Notes From “In And Out Of Style” - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
I love these notes on my recent talk!
Web Browser Engineering
It’s heavy on computer science, but this is a fascinating endeavour. It’s a work-in-progress book that not only describes how browsers work, but invites you to code along too. At the end, you get a minimum viable web browser (and more knowledge than you ever wanted about how browsers work).
As a black box, the browser is either magical or frustrating (depending on whether it is working correctly or not!). But that also make a browser a pretty unusual piece of software, with unique challenges, interesting algorithms, and clever optimizations. Browsers are worth studying for the pure pleasure of it.
See how the sausage is made and make your own sausage!
This book explains, building a basic but complete web browser, from networking to JavaScript, in a thousand lines of Python.
Related links
Why I don’t miss React: a story about using the platform - Jack Franklin
This is a great case study of switching from a framework mindset to native browser technologies.
Though this is quite specific to Jack’s own situation, I do feel like there’s something in the air here. The native browser features are now powerful and stable enough to make the framework approach feel outdated.
And if you do want to use third-party dependencies, Jack makes a great case for choosing smaller single-responsibility helpers rather than monolithic frameworks.
Replacing lit-html would be an undertaking but much less so than replacing React: it’s used in our codebase purely for having our components (re)-render HTML. Replacing lit-html would still mean that we can keep our business logic, ultimately maintaining the value they provide to end-users. Lit-Html is one small Lego brick in our system, React (or Angular, or similar) is the entire box.
Adding Response Metadata to Cache API Explainer by Aaron Gustafson and Jungkee Song
This is a great proposal that would make the Cache API even more powerful by adding metadata to cached items, like when it was cached, how big it is, and how many times it’s been retrieved.
A Simpler Web: I Concur
Tales of over-engineering, as experienced by Bridget. This resonates with me, and I think she’s right when she says that these things go in cycles. The pendulum always ends up swinging the other way eventually.
Removing jQuery from GitHub.com frontend | GitHub Engineering
You really don’t need jQuery any more …and that’s thanks to jQuery.
Here, the Github team talk through their process of swapping out jQuery for vanilla JavaScript, as well as their forays into web components (or at least the custom elements bit).
Related posts
Supporting logical properties
Using the CSS trinity of feature queries, logical properties, and unset.
Upgrade paths
If you’re going to deprecate a feature on the web, at least give us an alternative.
Authentication
Some ways of combining security and usability for two-factor authentication on the web.
A polyfill for button type=”share”
Kicking the tyres on a declarative Web Share API.