#444 — June 10, 2020

Read on the Web

Frontend Focus

Current browser support for 'is()' via caniuse.com

CSS :is() and :where() Are Coming to Browsers — Šime Vidas explains how these new CSS pseudo-classes can be used (for reducing repetition, and keeping specificity low respectively).

Web Platform News

The Complete Guide to CSS Media Queries — A solid, thorough guide on all things CSS media queries, good as a primer, or worth revisiting for a refresher.

Polypane

JAMstacked: An Email Update on The Evolving JAMstack Ecosystem — Join Brian Rinaldi for a regular email update on all things JAMstack, including all of the latest resources developers need to know about.

Cooperpress sponsor

Animate.css v4: Just-add-water CSS Animations — This is one of the most popular of the ‘drop-in’ CSS animation libraries, and they’ve now moved to version 4. Significantly, among the changes is a prefix on classes.

daniel eden

Cool Little CSS Grid Tricks for Your Blog — An exploration of how you can use CSS Grid, along with properties such as auto-fit and auto-fill, to produce some nifty looking image galleries.

Ana Tudor

Publishers Sue Internet Archive For 'Mass Copyright Infringement' — Whilst the legal action here is specifically to do with ebooks, it’s important to underline the excellent preservation work of the Internet Archive (which includes the Wayback Machine) and how hugely important it is to the long-term conservation of the web as a whole.

Colin Dwyer (NPR)

⚡️ Quick bits:

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Frontend Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Join X-Team and work on projects for companies like Riot Games, FOX, Coinbase, and more. Work from anywhere.

X-Team

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📙 Tutorials & Opinion

The Service Worker Lifecycle Explained — Explaining the lifecycle of Service Workers in PWAs and how to update them as fast as possible.

Felix Gerschau About

Grid for Layout, Flexbox for Components — Ahmad looks at the key differences between these two layout options, and although there’s no right or wrong here, he recommends some use-cases for where you may want to use each.

Ahmad Shadeed

The Mad Magazine Fold-In Effect in CSS — An impressive CSS-only recreation of the Mad magazine fold-ins (where folding a printed page would reveal a hidden message in the artwork).

Thomas Park

Quick Tips for High Contrast Mode — A few simple pointers to improve the High Contrast Mode experience for Windows users.

Sarah Higley

Scale Your Software Projects Without Losing Speed — See how Shopify used Buildkite CI/CD to scale from 300 to 1800 engineers while keeping build times under 5 minutes.

Buildkite sponsor

How to Create a Motion Hover Effect for a Background Image Grid — You’ll need to see the demo to get it, but it’s a neat visual effect well suited for when you’ve got a variety of photos to illustrate a concept.

Mary Lou

Styling Numbered Lists with CSS Counters — How to use CSS counters to customize the appearance of numbers in an ordered list.

Supun Kavinda

CSS Viewport Units: A Quick Start — Covers vh, vw, vmin and vmax.

Asha Laxmi and Maria Antonietta Perna

Sass Color Functions in CSS

Jim Nielsen

🔧 Code, Tools and Resources

CSS Grid: Newspaper Layout — This is an excellent demo showing how Grid can be used to create a responsive newspaper-style layout.

Olivia Ng codepen

FAB: Frontend Application Bundles — A bundle format for frontend applications that unify static sites, SPAs, server-side rendering (SSR), and server-side logic in a single format that’s easy to deploy.

Frontend Application Bundles

Grid.js: An Advanced Table Control — A lightweight, advanced table plugin that can work alongside React, Angular, Vue, or, well, nothing. Check out some of the examples for more on how to use it. It uses Preact under the hood.

Afshin Mehrabani

Quotebacks: Embed Quotes Without Losing Context — This is a small library that can embed a quote in an attractive format within the source context. Can also be used as a Chrome extension that saves to local storage.

Tom Critchlow and Toby Shorin

Sorted CSS Colors: A Way to Navigate CSS Colors By Hue — This feels like quite a natural way to navigate the over 100 ‘named’ CSS colors (like Gainsboro, Firebrick, and LawnGreen).

Mustafa Enes

SweetAlert: Attractive Modal Popup Alerts/Messages — Bills itself as ‘a beautiful replacement for JavaScript’s “alert”’

Tristan Edwards et al.

μJam: A Minimalistic Jamstack Approach for Creating GitHub-Pages Hosted Sites — Use Visual Studio Code as a lightweight authoring and publishing tool for small to medium websites.

Stefan Goessner