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wsf-xiv

CSS. CSS custom properties and the cascade by Miriam Suzanne / CSS Line Layout (video) by Elika J. Etemad, a.k.a. fantasai / Why you should use env() by Harry Nicholls / a piece of web lore I learned about recently: Why does HTML think chucknorris is a color? / This survey about z-index values by Philippe Suter brings back fond memories / Restricting a pseudo-element to its parent's border-box by Ana Tudor

JavaScript. Tips for rolling your own lazy loading by Phil Hawksworth / WeakRef gets implemented in v8, but it's a bit over my head / QuickJS, a JavaScript engine by Fabrice Bellard

SSG / CMS. Add webmention support to your website in 10 minutes, by Daniel Aleksandersen / Simon Collison has a beautiful new personal website / Building a static website with Jekyll and GitHub pages by Amanda Visconti for The Programming Historian

Serverless. The power of serverless for front-end developers, by Chris Coyer / imgpush, minimalist self-hosted image service for user submitted images in your app by Haukur Rósinkranz / contrast-swatch, image microservice for color contrast information by Brent Jackson

Accessibility. Scott O'Hara tackles <toast> in two articles: A toast to an accessible toast, and output: HTML's native live region element / Accessibility and archivability and making a GUI for rsync by Ashley Blewer / An Intro To Screen Reader Testing for Sighted Developers by Jessica Jordan

Progressive enhancement. Building a resilient frontend from GOV.UK / Trenchant enhancement, a thing I wrote

Performance. How Google PageSpeed works by Ben Schwarz / Why is my webpack build slow? by Sam Saccone

React / Web Components. A useEvent hook / Build your own React (video) by Rodrigo Pombo / react-compound-slider by Steve Hall / Why we use Web Components by Max Lynch / You spin me right r⟳und by Rowan Merewood / io-gui, a UI framework for JavaScript applications and custom elements by Aki Rodić

OSS work. GitHub added support for marking files as viewed in pull requests and it works a treat!

Personal tech. Darius Kazemi on how to run your own social network / Contemplating calendars by Devon Zuegel

Creative coding. Shirley Wu asks on Twitter: what are the uses of trigonometry in data visualization? choice anwers: Cosine similarity, Mathematics of Animation / lospec pallette list, a database of palettes for pixel art

Theory. Dorian Taylor's Annual Programme for 2019 / Let Christopher Alexander design your life by Alexandra Lange

Methodology. The Toolbox Toolbox is a collection of card-based thinking tools / This new book from Basecamp, Shape Up, sounds great / How to create a collaborative, rapid prototype by Douglas Ferguson

Design. Data Visualization Guidelines from Google Material / Design Systems and Front-End Architecture by Stuart Robson / Variable Fonts for Developers, resources curated by Mandy Michael


Keeping up

Looked into a couple of things which were on my radar for a long time.

WordPress Gutenberg. Tried a fresh WP install with the Gutenberg editor and now I think I see how it's going to change a lot about building and writing for WP websites. There's an official guide for building custom blocks. It's a bit convoluted and weird from a JS-first perspective, but I can get used to it. CSS Tricks has a series of tutorials, and this article by Jerome Duncan seems pretty on point (but I haven't read it through).

Web Components. Started implementing a few simple web components to get a feel for it. There's potential, there are limitations, all in all an excellent addition to the web platform. I'm chronicling my experience here.

WeakMap and WeakSet. Although these JavaScript data structures have been available across browsers since a while, I haven't looked into what they are, and what they're good for, until now. Prompted by only barely grokking the recent v8 announcement, I read up on them and, boy, this article by Nick Fitzgerald about using WeakMap for information hiding is kind of blowing my mind. May this technique be useful for hiding details in Web Components? It warrants further investigation.


Quote of the day comes from an anecdote about Roberto Ierusalimschy, the main author of the Lua programming language. When asked by a student whether they should make a pull request for a new feature, he replied:

Yes, but I won't use your code. I love that people send me ideas, but I actually enjoy coding... so I will gladly take your suggestions, though I will write it myself.


Soundtrack: Aldous Harding — The Barrel