🗓️ Hello! Hope you're well. After a week away in the unrelenting sun, we're back in your inbox with a look over the latest in all things frontend. Let's get to it! |
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Balancing Flex Items with Ahmad Shadeed |
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☄️ The Asteroid Currently Hitting Frontend Web Development — With much of the knowledge he's built up over the years now "rendered nearly obsolete", Nolan thinks through where things stand for frontend development and education in an age of AI answers, and lands on some ways to navigate it. Nolan Lawson |
Your Dashboard Is Only as Fast as Its Slowest Query — That slow render isn't the frontend. It's the analytics query behind it. TimescaleDB extends Postgres so dashboards query live data at scale, no pipeline to keep in sync. Hypertables, compression, continuous aggregates. Get $1000 credit to start. Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor |
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My HTML Boilerplate in 2026 — It's been five years since Manuel updated his boilerplate, so it was due an update. Here's every element he uses (largely in the Manuel Matuzović |
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HTML Can Do That — Chris says HTML has been "gobbling up swathes of what used to be JavaScript's remit" and demos eight examples, like Chris Burnell |
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📙 Articles & Tutorials |
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CSS Navigation Matching, Early Days — An early look at a proposed CSS feature for styling the transition from one specific page to another. You'd name the pages with Geoff Graham |
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Inaudible Sounds Used to Fingerprint Browsers Catch AliExpress Red-Handed — A researcher noticed his headphones cutting out when loading AliExpress. It turns out the site was firing inaudible tones for fingerprinting. Yet Firefox neutered that trick years ago and Chrome never fell for it. Dan Goodin (Ars Technica) |
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The Three AI Tools That Actually Matter for Building Mobile Apps — Skills cost almost no context. MCP servers load everything up front. That trade-off decides how well your agent works. Expo sponsor |
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3D CSS, from Super Mario Bros 3 to Mario 64 — An interactive guide showing how we can go from flat 2D faux depth to real 3D in CSS, using six properties/values (including Carmen Ansio |
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The Process of Migrating from Sass to Native CSS — A straightforward step-by-step guide, because "unless you're doing something very particular, Sass just isn't needed anymore". Chris Smith |
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Where Did the Old Web Go? We Followed 657,607 Links to Find Out — Having curated newsletters for over a decade, link rot is something we're very aware of. This post highlights the scale of the problem over time. 0.mk |
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The Future of CSS: Target Multiple Classes with the Class Prefix Selector — Imagine a selector like |
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Building an Accordion the Browser Can Search
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The EU's New Guidelines for AI Labelling
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🧰 Tools, Code & Resources |
CSS a-dev |
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MicroLighter: A Syntax Highlighter That Doesn't Touch the DOM — A 2KB client-side syntax highlighter that uses the CSS Custom Highlights API: a way to "idiomatically express 'I want to highlight this token' via CSS instead of injecting spans everywhere". Dave Rupert |
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Embed eSigning in Your App Without Sending Users Elsewhere — Text Tags, an embedded session URL, and an HMAC-verified webhook, from first request to executed PDF. Foxit sponsor |
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Mobile View: Test Desktop and Mobile Layouts Side by Side — A Chrome extension to let you test against 5 views at a time, including iPhone, Android, and tablets, with synchronized scrolling, rotate/scale the views, light/dark UI modes, and more. Mobile View |
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Form-Saver: Web Component That Saves/Restores Form Values — User-entered values are saved in localStorage to restore them if the session is ended prematurely and the values are cleared when the form is submitted. Live demos here. Aaron Gustafson |
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Dither: A Fine-Grained Vector Dithering Tool — A browser-based tool that lets you add custom dithering to any image. You can specify gradient types, choose from 9 styles, and select up to 8 colors (or start from a preset). Export is to SVG or PNG. I've tried many of these tools and this seems to consistently produce good results. Josh Pigford |
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Svelte Bits: Animated UI Components for Svelte — A Svelte port of React Bits (by the same creator), the popular suite of animation components for React. David Haz |
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Public Domain Image Archive: A Hand-Picked Collection of 11,000+ Out-of-Copyright Works
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type.lol: A Directory to Discover Typefaces from Independent Foundries
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🏙️ ...and finally |
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▶ A Walkable ASCII Cyberpunk City in One HTML File — A neat experiment and visual treat in one. It uses raycasting to render a city in ASCII characters, complete with roads, buildings, cars, and even people walking around. Getting the code for yourself requires a small donation, however. Grow Now! Games |
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