I could spend all day playing with Bartosz Ciechanowski‘s interactive blog posts (grab the dots and drag!), great stuff!
Shall we all gather ´round the virtual birthday cake to wish PHP a very happy 26th birthday? Happy to have this old friend still rocking along!
And speaking of still rocking on, exciting to see that HTML5Boilerplate still rocks!
And equally exciting to see GitHub announcing Template Repos! You can create a template repo or start a new repo based on a template repo. Very powerful, and really one of those “how could this not have already been a thing” things…
Iris Lješnjanin shares a massive collection of advent-style calendars and more.
I am sure that most developers know about JAWS (the world’s most popular screen reader), and I am sure that even those that do test with JAWS wish they could do more testing, but the reality is that screen readers are probably not included in most test browser matrices. And while I am certainly not advocating dumping all screen reader testing onto our users, JAWS Connect at least gives this user group a chance to provide feedback on pain-points directly to you / the site owner!
But if you are interested in upping your a11y testing game, here are four free testing tools that to help get you started!
Of course, Chrome’s DevTools also has a bevy of a11y test feature, as does Firefox, as does Edge.
And, of course, there are many other options out there too…
Tanner Hodges issues a Request for a General Theory of Web Performance, in which he seeks “an introduction to performance in general, and principles for practicing performance beyond general metrics”. I like this.
And while Tanner does acknowledge that CWV have helped us to at least more easily visualize performance issues, Barry Pollard questions whether they have really made the web any faster…
But in the mean time, people like Stoyan Stefanov continue to help us find ways to improve things like plugging memory leaks in our apps…
And to help make your React apps a little snappier…
Remix is a seamless server and browser runtime that provides snappy page loads and instant transitions by leveraging distributed systems and native browser features instead of clunky static builds.
Wow, that is a powerful marketing punch! Additionally, Remix is built on Web Fetch API, runs Cloudflare Workers, and supports serverless and Node.js.
Or, if Svelte is more to your taste, check out these tasty React Hooks that have been ported to Svelte… useState, useEffect, useRef and more!
Of maybe just code once and use it across all the frameworks!
From Hakim El Hattab comes Ladda, a small collection of buttons with built-in loading & progress indicators.
noUiSlider is equally small and powerful, with no dependencies, support back to IE9, and works on touch!
And finally, Bozhidar Batsov points a spotlight on the ever-mounting Chrome/Chromium near-monopoly that is slowly engulfing us… Yes, Safari basically owns the mobile market, but Chromium certainly owns the desktop market. I have been using Firefox on desktop for some time now, as Chrome basically eats my poor laptop, but I am clearly in the minority. For those of us that remember the horrid days of the Internet Explorer near-monopoly of the browser market, it is with a returned shutter that we should be thinking about our current situation. While I do think the circumstances are different (with IE, we were stuck developing for a crappy browser because Microsoft didn’t really care, whereas Chrome is at least a good browser), we are still slowly devolving into a world where one very large and powerful company will be ruling the browser market and controlling all of the data that flows through the web. Sadly, I offer no solutions here, I am merely asking that we all keep an open set of eyes on the situation…
Happy reading,
Atg