Hey,
This week I’m going to focus on some less known things, such as numerals in web typography, variable fonts, or the image async attribute that’s coming up to Chrome soon.
On a personal note: I’m going to recharge my batteries from all the exhausting months this year and will be on vacation for the next fourteen days so the next edition will be published again in about three weeks. It’s going to be an interesting time with the launch of a project I’ve worked on over the past year, for which I’ll need my full energy. Read you soon!
UI/UX
- The Inter UI font family is a nice, completely free to use open source font family optimized for screen readability.
Tooling
- Webpackmonitor is a nice dashboard for your JavaScript toolchain. The dashboard gives insights into bundle size, the individual parts of it and how the bundle and its size changes over time. With the useful hints on how to optimize the output, this dashboard is quite useful if you care about reducing the payload for users on your website.
Web Performance
- Chrome is implementing an
asyncattribute for HTMLImageElement and SVGImageElement. It’ll have one of two states: “on” will indicate that the developer prefers responsiveness and performance over atomic presentation of image and non-image content, while “off” will indicate that the developer prefers atomic presentation of content over responsiveness. - Alexey Ivanov shares how to optimize web servers for high throughput and low latency. But please note: They’re small fine tuning methods that can be very useful but we should apply them one after another, measure them and then decide for the project if it’s useful or not. A thoughtful post that gives us insights into how the Dropbox team improves their edge network servers.
CSS
- Richard Rutter wrote a guide how we can use old-style numerals on the web by using the
font-variant-numericCSS property, if available. As bonus points, proper sub- and superscripts are explained as well and we can learn when to use which feature for a specific purpose.
Go beyond…
- It’s a common question that I (most likely among many others) asked myself quite often in the past that now has been answered by researchers: Electric cars emit significantly less greenhouse gases over their lifetimes than diesel engines even when they are powered by the most carbon intensive energy, a new report has found.
- The chatbot called DoNotPay has saved motorists millions in parking fines—without charging a cent. It’s next target: divorce law. Following targets are also airlines, landlords and telemarketers—company types most human beings face money issues with in their lives.
Anselm