Frontend Focus

#​544 — June 1, 2022 | Read on the web

Customizing Color Fonts on the Web — Color fonts provide a way to add richness to your designs without sacrificing any of the many benefits of using plain text. Now, WebKit supports the CSS @font-palette-values property. This post looks at this new at-rule, how to use it to access predefined color palettes, and customize them to match your design.

Myles C. Maxfield and David Jonathan Ross (WebKit)

The 'Form' Element Created the Modern Web. Was It a Big Mistake? — “the <form> element was a pivot point for the entire technology industry. It is what changed the web from a read-only medium for physics papers into a read-write medium for anything.”

Paul Ford

Create a Better Interface for Any Business Problem in Retool — Retool provides a powerful platform to build your UI, connect your data, and publish your app 10x faster. Skip the boilerplate code with 90+ pre-built UI components, and write custom code nearly anywhere to customize how your apps look and work.

Retool sponsor

Creating a Perfect Table of Contents with HTML + CSS — A table of contents is easy to generate in word processing tools, but can be trickier to pull off in plain HTML and CSS. Here’s one approach.

Nicholas C. Zakas

'HTTPS Everywhere' Will Sunset in January 2023 — Major browsers now offer native support for an HTTPS only mode and Let's Encrypt makes TLS certificates available to everyone for free.. so mission accomplished, ten years on, for this browser extension that was always seeking to become redundant.

Electronic Frontier Foundation

⚡️ Quick bits:

📙 Tutorials, Articles & Opinion

Learn the Logic of Great Typography — This is a neat interactive typography tutorial (with real-time feedback), that aims to teach you some of the fundamentals on font choices, spacing, sizing, etc.

Erik D. Kennedy

▶  Sara Soueidan: 'Why Does Accessibility Matter?' — A 50-min chat where Vitaly Friedman talks in-depth to Sara Soueidan on why accessibility really matters and why it is so important to get it right. There’s a transcript here too if you’d rather read it.

Smashing Magazine podcast

Add Professional Scheduling to Your Web App — Bryntum's suite of web components includes powerful Gantt and resource scheduling widgets. Free 45-day trial.

Bryntum sponsor

Four Tradeoffs When Designing Navigation Menus — Shares the things that tend to “crop up again and again, regardless of the project, domain, or product” when creating menus.

Dan Brown

Readability: The Optimal Line Length? — The length of text lines substantially impacts their readability. Here’s some best practice pointers.

Edward Scott

An Introduction to Contiuous Integration and Delivery/Deployment (CI/CD) for Frontend Devs
Denedo Oghenetega Joseph

Manage Accessible Design System Themes with CSS color-contrast()
Daniel Yuschick

Four Cool Hover Effects That Use CSS Text Shadow
Temani Afif

Jobs

Software Engineers — Sticker Mule is the Internet's most "kick ass" brand. Our software team operates from 17 countries, and we're always looking for more exceptional engineers.
Sticker mule

(Senior) JavaScript Engineer (m/f/d) – Full or Part-Time — You continuously improve the frontend of Civey together with our team. We offer a hybrid working model.
Civey GmbH

Find Frontend Engineering Jobs with Hired — Create a profile on Hired to connect with hiring managers at growing startups and Fortune 500 companies. It's free for job-seekers.
Hired

🔧 Code, Tools & Resources

Contrast Grid: Test Foreground and Background Color Combos for Compliance with WCAG 2.0 — This interactive tool lets you quickly create a grid of examples so you can test a number of different combinations while quickly being able to discern the accessibility of each.

eightshapes

Obfuscate: A Firefox Extension to Obfuscate Text on Web Pages — Such as for when you want to take a screenshot showing a page’s general layout but don’t want to share (potentially) private data.

Vincent Tunru

Issue Tracking Has Never Been Easier with Shortcut

Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse.io) sponsor

System Font Stack: A Quick Reference for CSS Font Stacks Based on System Fonts — Includes three “stacks”, one each for sans-serif, serif, and mono.

Tom MacWright

Random Users: API to Generate Random User Names and Profile Pics for Placeholders — You can select gender, shapes/filters for the images, and pixel-based avatars, all via a simple URL-based API.

Frank Eno

Openverse: Openly Licensed Images, Audio and More — From the WordPress team, a search engine with access to 600 million images and audio files that are in the public domain or using a Creative Commons license. More info on the project here.

Wordpress

Meshed Up: 48 Beautiful Mesh Gradients (Inline SVG or Figma)
Michael Andreuzza