Today’s Readings

asks the question Are apps even that relevant anymore? Well, for some things, sure they are. But for most things I see in the app stores, they never really were. But Ben frames the question as if we developers were the ones pushing for native apps. But, aside from maybe app developers, I don’t really think it was ever we devs that were making this choice, was it? Certainly for me, it is always the client insisting “it has to be in the app store”… And that is usually because the end-users have been brainwashed into thinking that all apps must come from an app store… And of course, that mostly comes from all mobile devices making it really, really annoyingly unintuitive to install web apps on devices (at least initially, I believe Android is better now?)… So, until that mindset changes, the question is sadly moot…

Then again, if the likes of Macworld and are both gonna get behind promoting installable web apps, things just might start glacially moving! :-/

wrestles with getting an img element to work as a sort of fixed-background parallax effect. Note that the very last comment offers a great working solution, including a link to a clip-path generator. Nice assist, kubaS!

points out that we might want to also check on a page’s visibility state when we are looking at performance data, as browsers will often reduce resources for background tabs, which could really skew your RUM data…

Speaking of performance, offers A Unified Theory of Web Performance. It is a great conversation starter. I like the example of Gmail, as it is one we can (mostly) all associate with. So then, what’s the next step? :-)

Last web perf bit, promise, but check out these live RUM dashboards at SpeedCurve!

walks us through, first properly pronouncing Vite (thank you!), then adding it to an existing project, as in “replace whatever old thing you were using”…

Call it Floating UI, pop-ups, tooltips, whatever. These are cool, and work really well!

Ever want to create your own custom font? Brutalita makes it fairly easy. Have fun!

Man, when says A Complete Guide To Accessible Front-End Components, he is not joking… Would be nice to find them all in a single repo, but the candy is worth the extra click…

`course, is no slacker either

Okay, keeping on accessibility for another sec, I have been a fan of Zapier for years, using it to interconnect unrelated APIs with normally not more than a few clicks (occasionally a little Python). Well, now Zapier can help automate your continuous accessibility!

Anatole Touvron’s Portfolio is amazing! Though, after a few (dozen) scrolls, my laptop was getting ready to fly to Paris!

offers CSS Me Not, a bookmarklet that helps you find CSS files your site no longer needs, even letting you temporarily block them so you can test before removing them!

Anybody remember PHP? Well does, and reminds us about / introduces us to assert(). Around since PHP5, what a great, single-line alternative to:
if ( !something ) return false;!

SVG is so powerful, and so awesome, and has been around for so long, that I get kind of depressed thinking about how it is still not commonly used around the web… Sure, some icons here, maybe during election season a bunch of dynamic charts and graphs, but overall, I think most of us just see it as a limited-use, kind-of-hard-to-use branch of web tech… Well, walks us through several cool use-cases.

And finally, writes about The Optional Chaining Operator, “Modern” Browsers, and My Mom, a tale of how users can get “trapped” in older browser versions, even when that browser is “evergreen”… A reminder that, although CanIUse says “yes you can”, we need to remember there are lots of users “can’t”…

Happy reading,
Atg

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