Hey,
Personally, the last weeks have been not very easy and I’m not yet clear whether to share the reasons for this publicly or not but I’m slowly getting back to work again and found out that things are in change again. It’s not only that I found a lot of new tools, new thoughts about distributed networks like Mastodon but also that Google is discussing how to change or deprecate the URL and they’re already experimenting with this, resulting in a heated debate between them and developers who see a lot of issues with their approaches. On the other hand, the browser vendors also implement cool stuff so we can now use Variable Web Fonts in all browsers and get new JavaScript APIs in nearly every release. This is so cool and I can’t wait to give CSS Shapes another try once Microsoft Edge has support for it.
News
- Finally, with Firefox 62 Mozilla ships
::selectioninstead of:-moz-selection, but they also implementedflat(), andflatMap()for JavaScript arrays, and developers get a new Shape Path Editor. - Chrome 69 is out and brings CSS Scroll Snap Points, the CSS
viewport-fitproperty for cutout-displays like iPhone X, the Web Locks API which allows scripts running in one tab or worker to asynchronously acquire a lock, hold it while work is performed, and then release it. It also includes CSS conic gradient support,toggleAttribute()which is similar to theclassList.toggle()method but for attributes, andflat()andflatMap()for arrays. Unfortunately, this release brings changes to how the browser displays the URL and it seems that people aren’t happy about it and treat it as security bug. Let’s see how that evolves. - With Firefox 62 supporting variable web fonts we have support in all major browsers now and can use it widely now, improving performance, be more creative with typography and reduce data traffic drastically.
Generic
- Ethan Marcotte reflects on what accessibility means and realizes that it’s not about making a website compatible to some assistive technology or software but about making the website usable by everyone who wants to access it, regardless of the technology. This is a huge difference because it includes people having difficulties reading a website due to small font-size, low contrast. But they might still use the same Chrome browser and the same laptop as you, they just are in bright sunlight, have difficulties reading small text or get distracted by bright colors or animated elements besides a text.
HTML & SVG
- Stefan Judis read the Mozilla documentation on
inputelements and discovered quite a couple of very interesting things that I didn’t knew about as well but could be very useful for projects.
JavaScript
- Nolan Lawson checks out the different ways of using timers in JavaScript, compares them and tells us the differences and when to use which one.
- ky is a tiny and elegant HTTP client based on the browser Fetch API.
- Ankur Anand shares an article about the terrible performance cost of CORS requests in single-page applications.
CSS
- CSS Shapes have quite some history already. Being brought to the web early by the initiative of the Adobe Web team, browser vendors removed the implementations quite fast again and now are slowly coming back with iterated, improved specifications and implementations and it looks like we’re going to be able to use CSS Shapes nearly everywhere. Rachel Andrew shares how to implement CSS Shapes.
Work & Life
- Ryan Singer shares the difficulty of planning a project with ‘imaginary work’ and why it’s so important to first test out how hard for example integrating a specific API will be before planning it on the roadmap.
Go beyond…
- Marco Lambertini on how technology helps saving the planet but we still need to learn to value nature and its resources.
Anselm