Happy Monday, everyone! I know no one wants to actually work today, so let’s catch up on the latest news instead… At least this stuff is work-related… ;-)
Our favorite calendar of all, the Perf Calendar, is back for another another exciting series of performance-related articles! It makes every day in December feel like Christmas, can’t wait!
And speaking of performance, the performance.now() conference has just ended, and it appears that all of the presentations are now available online! Next binge! But specifically, when Harry Roberts says that Ryan Townsend‘s “The Unbearable Weight of Massive JavaScript” presentation was “one of the best I’ve seen this year“, you just have to give it a watch, don’t you?
Sticking with performance for one more, Karolina Szczur talks about perceived performance, which is basically how we feel about a page’s performance. Karolina covers how perceptions can vary and what triggers that variation, defining attention spans, and how best to handle varying load/wait times.
I feel like every time I see someone new work in VS Code, I see something else I want in my VS Code setup… Well, Bryan Braun shares 4 things he wishes he had know while configuring his VS Code; anyone else have anything they’d like to share?
The new web-based Photoshop from Adobe is making headlines. Ahmad Shadeed takes a look under the hood, checking out the CSS that helps it all work.
For anyone else that has been around the web for a number of years (or decades, at this point), Ernie Smith‘s Weird HTML Hacks is a glorious trip down (painful) memory lane… And I am proud/embarrassed to say that I have used all of them except for the “preheader text hack”. Guess I didn’t do enough HTML email work (thank God!).
Sticking with HTML for a sec, Paul Foster has a fun new HTML Tags Memory Test, where you try to remember as many HTML elements as you can. Thought I would do better, but still proud of 59… The elements must be valid, so no cheats like blink, marquee, frameset, etc. :-)
Okay, out with the old and in the the new, Geoff Graham covers A Few Ways CSS Is Easier To Write In 2023. As he says, not so much “new features”, but more “new ways to write something”.
And sticking with Geoff for a sec, he wrote another great Smashing Magazine article, The Fight For The Main Thread, in which he equates the main thread not the to congested highway we often hear it compared to, but instead to San Francisco’s ever-congested Lombard Street (“the crookedest road in the world”?), where “there’s only one way to go, and everything that enters it must go through it”… Apt. he also discusses ways to work around this…
And sticking with the main thread topic, and hopping back to #PerfNow, the great Nishu Goel helps us diagnose and resolve long tasks and improve INP with her Breaking Down Long Tasks presentation.
Okay, just one more on performance: Interested in learning about web performance? Web.dev has a new course you should check out! Seems rather intro-level, but we already start somewhere, so maybe this is right for you or someone you know!
Scott Vandehey goes on a deep-dive down a rabbit-hole researching is(), :not(), :has(), and :where(), and how they interact/affect CSS nesting. Get your notebook ready, there is a lot going on in this article!
Kevin Powell vidoes are always fun to watch, I feel like he is really having fun, experimenting, and everything is not always so planned and structured. I feel like he is also learning as he goes… :-) Anyhow, he recently ran through an idea he has for eliminating the need for so many wrapper/container elements, relying instead on some progressive CSS grid examples.
And finally, NASA just launched a rocket on a roughly 3-ton spacecraft on a six-year, 2.2 billion miles (3.6 billion kilometers) trip to “an enigma in the asteroid belt, an unusual metallic world the size of Massachusetts that could hold clues about the formation of Earth and other rocky planets”… I don’t have anything to add here. I just love this stuff.
Happy reading,
Atg