#378 — February 13, 2019

Read on the Web

? Frontend Focus

Rendering on the Web: Exploring the Server-Client Spectrum — A look at different forms of Web rendering from both simple, server-rendered HTML all the way along to fully client-rendered layouts. If you want to understand terms like CSR, rehydration, or pre-rendering, this is for you.

Jason Miller and Addy Osmani

Bootstrap 4.3.0 Released — Includes new utilities, optional responsive font sizes, improved CSS compilation, and more. There’s also notes on version 5 planning here, with news that Bootstrap 5 will drop jQuery for vanilla JavaScipt and also drop support for IE.

Mark Otto, Jacob Thornton, and Bootstrap contributors

Create a Serverless Powered API in 10 Minutes — Use Cloudflare Workers to cache content while still preventing unwanted access with HMAC and JSON Web Tokens.

Cloudflare Workers sponsor

To Grid or to Flex? — Unpacks when and where you might want to use CSS grids or flexbox, and some reasons for choosing one or the other.

Michelle Barker

Paint the Picture, Not the Frame: How Browsers Provide Everything Users Need — Instead of tweaking or trying to control browser functionality, this article makes the case for leaving key features to the browser to ensure the most accessible experience.

Eric Bailey

Apple Is Removing ‘Do Not Track’ From Safari — Ironically enough, the DNT standard being removed is to prevent its “potential use as a fingerprinting variable”. Thankfully, improved privacy and data protection seems to be slowly becoming a more default feature in browsers now.

Kashmir Hill

Microsoft Security Chief: IE Is Not A Browser, So Stop Using It As Your Default — A Microsoft exec has warned that Internet Explorer is a ‘compatibility solution’ and should only be used selectively. Preaching to the choir here, and this is, we suspect, the very end of IE’s long story for us. ?

Liam Tung (ZDNet)

Announcing the State of CSS 2019 Survey — From the creator of the popular ‘State of JavaScript’ survey comes a new study looking to identify key trends in CSS.

Sacha Greif

? Jobs

Sr. Fullstack Engineer (Remote) — Sticker Mule is looking for passionate developers to join our remote team. Come help us become the Internet’s best place to shop and work.

Sticker Mule

Senior Frontend Engineer – React (Remote, Palo Alto, Vancouver) — Join our team and help us bring orchestration and collaboration tools that promote SRE best practices to teams around the world.

Blameless

Try Vettery — Vettery specializes in developer roles and is completely free for job seekers.

Vettery

? Tutorials & Opinion

Links That Don’t Go Anywhere Should Be Buttons — Advises against using an anchor element for invoking JavaScript functionality, instead recommending using the button element (which comes with “a boatload” of accessibility benefits).

Christian Heilmann

How to Animate a Blob of Text with SVG and Text Clipping — This is a really neat effect and well suited to a homepage.

Zach Saucier

Webinar: CMAF Low Latency — Hear from Shilpa Murthy (Bitmovin), Jerome Blanc (Anevia), and Ashok Lalwani (Fastly) to learn more about how the current architecture is shifting to support a low latency framework.

Bitmovin sponsor

Constructable Stylesheets: Seamless Reusable Styles — Constructable Stylesheets are a new way to create and distribute reusable styles when using Shadow DOM and will be shipping in Chrome 73.

Jason Miller

How to Style Different Sites with One CSS Collection — An interesting approach here, driving two sites using the same CSS collection.

Gabrien Symons

Do I Have to Add A Dark Mode Now? — Reasons for and against adding a dark mode to an app or website.

Koos Looijesteijn

HTML Tables: All There Is to Know About Them — A good primer on HTML tables, elements and attributes, and when and when not to use them.

Alexander Gilmanov beginner

Whitepaper: Learn How to Plan a React Application

Progress KendoReact sponsor

Building A Modern Carousel with CSS Scroll Snap, Smooth Scrolling, and Pinch-zoom

Nolan Lawson

? Code and Tools

Uppy: A Next-Gen File Uploader for Web Browsers

Transloadit

ImmortalDB: A ‘Relentless’ Key-Value Store for The Browser — Data is redundantly stored in cookies, IndexedDB, LocalStorage, and SessionStorage, and self heals as needed.

Ansgar Grunseid

Shop Like a Developer – Discover and Experiment with Hot New Cloud Services ?

Manifold sponsor

The National Park Typeface: A New Open Font — A free, Web-friendly font (in four weights) inspired by the routed text commonly used on signs in America’s national parks.

DO Studio

Text Distortion Effects using Blotter.js — Some text distortion experiments (distort text as you scroll/move the mouse) using the Blotter.js library.

Mary Lou

Three.js Ballooning — A beautiful little demo of a hot air balloon flying over a 3D landscape. It’s open source too, if you want to play with the code yourself.

Alexander Perrin demo

? The Firefox DevTools team seek your help..

CSS Layout Debugging Survey — This quick one-page survey from the Firefox DevTools team is seeking responses. They’re looking to find out what CSS layout problems you run into.

Firefox DevTools Team