Gonna start this issue off with one of the most important concepts in the world of web performance: The psychology of site speed and human happiness. Written by Tammy Everts, this article digs into concepts ranging from why time is crucial and how we perceive wait times to how the end of an experience affects our perception and how slowness affects our perception. We’ve all had to explain why performance matters and how the data correlates to our emotions, well this article gift wraps all your talking points.

And speaking of making things faster, for anyone following along with the new Speculation Rules API, Tim Vereecke points out that Akamai now supports them!

John J. Hoare comments on the growing trend to “return to blogging”, rather than micro-dumping to social media platforms. He cites many people discussing this trend, and, while I love the idea of continuing the “individual web”, and I continue to constantly add new feeds to my RSS Reader, I have to admit that what I will miss about the social media feed is the ease of discovery and ease of communication (most of it, anyhow). It was sure easier to find new gems on Twitter than it was just randomly hunting around, and it surely is easier to inter-communicate, en masse, on Twitter (from the days of yore, for example), than it is via individual blog posts (though the blog posts are certainly ore personal)…

Anyone that has been at this web-dev game long enough has implemented their fair share of “hacks” to get the job done. But the problem with hacks is that they tend to outlive their necessity; new methods and capabilities arise, but we tend to get stuck using what we know. To that end, Stephanie Eckles shares 12 Modern CSS One-Line Upgrades that should help us all level-up.

Staying with upgrading our CSS for a second, Mojtaba Seyedi‘s Learn CSS :has() selector by examples: 5 top use cases certainly helps!

And staying with new CSS for just a smidge more, Kevin Powell shares several Unfamiliar CSS patterns that improve on the classics. Here Kevin explores several instances where he has had some push-back on code he used in demos and defends those newer ways of coding, explaining why “something new” might be better than “something old”…

And staying with Kevin for another couple of minutes, checkout his When you accidentally make something awesome video. Sometimes when you trip and stumble, you chance upon something amazing… Here, Kevin is trying to do something, it doesn’t quite work, but then he sees an opportunity to create something completely different, and it is really cool… (At right around the 12-minute mark, he hits upon a scroll-based animation, which is what I was thinking of as soon as I saw where he was headed! So glad he did it, so I don’t have to…)

A couple of huge new cracks in the Apple iOS megamonopoly are opening (at least in the EU (European Union), anyway). Soon we will be able to:

1. Use browsers other than WebKit on iOS devices.
2. Sideload apps (install apps that are not in the (main) App Store).

Of course, Apple is not going to make things easy, but the cracks are finally starting to open, let’s hope the floodgates soon follow!

Malte Ubl walks us through (at a high-level) how CWVs (Core Web Vitals) affect a page’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Or, just skip to the Takeaways… :-)

Jon Kirwan and Martin Jones from the GDS (Government Digital Service) explain how Gov.UK reduced CSS size and improved performance. The task included reworking their bundling system to only link to CSS files actually needed by each page.

We’ve used box-shadow to give the illusion of depth for some time. Now Yair Even Or walks us through using backdrop-filter to create a blurry box shadow. Definitely a cool effect!

Also cool, Giana Blantin presents four different scroll-driven carousel animations! The classic Horizontal Scroll is nice, but I really like the Zoom Scroll effect…

Elizabeth McCready explains how text-to-speech and screen reader interact with a site. First Elizabeth explains the difference of the two technologies, then explains how to use the built-in tools on Mac, Windows and in Edge, then covers NVDA (Non-Visual Desktop Access). Nice!

And finally, Pong Wars is one of the most sublime uses of tech I have ever seen… Thank you, Koen van Gilst, I could stare at this all day… :-)

Happy reading,
Atg

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