#428 — February 19, 2020

Read on the Web

Frontend Focus

Understanding CSS Grid Template Areasgrid-template-areas is one of my personal favorite parts of CSS Grid as it lets you specify layouts in the form of strings of text that visually represent the outcome you want. This is a thorough introduction to the idea.

Rachel Andrew

Why JavaScript is Eating HTML — The idea of JavaScript and HTML remaining separate and never the twain shall meet is now decidedly old-school and HTML-in-JS (a la JSX) is definitely A Thing™. Here’s a tour of all the parts involved.

Mike Turley

Designing High-Impact Dashboards for BI — Embedded analytics can transform your product, but terrible presentation can get in the way of great data. Design expert Laura Klein shares UI/UX guidelines and tips to improve your application’s dashboards, analytics, and reports.

LOGI ANALYTICS sponsor

A Complete Guide to Web Links and Buttons — A great resource from CSS Tricks with a lot to digest here. Starts with the basic implementation of both but quickly moves into accessibility, UX flourishes, and styling.

Chris Coyier

While You Weren't Looking, CSS Gradients Got Better — Unless you are some sort of CSS gradient expert, you are going to learn something here. Avoiding repetition by not having to repeat colors anymore is a huge win, IMHO.

Ana Tudor

'Scroll To Text Fragment' Now in Chrome 80+ — Last year we mentioned the Text Fragments spec which will let you link directly to specific content within Web pages that doesn’t have an associated anchor element.. and Chrome now supports it although the formatting of the fragment name isn’t particularly elegant.

Chrome Platform Status

First Public Working Draft for Resize Observer — An interesting new spec from the W3C (based on the same concept as MutationObserver or IntersectionObserver) that lets you observe for changes to an element’s size.

W3C

💻 Jobs

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

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

📙 Tutorials & Opinion

Same HTML, Different CSS — This is a step-by-step tutorial based on a concept from the old CSS Zen Garden site: Creating different designs via CSS while never touching the markup.

Ahmad Shadeed

Building a Performant Front-End Architecture — A technical writeup of the key things to consider performance-wise when building a front-end.

DebugBear

ImageCon 2020 Innovating the Visual Web — Uploading, managing, optimizing and delivering media slowing you down? Learn about serverless media best practices.

Cloudinary sponsor

Four Creative Ways to JavaScript Timing in Browsers — Interesting alternatives for setTimeout, setInterval, and requestAnimationFrame.

Omar Alshaker

How to Make a WebGL-Powered US Counties Map with D3 and Three.js — Creating a simple SVG-based map is one thing, but if you want the best performance, leaning on WebGL and your GPU is a good option. This tutorial covers how to approach moving from SVG to WebGL by way of Three.js.

Mika Iriarte

How to Build a Tinder-like Carousel in Vanilla JavaScript

Simone Manzi

Building an Image Gallery using PixiJS and WebGL — This goes beyond your typical image gallery with an interesting 3D effect. Lots of bits and pieces here to learn.

Luis Torres

Aborting a Fetch API Request — The Fetch API didn’t have the ability to abort a request in its early days (unlike XMLHttpRequest) but AbortController and AbortSignal can help you get the job done on all modern browsers.

Ganapati V S

How to Apply CSS3 Transforms to Background Images — A neat trick for applying CSS3 transforms (rotating and skewing elements) to your backgrounds.

Craig Buckler

(Please) Use a:visited in Your CSS Stylesheet — Help your visitors know which links they already visited. I can’t really argue with this.

Evert Pot

Don't Touch My Clipboard — You can (but shouldn’t) change how people copy text from your site.

Alex Ellis

An Accessibility Review of Squarespace, Wix, and Weebly — If you’re reading this newsletter you’re probably building your own pages from scratch or with a framework, but have you ever wondered just how good pages produced by tools like Squarespace or Wix are?

Terrill Thompson

Four Reasons to Still Use Sass in Your Frontend Project

Sonny Recio

Web Font of the Week

JetBrains Mono

From the creators of many a popular IDE comes a free and open source font specifically aimed at developers. I admit I'm a sucker for a monospaced font on the Web, but your mileage may vary.

🔧 Code, Tools and Resources

A Neumorphism/'Soft UI' CSS Shadow Generator — A simple online tool for creating elements matching the new design trend/fad.

Adam Giebl

Utopia: Tools for Fluid Responsive Design — There are two nifty tools here, a type scale calculator, and a CSS generator - both designed for scaling type and space without breakpoints.

James Gilyead and Trys Mudford

plink-plonk.js: Listen to Web Pages As Their DOM ChangesThis is really cool. Run this code at a console on a ‘busy’ Web page with lots of DOM changes and updates and you’ll be able to ‘hear’ them taking place.

Tom Hicks

Croppola: Quick Web-Based Image Cropping — These sorts of quick online tools sometimes seem a dime and dozen but this is so quick and simple, I had to recommend it.

Croppola

Axe 3.5: Accessibility for Development Teams — The popular accessibility testing toolkit is now at 3.5. Includes a better color contrast test, several new rules, bug fixes, and Danish localisation.

Wilco Fiers

   🗓 Upcoming Events

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

POSTPONED: 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”.

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