Link tags: modern

I don’t have time to learn React - Keith Cirkel

React is a non-transferable skill.

React proponents might claim that React will teach you modern UI, but from what I’ve seen it barely copes with modern UI. autofocus is broken, custom elements don’t work in all but the experimental version, using any “modern” features like dialog or popovers requires useEffect, and the synthetic event system teaches you so little about how DOM actually works. This isn’t modern UI, it’s UI from 2013 at its inception. I don’t have the time left in my career to pick up UI paradigms that haven’t evolved much beyond from when Barack Obama was in office.

When I mentor early career developers and they ask me what they should learn, I can’t say React, they don’t have time. I mean sure, pick up enough React to land you the inevitable job doing it, but it’s not going to level up your career.

RFC: Initial CSS Level Categorization · CSS-Next/css-next · Discussion #92

A proposal to retroactively classify additions to CSS in order to put more meat on the bones of the term “modern CSS”.

12 Modern CSS One-Line Upgrades | Modern CSS Solutions

I love how straightforward these bits of CSS are—time to rip out some of those old complicated hacks and workarounds!

Modern CSS in Real Life - Chris Coyier

This is a terrrific presentation by Chris, going through some practical implementations of modern CSS: logical properties, viewport units, grid, subgrid, container queries, cascade layers, new colour spaces, and view transitions.

My experience at Modern Frontends Live | hidde.blog

I appreciate Hidde’s reluctance to participate in anything that looks like a pile-on, but in this case, it’s important to call out the bad behaviour so it doesn’t happen again.

The specific issues I’ve put in this post cross the line between honest mistakes and bad behaviour. They cross the line, because they consistute fraud (the livestream) and because they impact attendees, sponsors and speakers. The front-end community doesn’t deserve this, and I’m worried for people new to the industry, who get may assume this is normal or ok. It’s not normal.

Modern Frontends

More on that shitshow of an event that Jo wrote about, this time from Cassie.

My experience of Modern Frontends Conference - DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻

I’ve heard from multiple people about how much of a shitshow this event was. Worth remembering in case they try to pull the same shit again.

Paul Rand: Modernist Master 1914-1996

A lovely fansite dedicated to the life and work of Paul Rand.

Modern CSS in a Nutshell - Cloud Four

I like this high-level view of the state of CSS today. There are two main takeaways:

1. Custom properties, flexbox, and grid are game-changers.
2. Pre- and post-processers are becoming less and less necessary.

This is exactly the direction we should be going in! More and more power from the native web technologies (while still remaining learnable), with less and less reliance on tooling. For CSS, the tools have been like polyfills that we can now start to remove.

Alas, while the same should be true of JavaScript (there’s so much you can do in native JavaScript now), people seem to have tied their entire identities to the tooling they use.

They could learn a thing or two from the trajectory of CSS: treat your frameworks as cattle, not pets.

1187179 - service worker NavigationPreload should trigger for frame requests - chromium

It’s official. The extremely niche browser behaviour I documented is a bug.

MODERN TIMES on Vimeo

A gorgeous sci-fi short film with some fine interface porn.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Morph flashmob honours Tony Hart

This is beautiful. Really beautiful.

Star Wars: Episodes I-VI - The greatest postmodern art film ever. By Aidan Wasley

What if the Force isn't a plot device... what if the Force is the plot?