Link tags: source

12 Days of Web

All twelve are out, and all twelve are excellent deep dives into exciting web technologies landing in browsers now.

Mona Sans & Hubot Sans

Two new lovely open source variable fonts from Github.

An Interactive Guide to Flexbox in CSS

This is a superb explanation of flexbox—the interactive widgets sprinkled throughout are such a great aid to learning!

The Thorny Problem of Keeping the Internet’s Time | The New Yorker

This story of the Network Time Protocol hammers home the importance of infrastructure and its maintenance:

Technology companies worth billions rely on open-source code, including N.T.P., and the maintenance of that code is often handled by a small group of individuals toiling away without pay.

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.

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).

Color and Contrast.com

A lovely website (or web book?) dedicated entirely to colour contrast, complete with interactive illustrative widgets.

A comprehensive guide for exploring and learning about the theory, science, and perception of color and contrast.

Canned web development — Jeremy Wagner

Our mental model for how we build for the web is too reliant on canned solutions to unique problems.

This is very perceptive indeed.

Compounding this problem is that too few boot camps are preparing new web developers to think critically about what problems are best solved by JavaScript and which aren’t — and that those problems that are best solved by JavaScript can be solved without engaging in frivolous framework whataboutism. The question developers should ask more often when grappling with framework shortcomings shouldn’t be “what about that other framework?”, but rather “what’s best for the user experience?”.

Start at the beginning: the importance of learning the basics - localghost

I’d recommend going in the order HTML, CSS, JS. That way, you can build something in HTML, add CSS to it as you learn it, and finally soup it up with your new-found JS knowledge.

Excellent advice for anyone new to web develoment.

Once you start getting into interactive website territory, with API calls and fancy stuff, that’s where you need JavaScript (JS) knowledge. More specifically, vanilla JS: plain JS with no additional frameworks or plugins. The JS that your browser understands without having to do any pre-processing. It makes working with frameworks a whole lot easier, and it’ll help you to know when not to use a framework (and avoid making users download massive JS bundles when all you need is a tiny bit of code).

Manrope – free sans-serif variable font

This font is a crossover of different font types: it is semi-condensed, semi-rounded, semi-geometric, semi-din, semi-grotesque. It employs minimal stoke thickness variations and a semi-closed aperture.

Can I include a tag to a tag? Based on HTML Spec WHATWG

A neat little tool when you need a reminder about what elements can go in other elements.

Tiny Helpers

A very comprehensive collection of standalone little tools for web design and development—tools that do one thing.

Learn CSS

This is a great (free!) course on learning CSS from the basics up. Nicely-pitched explanations with plenty of examples.

Library: Accessibility resources, guides, communities, and more

A very comprehensive directory of accessibility resources.

A Complete Guide To Accessible Front-End Components — Smashing Magazine

Vitaly has rounded up a whole load of accessibility posts. I think I’ve linked to most of them at some point, but it’s great to have them all gathered together in one place.

Responsible Web Applications

An excellent collection of advice and examples for making websites responsive and accessibile (responsive + accessible = responsible).

The Long Now Foundation: “Nadia Eghbal Talk”

This is a great talk by Nadia Eghbal on software, open source, maintenance, and of course, long-term thinking.

Operator Lookup - Search JavaScript operators · Josh W Comeau

Operators in JavaScript—handy! I didn’t know about most of these.

Copying is the way design works || Matthew Ström: designer & developer

A people’s history of copying, from art to software.

Designers copy. We steal like great artists. But when we see a copy of our work, we’re livid.

AddyOsmani.com - Preload late-discovered Hero images faster

Did you know there’s an imagesrcset attribute you can put on link rel="preload" as="image" (along with an imagesizes attribute)?

I didn’t. (Until Amber pointed this out.)