I was reading a post on LinkedIn the other morning. In the second paragraph, the author mentioned their first click of “View Source”, which immediately took me back to mine… And made me wonder:
How many other web devs out there got their first “taste”, their first inspiration, by clicking “View Source”?
What an amazing feature, that was in no way necessary, yet likely transformed 100s of 1000s of lives… How many careers do you think were kicked off by that little link???
As I strive to keep up with the constant flow of new and fascinating articles that our worldwide wonderful web community constantly creates, I find it harder and harder to filter through the stuff that I am not really interested in. And by that, I mean filtering out ads, infomercials, etc. That’s why I still love love love my RSS feed reader (I currently use Feedly, but I am sure there are other good ones, feel free to share your personal fave ebelow!)… And I should expounded on that love before, but I haven’t. Which is why I was so happy to see that Tom Burkert did it for me with his In Praise of RSS and Controlled Feeds of Information post… Thanks, Tom! :-)
As WordPress still runs a substantial portion of the Internet, keeping an eye on WP’s performance seems like a good idea. But how? Luckily, Remkus de Vries shares how he diagnoses WordPress performance bottlenecks. And thankfully, this not your typical high-level, generic “fix this” article; Remkus gets into details, including specific issues, plugins that can help, using thee Performance panel, and more.
If you’re like me and are occasionally befuddled when CSS specificity doesn’t work as expected, then Courtney Hackshaw article Let’s Be Specific: CSS Specificity Explained should help us all a lot!
Sticking with CSS, Kevin Powell, by way of Piccalilli (bravo!), opens a series about CSS colors. Having started with Hex colors, I quickly got comfy with color names, and slowly with rgb() and then rgba(). And that’s about where I stopped… Kevin helps us (me?) now also get comfy with rgb (again, but this time with an alpha channel, and without commas (but with /!)). color(), oklch(), lch() and hwb() may take a little longer, but relative colors, and of course color-scheme and light-dark(), are freaking awesome!
Still sticking with CSS and Kevin, is CSS a programming language? Until recently, I would have answered “absolutely not!” But recent developments like custom properties, @functions, relative colors, etc., I might start to say “Maybe?” Well fortunately for all of us, people far smarter than I (namely Robbie Wagner, Chuck Carpenter, Adam Argyle, and Kevin Powell) cover the bases with their whiskey, web and Whatnot chat.
The great Sara Soueidan updates us all on the accessibility of CSS generated content. Turns out support for “alt text” for generated content has improved to the point where, paraphrasing Sara’s examples, instead of just this:
a.external::before {
content: " \2197"; //
}
We can now do this:
a.external::after {
content: " \2197" / "Opens in a New Window" ;
}
So the accessibility tree will see the alt text, and screen readers will read it as part of the content!
Sticking with accessibility, Eric Bailey looks into the double focus ring problem. Yeah, I never heard of this either, but apparently it is a thing, and Eric tears into all the variations, and uses modern CSS to solve them all!
And finally, the most hated of hated web banners, the cookie consent, ignored-clicked-through by probably nearly every single person on the web, may be coming to an end. Or at least a significant change. Politico reports that the European Commission wants to eliminate one of its peskiest laws: …pop-ups requesting consent to cookies… This will surely be a long, drawn-out, and fiercely-debated topic before anything really changes, but we at least have something to look forward to…
Happy reading,
Atg