Frontend  Focus

#468 — November 25, 2020 | Read on the web

Tailwind CSS v2.0 Released — A new major version of this popular CSS framework (that just so happened to drop just after we sent last week’s issue 😅) is out now. It includes an all-new color palette, dark mode support, an extra wide breakpoint, and tons more.

Adam Wathan

FrontPage: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly — Remember Microsoft FrontPage? It was a popular Web page editor many years ago. Here’s an exploration of its interface and a comparison to its contemporary alternatives. It concludes by stating that we now “need a FrontPage that lets the incredibly talented common folk retake the internet with creativity and originality”.

Invisible Up

[BUNDLE] Earn More in 2021 with These Full-Stack Courses — Become a pro in React, Redux, GraphQL, Next.js, Tailwind CSS, build Node.js CLIs, and deploy Serverless with this Full-Stack bundle of courses from experts like Ahmad Awais, Swizec Teller, Dave Ceddia, & Chris on Code. Save $923 (70%). Ending soon ↗

Learnetto sponsor

Simulating Color Vision Deficiencies in the Blink Renderer — Earlier this year a new Chrome feature shipped letting you use DevTools to simulate various vision deficiencies. Here’s a good look at how (and why) such a simulator was added to Chrome DevTools and the Blink Renderer. Also available as a 15-minute video if you’d prefer.

Matthias Bynens (Google)

Back/Forward Cache — How to optimize your pages for instant loads when using the browser’s back and forward buttons. There's so much depth in here you're bound to learn something.

Philip Walton (Google)

▶  Chris Ferdinandi: The Lean Web — Suggests that the web in 2020 is a “bloated and over-engineered mess” and that modern web development 'best practices' are often making the web worse. This thought-provoking 50-minute talk shares ideas on how to fix the problem.

Wordcamp

⚡️ Quick bits:

📙 Tutorials, News & Opinion

Why It's Good for Users That HTML, CSS and JS Are Separate Languages — “The separation between HTML, CSS and JavaScript as it currently is benefits web users Well written and well separated HTML and CSS is important to their experience of it.”

Hidde de Vries

Refactor and Clean Your Stylesheets with the CSS Overview in Chrome DevTools — A quick tip on using the CSS Overview Panel. It provides a high-level look at various CSS metrics, especially useful when refactoring.

Umar Hansa

The Most Accurate Way to Schedule a Function in the Browser — A detailed analysis of three JavaScript timeout strategies and how they perform in thousands of web contexts. A bit of a micro-optimization for sure, but it’s interesting to dig into the weeds like this.

Benoit Ruiz

10 React Security Best Practices — A checklist to help you and your team find and fix security issues in your React applications.

Snyk sponsor

How to Create Text Gradients in CSS — using the background-clip property. Oh, and here's how to do this whilst progressively supporting all browsers too.

Sebastiano Guerriero

A Quick CSS Tip: How to Show Source Code The Easy Way — Using display:block on script and style blocks is a simple way to make HTML tutorials easier.

Christian Heilmann

Simple Pie Charts with Fallback, Today — A neat way to create conic-gradient pie charts where supported, that gracefully degrade and fallback to using the linear-gradient property.

Lea Verou

Creating WebGL Effects with CurtainsJS — A way to add neat WebGL effects to <image> and <video> elements of an already “completed” web page.

Zach Saucier

Use a Submit Button Outside of a Form — A cute tip if you didn’t know this already – you can place submission buttons outside of the form element if you use the form attribute to reference which form you want the button to work with.

David Walsh

A Centered CSS Navigation with fit-content — A neat pattern to build a centered navigation bar.

Stefan Judis

Browsers Don’t Have Feelings—Measure What Matters to Users

New Relic sponsor

How to Load Fonts in a Way That Fights FOUT and Makes Lighthouse Happy — No-one likes that 'flash of unstyled text'. Trivia: 'fout' means fault or flaw in Dutch!

Adrian Bece

Five CSS Pseudo-Elements You May Never Knew Existed — Things like ::first-line and ::first-letter.

Joel Olawanle

💻 Jobs

Frontend Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Join the most energizing community for developers and work on projects for Riot Games, FOX, Sony, Coinbase, and more.

X-Team

Find Your Next Job Through Vettery — Create a profile on Vettery to connect with hiring managers at startups and Fortune 500 companies. It's free for job-seekers.

Vettery

🧑‍💻 Looking to share your job listing in Frontend Focus? There's more info here.

🔧 Code, Tools and Resources

Dev Fonts: Live Preview the Best Coding Fonts — An interactive tool to test drive dozens of coding fonts that are live-displayed in dozens of different themed embeds. Includes both free and non-free fonts.

Mostafa Gaafar

Polypane 4: Unified Console, DOM Tree in Elements Panel — This paid standalone browser is aimed specifically at developers working on responsive and accessibile designs. The latest version has a new console, a treeview in the elements panel, locale emulation, new and updated debug tools, and more.

Polypane

Type Scale: A Visual Type Scale Calculator — Enter the base font size, select a musically inspired 'scale' (minor second, major second, etc.), along with a Google font option, and this tool will generate the results visually with copy/paste CSS.

Jeremy Church

Harold: A CLI Tool That Compares Frontend Project Bundles in Size — This tool makes it easier to compare bundle sizes by taking snapshots that you can then review to manage how a project’s size is changing.

FunBox

CSS Background Patterns: A Gallery of Customizable Pure CSS Backgrounds — The tool lets you adjust the background/foreground colors along with opacity and spacing of the patterns.

Jim Raptis

Suri: A Static Link Shortener — A URL shortener that can be easily deployed as a static site to platforms like Netlify or Vercel.

Justin Stayton

web-ext: A Command Line Tool to Help Build, Run, and Test Web Extensions"Initially, it will provide a streamlined experience for developing Firefox Extensions."

Mozilla