Elsewhere
Things we find interesting we think you might too. Grab the RSS feed for your newsreader of choice.
PWAs: Past, Present, Future
September 5, 2024
The first working draft of HTML5, then known as Web Applications 1.0, was released on September 1, 2005. For context, that’s almost 18 months before the first iPhone was released, over 3 years be...
Read MoreThe Ultimate Guide to Font Performance Optimization
September 5, 2024
Optimizing the fonts displayed on your website comes with many web performance advantages, including faster page load times, improved user experience, and better results for Core Web Vitals and other ...
Read MoreCaptured Custom Properties — Roma’s Unpolished Posts
September 4, 2024
Registered custom properties are invaluable, as they unlock many things previously not possible.Among other use cases (I recommend reading the Providing Type Definitions for CSS with @property artic...
Read MoreIs AI a Silver Bullet?
September 3, 2024
Like previous attempts to find a silver bullet such as 4GLs, it does not seem likely that LLMs as a software authoring tool will be succeed. In particular, like 4GLs they suffer from the problem that ...
Read MoreThe Death of the Junior Developer
September 3, 2024
I have been chatting with a bunch of both junior and senior developer-type folk at different companies lately. By cross-barfticulating these conversations I’ve picked up on an emerging new patte...
Read MoreCSS finally adds vertical centering in 2024
September 3, 2024
The status quo for CSS alignment is to switch to flexbox or grid because align-content doesn’t work in the default layout (flow). In 2024, browsers have implemented align-content for flow layout. Th...
Read MoreThe web’s clipboard, and how it stores data of different types
September 3, 2024
If you’ve been using computers for a while, you probably know that the clipboard can store multiple types of data (images, rich text content, files, and so on). As a software developer, it start...
Read MoreThe death of the [modified] developer – by Forrest Brazeal
September 3, 2024
I think that AI has killed, or is about to kill, pretty much every single modifier we want to put in front of the word “developer.”“.NET developer”? Meaningless. Copilot, Cursor, etc can get a...
Read MoreSemi-Annual Reminder to Learn and Hire for Web Standards
September 3, 2024
Alex Russell wrote a four-part series a couple weeks ago arguing that modern JavaScript-first framework-focused front-end development is costing the industry and users. Part of his conclusion for orga...
Read MoreParagraphs
September 2, 2024
In HTML there is the the p element, which is the element you use if you want to explicitly markup text and other phrasing conetnt as a paragraph. But also in HTML, there is the more general concept/de...
Read MoreWeb Components
September 2, 2024
Web Components are a polarizing feature that seem simultaneously old news and not quite ready for production yet. But we’ve been making things with Web Components, and finding some areas where they ...
Read MoreA Quick Look at AI in Chrome
August 30, 2024
Google announced a while back their intent to experiment with generative AI in the browser itself. Personally, I think this could be a really good idea, but I’m really unsure as to how many othe...
Read MoreJavaScript Generators Explained, But On A Senior-Level
August 30, 2024
Generators are most commonly seen in sagas, but there are more use cases for them. You’re going to see some of them in this article. The short answer to the question “What is a generator?&...
Read MoreCommon misconceptions about how to optimize LCP
August 29, 2024
The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) of a page can be complicated to improve, often involving multiple moving parts and tradeoffs. This post looks at field data from real page loads across the web to de...
Read MoreHow to make your web page faster before it even loads
August 29, 2024
As developers (and as front end developers in particular), we usually talk about web performance in the context of measuring what happens when we start to see things appear in a browser window, and wh...
Read MoreAssessing components and patterns for WCAG 2.2
August 27, 2024
Version 2.2 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, released in October 2023, introduces six new requirements at the A/AA level. Jess Lin and I created the following decision trees to help you qu...
Read MoreWhat RSS Needs
August 26, 2024
It’s also a good time to revitalise feeds. When Google killed Reader years ago, no one questioned their right to do so, even if we grumbled about it. Now, however, regulators are much more aware of ...
Read MoreRegexes Got Good: The History And Future Of Regular Expressions In JavaScript
August 22, 2024
In this article, I’ll recount the history of improvements to JavaScript regexes (spoiler: ES2018 and ES2024 changed the game), show examples of modern regex features in action, introduce you to a li...
Read MoreThe CSS contain property – Frontend Masters Boost
August 22, 2024
The purpose of CSS’ contain property (“CSS containment”) is twofold: Optimization Styling possibilities When we apply contain to an element we’re isolating it (and it’s descendents) fr...
Read More50 years ago, CP/M started the microcomputer revolution
August 21, 2024
Late in the summer of 1974, CP/M first started running on hardware. It became one of the first cross-platform microcomputer OSes, and revolutionized the hardware and software industries. Source: 50 ye...
Read MoreCommon Causes of Memory Leaks in JavaScript | Trevor Indrek Lasn
August 20, 2024
Memory leaks are a silent threat that gradually degrades performance, leads to crashes, and increases operational costs. Unlike obvious bugs, memory leaks are often subtle and difficult to spot until ...
Read MorePatterns for Memory Efficient DOM Manipulation with Modern Vanilla JavaScript
August 19, 2024
As an industry, we’ve offloaded most of this direct rendering to frameworks. All JavaScript frameworks (React, Angular, Vue, Svelte, etc) use these APIs under the hood. While I recognize that the pr...
Read MoreSonos considers relaunching its old app
August 19, 2024
Sonos has explored the possibility of rereleasing its previous mobile app for Android and iOS — a clear sign of what an ordeal the company’s hurried redesign has become. The Verge can report that ...
Read MoreReckoning: Part 3 — Caprock – Infrequently Noted
August 19, 2024
JavaScript-based UIs are fundamentally more challenging to own and operate because the limiting factors on their success are outside the data center and not under the control of procuring teams. The s...
Read More