#443 — June 3, 2020

Read on the Web

🖤 It's time to speak up, donate, or even just stream a fundraising video, because Black Lives Matter. Our thoughts are with everyone in the US and beyond fighting for these causes.

Frontend Focus

Image via: Increment

A User’s Guide to CSS Variables — A long-requested but still underused feature. Here’s a solid look at the “revolutionary possibilities for collaboration and code reuse” that CSS custom properties for cascading variables offer.

Lea Verou

Introducing the Web Platform Contribution GuideThe Web Platform Contribution Guide is an online resource for anyone who wants to participate in the development of Web standards present and future. If the idea of Web standards boggles your mind at all, this is a very accessible guide.

Bocoup

You Write Amazing Code, Get The Glory You Deserve — The most amazing code, but they see only the nasty bugs. Get rid of bugs fast and easy with the power of AI. DeepCode is free to use. Give it a try today.

DeepCode.AI sponsor

Microsoft’s New Edge Browser Now Rolling Out Via Windows Update — Yep, Microsoft’s Chromium-based Edge launched back in January, but users had to specifically download it. It will now be automatically installed.

Tom Warren

htmx: Build Dynamic Pages Using HTML Attributes — Billed as the ‘successor to intercooler.js’, htmx lets you add dynamic Ajax-y elements, Server Sent Events (SSE), WebSockets and more to a site using just HTML attributes.

Big Sky Software

⚡️ Quick bits:

💻 Jobs

Find A Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

Frontend Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Join X-Team and work on projects for companies like Riot Games, FOX, Coinbase, and more. Work from anywhere.

X-Team

ℹ️ Interested in running a job listing in Frontend Focus? There's more info here.

📙 Tutorials & Opinion

Global and Component Style Settings with CSS Variables — A look at how to use CSS variables to create more manageable project styles and more portable patterns.

Sara Soueidan

A First Look at aspect-ratio — It’s not directly supported in any browsers yet but its arrival is described as ‘impending’. Stuff like aspect-ratio: 16 / 9 certainly seems nice, though, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed..

CSS Tricks

🍔 Let's Make a Hamburger Menu — A step by step guide to creating a hamburger menu animation with SVG and CSS.

Mikael Ainalem

On Fixed Elements and Backgrounds — Definitely not for the faint of heart. This is a pretty deep dive into containing blocks, rendering, and scroll performance.

Chen Hui Jing

When Frontend Means Full Stack — Thoughts on the shifting responsibilities of frontend developers, a place which puts us “between the thing we’re building and the people we’re building it for”.

Chris Coyier

Scale Your Software Projects Without Losing Speed — See how Shopify used Buildkite CI/CD to scale from 300 to 1800 engineers while keeping build times under 5 minutes.

Buildkite sponsor

A New Way to Delay Keyframes Animations — If you’ve ever wanted to add a pause between each iteration of your CSS @keyframes animation, it’s.. not easy. Here’s an interesting technique to create such an effect, though.

Eric Johnson

Creating an Overlapping Header with CSS Grid — A clever (sneaky?) use of :before makes it all work.

Jonathan Snook

▶  CSS Aspect Ratio, Rendering Engines, and More with Jen Simmons — Web Designer and Developer Advocate Jen Simmons joins Dave Rupert and Chris Coyier to talk about her new HTML Essentials course, CSS Aspect Ratio, and rendering engines vs browsers.

ShopTalk Show podcast

Svelte, Why So Much Hype ? — A closer look at the component-based library.

Anthony Le Goas

🔧 Code, Tools and Resources

RoughNotation: A Small Library to Create and Animate Rough Annotations — Uses Rough.js for the handdrawn look. Lots of nice interactive examples on the page showing the diversity of annotation types.

Preet Shihn

htmlgoddess: A Static Site Generator to Code Like It's 1999 — Feels a bit like satire, but seems to be a real framework that wants to promote simplicity, speed, and accessibility in web pages. Backstory here.

Jonathan Crockett

AudioMass: A Full-Featured Web Audio Editing Tool in JavaScript — Runs entirely in the browser with no backend or plugins required. Impressive. Source here.

Pantelis Kalogiros

Easings: Generate, Test & Share Custom Cubic Bezier Easing Curves — This online tool lets you play around with cubic-bezier() values to create custom easings that you can drop into transitions and animations.

Paul Macgregor

Perspective: Streaming Pivot Visualization via WebAssembly — An interesting use for WebAssembly here. Originally built for J P Morgan, Perspective is for building real-time high performance interactive visualizations, powered by a C++ engine compiled to WASM under the hood.

The Fintech Open Source Foundation

Better Keyboard Buttons in CSS — A quick way to improve the readability of keyboard shortcuts when you’re mentioning them in text. I love simple little solutions like this.

Terence Eden