When I come to the end of any given year, it’s always interesting to look back through the click-through stats for my weekly newsletter Web Tools Weekly to see which tools got the most attention.
This year wasn’t all that different from previous years. I’ve learned that clicks happen for basically one of two reasons:
When I visit a page, I get annoyed when I try to interact with elements while the website is still loading. Often stuff is moving around, fonts aren’t quite loaded, and it feels broken.
I know nowadays we’re obsessed in this industry with gaining every millisecond in page performance. But in a couple of projects that I recently overhauled, I added a subtle and clean loading mechanism that I think makes the experience nicer, even if it does ultimately slightly delay the time that the user is able to start interacting with my page.
A couple of months ago a post by Leo Blanchette got to the front page of Hacker News and there was an interesting discussion on dealing with broken links and external content – the main problem being links that become out of date due to paywalls, altered content, or content getting taken down.
I’ve been running this blog since May 2008. If you’ve run a content-driven site for even a fraction of that, you know that link rot is a problem. In this post I’ll go over some of the suggestions in that thread along with some tools to use to check for broken links.
This week I did some research to try to build a hamburger menu that opens a slide-out navigation panel, a common design pattern nowadays. But I wanted to ensure the whole thing was keyboard-friendly and as accessible as possible.
I’m not 100% sure what I’ve come up with is the most accessible solution, but I did consult a number of decent sources on building accessible navigation menus like these. I also did some rudimentary testing using the free NVDA screen reader, to ensure there are no major problems.
I’ve been coding websites for a long time but even I was a little puzzled when I came across a Hacker News comment where the commenter described their own makeshift CMS that involves using your own file system. The most interesting part to me was when the person said they add CSS to pages on their personal projects by means of HTTP headers.
I had heard of this technique before and the person does say in the comment that this doesn’t work in every browser. But I decided to do some research to figure out how one might do this and why this would be easier than just dropping in one or more <link> elements in the HTML.
Back in 2011, Paul Irish posted his personal list of frontend RSS feeds for front-end web developers. It was a great list, but after some time it needed some refreshing.
In 2014 I published my own list of categorized feeds for front-end developers. I cleaned up Paul’s feed list quite a bit and added some new feeds, while splitting the feed up into manageable categories.
Over on CSS-Tricks, Chris breaks down what some in the industry have said on the possibility that there will one day be a CSS4. The latest article that Chris references is one by a well-respected member of the community, Peter-Paul Koch (“PPK”).
In brief, PPK believes in initiating some sort of marketing gimmick wherein we basically try to repeat the success of the buzz surrounding “CSS3” by pushing the name “CSS4”.
You are probably aware that ECMAScript has something called Infinity, which is a numeric value that you can apply to any variable, the same way you can apply other numbers as values for variables.
Infinity of course is not the same as other numbers, so I thought I’d summarize, with examples, many of the quirks and useful facts around JavaScript Infinity and how it works.
I probably don’t need to tell you that if you want to make it easier marketing yourself as a strong front-end web developer, it’s important to learn React. No, it’s not absolutely crucial, nor is it required. But React is undoubtedly the most important UI library in the front-end landscape in 2019 and it’s not going away anytime soon.
In a recent issue of my newsletter, I briefly discussed many (if not all?) of the different ways you can retrieve a DOM element’s dimensions via JavaScript.
These include getBoundingClientRect()‘s width and height properties, offsetWidth and offsetHeight, window.getComputedStyle(), the document.styleSheets object, and scrollWidth and scrollHeight.
