CSS engineering.

system.css | A design system for building retro Apple-inspired interfaces

A stylesheet for when you’re nostalgic for the old Mac OS.

The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance - Inside GOV.UK

Following on from that excellent blog post about removing jQuery from gov.uk, here are the performance improvements in charts and numbers.

It may sound like 32 kb of JavaScript is nothing on today’s modern web with quick devices and fast broadband connections. But for a certain cohort of users, it makes a big difference to how they experience GOV.UK.

How and why we removed jQuery from GOV.UK - Inside GOV.UK

This is a great thorough description of the process of migrating gov.uk away from jQuery. It sounds like this guide was instrumental in the process—I love that they’re sharing it openly!

Removing jQuery means that 32Kb of JavaScript has been removed from the majority of pages on GOV.UK. GOV.UK is already quite fast to load and for many users this will make no noticeable difference. However, the change for users on a low bandwidth connection or lower specification device will be much more noticeable, resulting in significantly improved page download speed and performance.