#433 — March 25, 2020

Read on the Web

Frontend Focus

A Practical Overview of CSS Houdini — A detailed look at each part of Houdini, a group of APIs that give developers direct access to the CSS Object Model, including current browser support (quickly improving) and how its features can be used today using progressive enhancement.

Adrian Bece

Safari Now Blocking Third-Party Cookies By Default, Plus Expires Local Storage After 7 Days.. — Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) has been in beta for a few months, and is now live in both the iOS and macOS builds. It introduces significant privacy changes, including cross-site cookies now being blocked by default. There is also a '7 day cap on all script-writeable storage' (including Indexed DB, localStorage and sessionStorage) which Aral Balkan suggests “effectively kills offline web apps”.

John Wilander (WebKit)

New Course: State Management in Pure React, v2 — The root of most performance and maintainability issues in large React apps is often how you manage your state. This course focuses on pure React APIs such as hooks, context, useReducer, and custom hooks.

Frontend Masters sponsor

Embracing Modern Image Formats: Leveraging WebP in HTML and React — A thorough look at how using next-gen image formats along with the <picture> element can reduce image sizes dramatically.

Josh W Comeau

▶  The Complete AEA DC 2019 Now Online — Usually videos from ‘An Event Apart’ sessions get released gradually, but due to current circumstances they’ve opted to release them all in one go. There’s some good stuff here including excellent talks from Jen Simmons, Sara Soueidan, Aaron Gustafson and others.

An Event Apart

Chrome Releases Paused: There'll Be No Final Chrome 82 — The stable release of Chrome 81 was due to arrive last week, but this version remains in beta for the forseeable future as things are now on hiatus due to the current global crisis. Canary releases will continue shipping as planned.

Chrome Developers on Twitter

💻 Jobs

Find a Dev Job Through Vettery — Vettery is completely free for job seekers. Make a profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers.

Vettery

UX/Frontend Engineer @ Siteline — Join the founding engineering team at Siteline and help us revolutionize the payments process for construction.

Siteline

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

📙 News, Tutorials & Opinion

Flexbox and Absolute Positioning — Looks at what happens when you absolutely position a flex item and talks about a related bug in Firefox’s developer tools.

Chen Hui Jing

How Do You Make Video Accessible? — Lots of good reminders here on video accessibility, covering captions, subtitles, audio descriptions, transcripts, and more.

Suzanne Scacca

CSS Can Influence Screenreaders — Runs through a few examples of how your CSS can significantly change what some screen readers announce.

Ben Myers

Maintaining Performance — Dave discusses how shaving 33s off page load time (by fixing how fonts are loaded) helped him recognize some larger lessons about performance over the long haul.

Dave Rupert

31 Days of #MarchMediaMadness. New Cloudinary Challenges, Win Daily

Cloudinary sponsor

Customize Media Notifications and Playback Controls with The Media Session API — A look at how to customize media notifications and respond to media related events, such as seeking or track changing with the Media Session API.

François Beaufort

How to Create an Extruded Hover Effect with Box Shadows — Now this may have some performance implications, but the end result is a neat effect. The article refers to the effect as an “accordion”, but not in the UI sense.

Sarah L. Fossheim

How to Use the URL API with Vanilla JavaScript — A simple look at a lesser-known Web API, which lets you grab various bits including the hash, hostname, pathname, protocol, etc.

Chris Ferdinandi

Playing With Particles Using the Web Animations API

Louis Hoebregts

How to use the currentColor value in CSS

JS Craft

Indicating Scroll Position on a Page With CSS

Preethi Sam

   🗓 Upcoming Events

StayAtHomeConf, March 29 — Online — An online conference streamed on YouTube. Has a few talks which may be of interest to a frontend crowd, including one on accessibility.

PerfMatters, March 31 - April 1 — Online — A web performance conference, which has now moved to be a virtual event, with a focus on frontend web performance with talks by internationally renowned performance developers.

FrontCon, April 1-3 August 12 - 14 — Riga, Latvia — This event has been postponed until August due to the Coronavirus outbreak.

You Gotta Love Frontend Conference, May 14-15 August 27-28 — Vilnius, Lithuania — Described as having "big names with irresistible talks and a whole lot of fun". This event has been postponed, and will now take place in late August.

📌 If you're hosting, or know of any, upcoming online events that our readers should know about then just hit reply with a few details so we can share them in a future issue.

🔧 Code, Tools and Resources

tabler-icons: A Set of Over 300 Free High-Quality SVG Icons — Here's a nice collection of practical icons. MIT-licensed.

Tabler

Buttono: A Flexible Sass Mixin for Creating BEM-Style Buttons — Buttons have a consistent look across modern browers and include focus styles for accessibility.

Hasan Aydoğdu

CSS2JS: Convert CSS to a JavaScript Object — Got CSS and need it in JavaScript object format for JSX or some CSS-in-JS library? This may help.

dotenv

Uppload: A 'Better' JavaScript Image Uploader — Open source, highly customizable with 30+ plugins and can be used with any file uploading backend.

El Niño

Web Font of the Week

Ostrich Sans

Although not new, this remains a popular typeface. Ostrich Sans is a modern sans-serif font featuring long stems (or necks if you will). It's available in a variety of styles and weights — I particularly like the Black and Heavy variants. Here's the related GitHub repo.