#425 — January 29, 2020

Read on the Web

Frontend Focus

The Trident Era Ends — Edge moving over to using Chromium marked the true end of the Trident-Engine. This is a great and detailed post looking back at the IE era, its quirks, technologies, along with the ideas Microsoft put forward during it. Plenty of good discussion on this one over at Hacker News too.

Christian Schaefer

Four CSS Layouts Without Using Media Queries — You may have seen a tweet from Adam Argyle doing the rounds lately, showing how you can get “4 layouts for the price of 1” thanks to flexbox. This blog breaks it down, showing how it works - without the need for media queries.

Polypane

New: Our 'Most Loved' JavaScript Course 🧡 Gets Updated — Take your JavaScript to the next level. Gain an understanding of callbacks, higher order functions, closure, asynchronous and object-oriented JavaScript.

Frontend Masters sponsor

JavaScript Libraries Are Almost Never Updated Once Installed — An analysis, based on CDNJS data, of when and if JavaScript libraries are updated after being installed onto websites (the headline kinda gives this one away 😉).

Zack Bloom (Cloudflare)

Understanding CSS Grid: Grid Lines — Breaking down the CSS Grid Layout specification, looking at how to use the grid lines to place items.

Rachel Andrew

Use and Reuse Everything in SVG… Even Animations — A clear guide on how to build and optimize your code when working with SVG and CSS (by way of the <use> element, CSS Variables and animations).

Mariana Beldi

💻 Jobs

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery is completely free for job seekers. Make a profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers.

Vettery

Senior Frontend-Focused Engineer in Munich — Do you love working with React, TypeScript, GraphQL, and working in a user-centred team? Then you're in for a treat. 🍪 Let's protect some businesses together. 🙌

Finanzchef24

📙 News, Tutorials & Opinion

Microsoft Is Helping Google Improve Chrome’s Tab Management — A clear example of Microsoft and Google engineers working together.

Tom Warren

▶  'Humans Can't Read URLs. How Can We Fix It?' — Jake Archibald makes the case that URLs are impossible for humans to interpret, especially when it comes to security. Jake and Surma explore what browsers are doing today to overcome that, and asks if there may be a better way?

Google Chrome Developers

Cookie Consent Tools Are Being Used to Undermine EU Privacy Rules — A new study suggests that regional privacy laws are being flouted by ‘most’ cookie consent pop-ups.

Natasha Lomas

Introduction to Machine Learning with Tensorflow.js and IBM Watson — Learn about machine learning from the browser to the cloud in this free online workshop - RSVP now to save your spot.

IBM Developer sponsor

Intrinsic Sizing In CSS — An exploration of using intrinsic sizing values (such as width: max-content;), their benefits and how they work with grid and other CSS properties.

Ahmad Shadeed

Can You Make A Countdown Timer in Pure CSS? — The TL;DR here is yes, you can, but there’s a “much more straightforward” JavaScript solution.

Chen Hui Jing

An Accessible Digital BBC – 2019 in Review — Reviews the advances in accessibility that have been made across the British Broadcasting Corporation’s vast online presence.

Emma Pratt Richens

How to Create Procedural Clouds Using Three.js Sprites — The end result here is pretty convincing (makes use of React-Three-Fiber).

Robert Borghesi

Accessibility with The New Microsoft Edge — A walkthrough of the accessibility enhancements added to the new version of Edge.

Microsoft

Mozilla Has Banned Nearly 200 Malicious Firefox Add-ons Over The Last Two Weeks

Catalin Cimpanu

Simple Image Placeholders with SVG

Tyler Sticka

🔧 Code, Tools and Resources

Popper: Tooltip & Popover Positioning Engine — This popular tooltip and popover library just hit version 2.0. You can read the blog post detailing what’s changed and what’s new here.

Federico Zivolo

PurgeCSS 2.0: Removing Unused CSS — The second version of this popular CSS removal tool is now written in TypeScript, works asynchronously, and adds support for the removal of CSS variables.

Floriel Fedry

Mirage JS: An API Mocking Library for Frontend Developers — This hasn’t reached v1.0 just yet, but looks like a decent, quick way to build, test and demo your JavaScript app client-side without an API.

MirageJS

The Fastest Way to Get Great Bug Reports from the Non-Technical Folk

BugHerd sponsor

My Browser — Testing a site and need a quick way to share your browser details (or get someone elses)? This seems like a clean way to do just that.

Andy Bell

Screen: A Stylesheet for Desktops, Tablets, & Phones — A straightforward stylesheet with enough CSS to cover just the basics.

Georges Duverger

   🗓 Upcoming Events

Flashback Conference, February 10-11 — Orlando, USA — Looks at cutting-edge web dev, browser APIs and tooling, but adds how they’ve evolved from the past to the web of today.

Frontend Developer Love, February 19-21 — Amsterdam, Netherlands — Three full days of talks from 35+ global JavaScript leaders from around the world.

ConveyUX, March 3-5 — Seattle, USA — This West Coast user experience conference features over 65 sessions across three days.

W3C Workshop on Web & Machine Learning, 24-25 March — Berlin, Germany — Hosted by Microsoft, this free event aims to “bring together providers of Machine Learning tools and frameworks with Web platform practitioners to enrich the Open Web Platform with better foundations for machine learning”.