Hey,
Doing things right isn’t always easy but I’m glad we constantly get new features and tools that allow us to improve our solutions and to let people get a better experience. Whether it’s new tools and concepts how to integrate accessibility into the project planning and not handling it as an after-thought or an article how to properly design and build a site search. Let it be the ability to define a native base element for your Custom Elements with the is="" attribute, or a nice, seamless progressive image loader with modern JavaScript APIs and SVG tools, or a overscroll CSS property that makes it quite easy to build a “pull to refresh” functionality on the web. we can progressively enhance more and more things and the benefit is that we can use the latest technology, serve the best performance and experience to our users without breaking it for other people whose tools don’t support a feature.
News
- Chrome 63 is out now and brings us awesome stuff: Dynamic JavaScript modules are publicly available now,
asynciterators and generators, CSSoverscroll-behaviorallows pull to refresh natively, and big changes to the Permissions UI which now asks for permission in a modal to make clear that site owners should only ask for additional permissions when necessary and useful. Lastly, theIntl.PluralRulesAPI is also included in this version.
UI/UX
- John Moore Williams shares the best practices for site search design that are important if you want to provide an impactful, powerful search experience to your users.
Security
- It’s a common misconception that by using a CAPTCHA a CSRF attack can be prevented. Here’s Linus Särud explaining why this doesn’t work.
Web Performance
- Peter Hedenskog wrote up how we can automate web performance regression alerts using WebPagetTest and Grafana dashboard alerts.
- Dean Hume explores pretty interesting paths how to load images progressively using Intersection Observers and SQIP, a tool that builds SVG-based image placeholders automatically.
Accessibility
- Melanie Myers shares her own misconceptions about accessible web design and how she learned to integrate it into her everyday work.
JavaScript
- Jake Archibald explains the subtle but vital difference between
awaitvsreturnvsreturn awaitand gives advice when to use which one. - Brian Kardell wrote an important post about how we soon can use Custom Elements as extension of a common native element. This is especially great as we then don’t need to build everything from scratch but can extend native elements with customizations and still have the full accessibility and usability inherited from the native element. Apart from that, this feature allows to build great progressively enhances Custom Elements.
Work & Life
- Noah Lorang shares why he wants to run a small business on the side of his main job. By day he works in the web industry, but by night he crafts wooden topographic maps for people and sells them. It’s his passion to build maps out of wood and he explains why it matters a lot to him to do something different which he believes in to be good at his main job.
Go beyond…
- James Clear explains why life always seems to get more complicated and what we can do to not feel overwhelmed by this feeling.
Anselm