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✍️ Hello, and welcome to the last issue of Frontend Focus for 2024! It's been a packed year for the web platform, with plenty of exciting new features added to our developer toolbelt, improvements in browser cooperation, the developing AI tooling situation, and much more. As ever, we're going to take a look back over what we've shared in Frontend Focus throughout 2024 and revisit some of the highlights — you'll no doubt find something that's well worth bookmarking, sharing on, or revisiting (or maybe you missed it the first time). If you've enjoyed the newsletter and found it valuable this year, please consider following us on Bluesky, and maybe forwarding this on to a friend — perhaps even someone starting their frontend journey in the new year. A big thanks for reading. We'll be back in your inbox in early January. Now, it's a big issue, so let's get started! |
🗓️ Top Ten of 2024 |
01: Twelve Modern CSS One-Line Upgrades — Stephanie shared this list of a dozen CSS properties that are well worth knowing earlier in the year — the one-line upgrades here will help reduce technical debt, remove unnecessary lines of JavaScript, and score some easy wins for the user experience, too. Stephanie Eckles |
Complete Intro to React v9: New Project, Modern Stack — Join Brian Holt in building a pizza delivery app from scratch. Master hooks, TanStack Router, testing, and React 19 features in this comprehensive guide to modern React development. No prior React experience needed. Frontend Masters sponsor |
02: Five CSS Snippets Every Frontend Developer Should Know in 2024 — Adam did this in 2023, and the 2024 version proved very popular too. All the snippets here are toolbelt worthy, powerful, CSS tips (including nesting, sub grid, container query units, etc) that will be just as valuable as we head into 2025. Adam Argyle |
03: Inline Conditionals in CSS? — In the summer the CSS Working Group resolved to add an inline Lea Verou |
04: What You Need to Know about Modern CSS — A bookmarkable guide from this past Spring featuring a list of all the then new additions to CSS (think nesting, view transitions, Chris Coyier |
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05: How to Center a Div — The fact that so many of you tapped on this one tells us that it's still something of a tricky ordeal to get right. Yes, it's easier now thanks to new tools (Flex, Grid, etc), but which to use? Josh shares the trade-offs between different approaches, and the best strategies to use. Josh W Comeau |
06: The Magic of Clip Path — This post sets out to “inspire you and show you that thinking outside the box can lead to some great animations” — all via the magic of the very powerful Emil Kowalski |
AuthKit: The World’s Best Login Box — Powered by WorkOS & Radix — AuthKit is a complete solution for authentication, authorization, and user management. It’s free up to 1 million MAUs and comes standard with RBAC, bot protection, MFA, and more. AuthKit sponsor |
07: CSS Selectors — A thorough, complete guide covering all of the various methods we have to select elements in CSS (such as pseudo-selectors, nested selectors, attribute selectors, etc) and how to use them for applying styles. Geoff Graham |
08: An Interactive Guide to CSS Container Queries — This is a detailed explainer on CSS container queries, exploring the problems they solve, how they work, and how we can use them in our workflows. Lots of code and visuals to help things along too. Well worth bookmarking. Ahmad Shadeed |
💡 Josh Comeau also took a look at Container Queries this year, noting that adoption so far isn't all that high. Here he goes into why that may be, reintroduces us to the feature, and suggests how we may want to approach using it. |
09: How to Make Your Web Page Faster Before It Even Loads — Salma looked at the events that happen before the first byte of a web page is even received by the browser. Asking if we can measure those events, and subsequently optimize them to make our web pages and applications load even faster. Neat. Salma Alam-Naylor |
10: The Frontend Developer/Engineer Handbook 2024 — This incredibly in-depth and detailed guide on the current web development landscape was well received. It's remains a superb resource for getting up to speed on everything from code editors, CSS, UX, UI, the command line, performance, accessibility, testing, AI, and much, much more. Cody Lindley |
🧰 Popular Tools & Resources we shared this year |
Anchor Position Tool — CSS anchor positioning is on the way, and one rather neat layout mechanism that’s part of the spec is Una Kravets |
Speedometer 3.0: A Browser Benchmark for Webapp Responsiveness — 2024 gave us a new major release of Speedometer — the first with a cross-industry collaborative approach supported by each major browser engine (Blink, Gecko, WebKit). Version 3 added in many new tests, performance wins, and improvements. You can run the test for yourself here. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla |
CSS Grid Generator — This handy browser-based tool got plenty of you clicking — you can use it to easily create custom CSS grid layouts — you can specify the number of columns, rows, and gutter size. Kristjan Retter |
A Showcase of What's Now Possible with Progressive Web Apps
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Jake's 'Slightly More Opinionated' Modern CSS Reset
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Barba.js: Create Smooth Visual Transitions Between Pages
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Plain Vanilla: A Tutorial Website for Modern, Vanilla Web Development
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PixiJS v8: A Library For Building Striking 2D WebGL Experiences
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