Link tags: features

JavaScript dos and donts @ Mu-An Chiou

Straightforward smart sensible advice that you can apply to any feature on a website.

New CSS that can actually be used in 2024 | Thomasorus

Logical properties, container queries, :has, :is, :where, min(), max(), clamp(), nesting, cascade layers, subgrid, and more.

AI-free products

Develop a simple, focused app that does what it says on the tin — not one where the tin talks back at you.

WebKit Features in Safari 17.4 | WebKit

It’s a shame that the newest Safari release is overshadowed by Apple’s shenanigans and subsequent U-turn because there’s some great stuff in there.

I really like what they’re doing with web apps added to the dock:

Safari adds support for the shortcuts manifest member on macOS Sonoma. This gives you a mechanism in the manifest file for defining custom menu commands that will appear in the File menu and the Dock context menu.

WebKit Features in Safari 17.2 | WebKit

Lots of new features landing in Safari, and it’s worth paying attention to the new icon requirements now that websites can be added to the dock:

To provide the best user experience on macOS, supply at least one opaque, full-bleed maskable square icon in the web app manifest, either as SVG (any size) or high resolution bitmap (1024×1024).

CSS Wrapped: 2023!

🎶 What a good year for the style sheets! 🎶

Baseline’s evolution on MDN | MDN Blog

These updated definitions makes sense to me:

1. Newly available. The feature is marked as interoperable from the day the last core browser implements it. It marks the moment when developers can start getting excited and learning about a feature.
2. Widely available. The feature is marked as having wider support thirty months or 2.5 years later. It marks the moment when it’s safe to start using a feature without explicit cross-browser compatibility knowledge.

Kinopio’s Design Principles

Pirijan talks us through the design principles underpinning Kinopio, a tool I like very much:

1. Embrace Smallness by Embracing Code as a Living Design System
2. Building for Fidget-Ability, hmmm
3. Embrace Plain Text
4. A Single Interface for Mobile and Desktop
5. Refine by Pruning

Apple previews Live Speech, Personal Voice, and more new accessibility features - Apple

This is the kind of press release I like.

12 Days of Web

All twelve are out, and all twelve are excellent deep dives into exciting web technologies landing in browsers now.

News from WWDC22: WebKit Features in Safari 16 Beta | WebKit

Good news and bad news…

The good news is that web notifications are coming to iOS—my number one wish!

The bad news is that it won’t happen until next year sometime.

Dark Mode Toggles Should be a Browser Feature – Bram.us

This is a thoughtful proposal for a browser feature from Bram. Very convincing!

Emily F. Gorcenski: Angelheaded Hipsters Burning for the Ancient Heavenly Connection

Twitter is a chatroom, and the problem that Twitter really solved was the discoverability problem. The internet is a big place, and it is shockingly hard to otherwise find people whose thoughts you want to read more of, whether those thoughts are tweets, articles, or research papers. The thing is, I’m not really sure that Twitter ever realized that this is the problem they solved, that this is where their core value lies. Twitter kept experimenting with algorithms and site layouts and Moments and other features to try to foist more discoverability onto the users without realizing that their users were discovering with the platform quite adeptly already. Twitter kept trying to amplify the signal without understanding that what users needed was better tools to cut down the noise.

Twitter, like many technology companies, fell into the classical trap by thinking that they, the technologists, were the innovators. Technologists today are almost never innovators, but rather plumbers who build pipelines to move ideas in the form of data back and forth with varying efficacy. Users are innovators, and its users that made Twitter unique.

Trust • Robin Rendle

Robin adds a long-zoom perspective on my recent post:

I am extremely confident that pretty much any HTML I write today will render the same way in 50 years’ time. How confident am I that my CSS will work correctly? Mmmm…70%. Hand-written JavaScript? Way less, maybe 50%. A third-party service I install on a website or link to? 0% confident. Heck, I’m doubtful that any third-party service will survive until next year, let alone 50 years from now.

CSS { In Real Life } | My Browser Support Strategy

This is a great succinct definition of progressive enhancement:

Progressive enhancement is a web development strategy by which we ensure that the essential content and functionality of a website is accessible to as many users as possible, while providing an improved experience using newer features for users whose devices are capable of supporting them.

Trust and suspicion | Keenan Payne

Another thoughtful reponse to my recent post.

Reflections on native browser features and third-party library adoption.

“Evergreen” Does Not Mean Immediately Available | CSS-Tricks - CSS-Tricks

Smart advice on future-proofing and backward-compatibility:

There isn’t a single, specific device, browser, and person we cater to when creating a web experience. Websites and web apps need to adapt to a near-infinite combination of these circumstances to be effective. This adaptability is a large part of what makes the web such a successful medium.

Consider doing the hard work to make it easy and never remove feature queries and @supports statements. This creates a robust approach that can gracefully adapt to the past, as well as the future.

Unveiling the new WebPageTest UI - WebPageTest Blog

If you haven’t seen it yet, the new redesign of WebPageTest is lovely!

No, Apple Did Not Crowdfund :focus-visible in Safari – Eric’s Archived Thoughts

Eric has a written a clear and measured explanation that I hope Alex and Jake will read, given their petty snarky reactions to Webkit shipping a feature (reactions that do more harm than good to their cause—refuting their bullshit has taken time and energy away from the legitimate criticisms of Apple’s rendering engine monopoly on iOS; this whole debacle has been one big distraction from far more important browser bugs).

Many of us are mad at Apple for a lot of good reasons, but please don’t let the process of venting that anger tar the goals and achievements of Open Prioritization.

Using the platform

Elise Hein documents what it was like to build a website (or web app, if you prefer) the stackless way:

• use custom elements (for modular HTML without frameworks)
• use the in-browser package manager (for JavaScript packages without build tools)
• match pages with files (to avoid routing and simplify architecture)
• stick to standards (to avoid obsolescence and framework fatigue)

Her conclusions are similar to my own: ES6 modules mean you can kiss your bundler goodbye; web components are a mixed bag—it’s frustrating that Apple are refusing to allow native elements to be extended. Interestingly, Elise feels that a CSS preprocessor is still needed for her because she wants to be able to nest selectors …but even that’s on its way now!

Perhaps we might get to the stage where it isn’t an automatic default to assume you’ll need bundling, concatenation, transpiling, preprocessing, and all those other tasks that we’ve become dependent on build tools for.

I have a special disdain for beginner JavaScript tutorials that have you run create-react-app as the first step, and this exercise has only strengthened my conviction that every beginner programmer should get to grips with HTML, CSS and vanilla JS before delving into frameworks. Features native to the web are what all frameworks share, and knowing the platform makes for a stronger foundation in the face of change.