Next big story, in case you’ve been under a rock (or stuck in a coding cave as I’ve been for the past few months), the future of the Internet is (somewhat) at stake this week. Alex Russell wrote about it, Bruce Lawson wrote about it, lots of other people wrote about it, heck, even I wrote about it. So, be nice lad, lassie or otherwise, and lend a couple minutes to help, won’t you? It’s all of our Internet…
Okay, now on to the regular stuff…
Hot on the heals of the A11Y challenge in the last Today’s Readings, the good folks at TPGi (previously The Paciello Group) share a list of the Top Ten Most Common Web Accessibility Issues. These seem like a good place to get started…
Cyndi Rowland continues the topic with this call to action through WebAIM.
Mr. PWA himself, Maximiliano Firtman has all the details on the latest-and-(sort-of)-greatest upcoming iOS release.
Speaking of PWAs, Justin Willis just announced a VS Code extension for building Progressive Web Apps. Not only does it offer a one-click “get started” new project feature, but also checks current projects for missing bits, and can build and deploy for you, too… Nice!
Javan Makhmali shares a great tip for aligning numeric values in a table (supported everywhere you would expect):
CSS tip: Use `font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums;` to align numbers neatly in a tables, progress counters, etc. Demo: https://t.co/Hnsz4OJIPg pic.twitter.com/FjC9L6Ywkc
— Javan Makhmali (@javan) January 25, 2022
Una Kravets and Vladimir Levin show us how to use content-visibility to lazy-load page elements. Awesome! Support is not really great yet, but at least Firefox is tracking it, and as usual, who knows what Safari is doing. But this is also another great progressive enhancement feature: Chrome/Edge/Opera users get the benefit now, other users get it if/when their browsers start supporting it, and until then, no-harm no-foul…
First we were told to combine all JS into a single file to reduce requests. Then, when browsers started handling more simultaneous downloads, we were told to split-up files again. Then bundlers came along and pushed everything back together. Now Adrian Bece tells us to split those bundles… :-) Well, the truth is, as it often is, not always simple: Bundling can still be a good thing, but so can splitting… While browsers can handle multiple simultaneous downloads, each download has its own latency, which is bad. But you also don’t want all of your JS in one mammoth file. Plus, keep in mind that all JS that gets downloaded, whether used on that page or not, has to be parsed, which takes additional time and browser resources. Ideally, you find a balance and each page downloads just the JS that it needs…
And once you have your bundling and splitting strategy all sussed-out, let Simon Hearne help you optimize your caching headers. Remember: The fasted request is the one not made…
Eric Bailey reminds us that, although most browsers are now “evergreen”, that doesn’t mean they’re always up-to-date. In Eric’s article, he highlights those that choose not to update their browsers, but there are also lots of people that do not have the option, due to work policies that prevent them from updating their own software, or OS limitations that prevent them from doing so… So please remember to be kind, not everyone is bleeding edge… :-)
Piper Haywood offers a very nice run-down for implementing fluid-type.
Ahmad Shadeed shares several use-cases for fit-content. I love the first couple, having fought with them many times, but not sure why you would ever not want an entire tab to be clickable… I feel like I am also constantly setting .tab a { display: block; }… :-)
From the incomparable Tania Rasica comes an update to her Setting up a Mac for Development article. Timely! Just got a new MacBook Pro for my new job. More on that one of these days… ;-)
Sort of following the “replace jQuery” trend, Noam Rosenthal writes about What Web Frameworks Solve And How To Do Without Them (note this is only part 1, so lots more framework killing to come!).
CSSUI is a library of interactive user interface components realized in pure HTML and CSS
Now that’s pretty… Love how modular it is, hope to see the list of modules grow!
And finally, how well do you think you know the various countries around the world? For instance, did you know there are 197?!?! Test your knowledge, how many can you get?
Happy reading,
Atg