Frontend Focus
Issue 270 — December 21, 2016

In this issue, we're taking a look back at the top items of 2016. If you've missed any issues, this is a great time to catch up with the stories that caught everyone's imaginations in the world of front-end development :-)

We're taking a break for Christmas and will be back in January. Thanks for all of your support this year and we hope you have a great holiday season :-)

These are mostly simple tips but may uncover a few features you hadn’t got around to trying yet. ($0 was a handy one I didn’t know about.)
David Gilbertson

Practical explanations and examples. Includes a look at contextual highlighting with ‘mark’, quotations with ‘q’, and more.
SitePoint

In 30 minutes, Paul Irish shared what’s new in Chrome’s DevTools and how they’ll help you when debugging your sites and front-end work. A lot of useful stuff.
Paul Irish

Progress
Kendo UI delivers everything you need to build modern web applications under tight deadlines - from the must-haves Data Grids and DropDowns to Spreadsheet and Scheduler. Choose from 70+ UI components and combine them to create beautiful, responsive apps.
Progress   Sponsor

What are the bare elements you need and how can they come together? Originally published in 2013 but updated for 2016.
Louis Lazaris

A superb slidedeck from a workshop given by Smashing Magazine’s proprietor. You should learn a few things from this.
Vitaly Friedman

Literally see what’s new in the next version of the popular front-end framework, including cards, font changes, a new XL grid tier, and tweaks to button styling.
Carol Skelly

Starts from the usual basics (title, charset, etc.) but works up to a significant number of meta and link tags useful in various situations.
Josh Buchea

A ton of useful insights, tips, videos, and more, on debugging issues in Web apps, front end development, etc.
Remy Sharp

A look at a variety of approaches and tools for testing Web sites using network conditions end users are likely to experience.
Patrick Meenan

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In Brief

Chrome's DevTools in 2016 and Beyond news
Google

Houdini: Maybe The Most Exciting Development In CSS You've Never Heard Of news
Philip Walton

Free O'Reilly eBook - 'Intelligent Caching' - Optimize Front End Performance at Scale 
Use "Intelligent Caching" as a resource and guide for optimizing performance on your website or application. Download now
StackPath  Sponsor

How Well Do You Know CSS 'Display'? tutorial
A helpful, in-depth run through of what each value of an element’s ‘display’ property can do for you, including inline-block, flex, run-in, and others.
Chen Hui Jing

12 Little-Known CSS Facts (The Sequel) tutorial
Louis Lazaris

How to Center in CSS tutorial
A golden oldie that resurfaced this year.
Oliver Zheng

A Guide to Writing Maintainable CSS tutorial
Write CSS without worrying that overzealous styles will cause problems.
Adam Silver

Full Width Containers in Limited Width Parents tutorial
Chris Coyier

Getting Started with Webpack 2 tutorial
Drew Powers

A Case Study on Boosting Front-End Performance story
CSS Tricks

How and Why GitHub Switched to SVG for Its Icons story
GitHub

Is jQuery Still Relevant? opinion
Telerik Developer Network

The Headless Web opinion
Creative (and fascinating) thinking about the future of the Web.
Paul Kinlan

Discover the world’s most trusted SQL Server comparison tool 
Enjoy a free trial of SQL Compare, the industry standard for comparing and deploying SQL Server schemas.
Red Gate  Sponsor

Flexbox Patterns: User Interface Examples with Code code
Examples of practical ways to use Flexbox to build UI components for your own site.
CJ Cenizal

WTF, Forms? Friendlier HTML Form Controls code
Friendlier HTML form controls with a little CSS magic from GitHub’s Director of Design.
Mark Otto