#427 — February 12, 2020

Read on the Web

🖍 Heya! Be sure to scroll to the end of the issue to see a nostalgic comic about how many of us started out with HTML 😄.

Frontend Focus

Protecting Users From Insecure Downloads in Google Chrome — In a move designed to stop unsafe downloads, starting in April, Chrome will block files downloaded insecurely (non-HTTPS downloads started on secure pages) from HTTPS pages. Here’s The Register’s take on this change.

Joe DeBlasio (Google)

Mozilla Lost The Browser Wars. It Still Thinks It Can Save The Internet — The inside story of Mozilla’s long, sometimes lonely and totally idealistic quest: “The only way to fight Google, Facebook and the rest of the seemingly unstoppable tech giants is to change the structure and technology of the internet itself.

David Pierce

Webinar: How to Deploy and Manage Cloud-First Applications and APIs — Join AWS and ESG for in-depth guidance on how to secure application traffic, manage performance, and maintain visibility. Learn how to seamlessly deploy and manage your applications and APIs using partner solutions in AWS Marketplace.

AWS sponsor

What is CSS4? — A number of bloggers have responded to PPK’s original article calling for better marketing efforts around CSS. Here PPK furthers the discussion with a response to those articles.

PETER-PAUL KOCH

Should You Self-Host Google Fonts? — A detailed and considered look at what we can do to minimise the performance impact of third-party fonts, whilst also giving designers what they want - win win.

Barry Pollard

Firefox 73 Is Upon Us — Released yesterday, this version adds CSS logical properties, letter-spacing and word-spacing support when working with SVG, DevTools updates and more. You can see the full list of changes for developers here.

Chris Mills (Mozilla)

💻 Jobs

Find a Dev 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

Frontend Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Work with the world's leading brands, from anywhere. Travel the world while being part of the most energizing community of developers.

X-Team

📙 Tutorials & Opinion

Sticky Table of Contents with Scrolling Active States — If you’ve got a lengthy article with lots of subsections, how about putting a handy, sticky navigational menu alongside of it? Here’s how.

Chris Coyier

Some Imaginary CSS — A bit of wish-casting here, conjuring up a half dozen or so little ideas and features that would be nice to see in the CSS of the future.

Tyler Sticka

▶  Dealing with Third Parties with Karolina Szczur — Tim Kadlec talks to designer Karolina Szczur about third-party scripts, how to identify which ones are problematic, and what you can do about it.

Chasing Waterfalls podcast

ImageCon 2020: Great Media Experience for U and I

Cloudinary sponsor

Getting Acquainted With Svelte, the New Framework on the BlockSvelte is an interesting compile-time framework. Here’s why you may want to consider using it.

Tristram Tolliday

Building an Accessible Autocomplete Control — Learn how to design and build an accessible autocomplete control from scratch.

Adam Silver

   🗓 Upcoming Events

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, March 24-25 — 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”.

Imagecon, April 22-23 — San Francisco, USA — Learn the latest in innovative approaches to the visual web.

🔧 Code, Tools and Resources

Tailwind Version 1.2.0 Released — The new version of this popular utility-first CSS framework is described as “probably the most exciting feature release in the history of Tailwind”. It adds CSS Transition, Transform and Grid support, plus a ton of other additions.

Adam Wathan

CheerpJ 2.0 Released: A Java to WASM and JS Compiler — This is a commercial tool (though free for non-commercial purposes) but as someone who started on the Web in the 90s, the idea of Java being compiled to JavaScript continues to tickle me. 🙂 Interesting tech.

Stefano De Rossi

Griddle CSS Framework — A just-add-classes grid framework based on the Grid Layout module and Flexbox. If you’ve used Bootstrap grids, this should be easy to use.

Dave Berning

rgbKineticSlider WebGL Carousel — A fully customizable WebGL slider/carousel based on PixiJS and GSAP. Certainly not for every project, but the demos are worth a look.

Hadrien Mongouachon

Put the Joy Back in Your Work — "Clubhouse is like a fast and delightful version of Jira, a more purposeful version of Trello." - Current User.

Clubhouse.io sponsor

Web Font of the Week

Public Sans

A reworking of Libre Franklin by the USWDS department of the GSA, a US government agency. It's freely licensed and comes in nine weights.

Source: digital.gov

darkmode-js: Dark Mode Switcher Library — This lightweight and cross-browser library helps auto-detect a user’s local time and switch themes.

Nickolas Deny

Sharect: A Library to Let Users Share Text Selections to Social Networks — If you’ve seen how Medium lets readers select text and share it, it’s like that, but lighter.

Estevan Maito

Motion — Native Mac or Windows app. A free editor to create animated SVG icons using a nice clean interface.

Philip Ardeljan

🖍 Mastery of HTML has to start somewhere...

(Image shared with permission via: Becks)