#435 — April 8, 2020

Read on the Web

Frontend Focus

Changes in Firefox 75 That Will Affect Developers — Version 75 of Firefox dropped yesterday, bringing with it support for lazy loading, additions to the Web Animations API, implementation of the min(), max(), and clamp() CSS functions, plus a handful of accessibility wins. All of the user-facing features are detailed in the release notes here.

Mozilla

Why Do Some HTML Elements Become Deprecated? — An in-depth look at what factors influence obsolete and deprecated elements (such as and ), and a discussion of the subtleties around elements that seem like they should be deprecated but aren’t.

Ryan Grist

Webinar: Challenges of Building Complex Dashboards with Open Source Components — Charting components and open source libraries may get you basic dashboards quickly, but at what cost? Join this webinar with Lean UX leader Ryan MacCarrigan to learn about the challenges of designing dashboards for different user personas.

Logi Analytics sponsor

How Stack Overflow Built Its New ‘Dark Mode’ — Building a ‘dark mode’ for a site as complex as Stack Overflow isn’t just about switching some colors around in the CSS. Here’s the process they went through.

Aaron Shekey

Perflink: Low Friction JS Benchmarks You Can Share via URL — Version 2 just launched, details here. Tests now run isolated in web workers, ability to save and fork to/from local storage, works cross-browser, and more.

luke jackson

Extending the Limits of CSS — This is a bit of a history lesson on CSS, specifically dealing with how some in the community have done things with CSS that at one time nobody thought would be possible.

Rina Diane Caballar

? Jobs

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

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

? Tutorials & Opinion

An Introduction to the Web Contact Picker API — A look at the new Contact Picker API, a Chrome only API (for now) that allows web apps to resemble native ones in allowing users to select entries from their contact lists and share the details with a web page.

Phil Nash

Rendering Charts with OffscreenCanvas — Rendering charts can be an intensive operation for browsers, but what if you could delegate such work to a Web Worker? This post looks at what performance improvements you can realistically expect.

Chris Price

Our Tech Skills Platform Is Free for the Month of April. Start Today

Pluralsight sponsor

?  Hacking Digital Style Guides for Accessibility: Type, Colour, Imagery — A mindful primer on how to approach certain accessibility considerations in your next project.

Tatiana Mac

?  How to Sing a Song with the Speech Synthesis API and async/await — A fun little project if you want to play along.

Jad Joubran

Getting JavaScript to Talk to CSS and Sass — Despite being bedfellows for years, sharing data between JavaScript and CSS has not always been the simplest task.

Marko Ilic

Create Animated Loading Text with CSS — A neat little effect, getting text to move up and down like a wave.

Cody Pearce

10 Headless CMS Options for your JAMstack Website — A detailed and comprehensive overview of the headless CMS landscape that, including pros and cons of each option. (FYI, we’ve launched a new JAMstack focused newsletter if you dabble in that world.)

Nebojsa Radakovic

Centering Things with CSS Flexbox — Fairly basic for those well-versed in Flexbox, but a great start for beginners (includes an accompanying screencast).

Chris Sevilleja beginner

? Code, Tools and Resources

Accessible UI Component Libraries Roundup — A good list of options for libraries that are built with accessibility in mind.

Raghavendra Satish Peri

MVP.css: A Minimalist Stylesheet for HTML Elements — No class names, no frameworks, just semantic HTML. 7kb.

Andy Brewer

Faster CI/CD for All Your Software Projects Using Buildkite — See how Shopify scaled from 300 to 1800 engineers while keeping their build times under 5 minutes.

Buildkite sponsor

Meanderer: A Micro-Library for Scaling CSS Motion Path Strings — Generates scaled (i.e. resized proportionally) CSS offset-paths, which is a feature that allows you to animate an object along a custom path.

jhey tompkins

A CSS ‘Grab n Go’ Visual Editor — Generates valid CSS (or SASS, SCSS and LESS) code for border-radius, border, box-shadow, text-shadow, filter and transform properties.

Veliov Group

A CSS Animation-Delay Demo — Consider this a little interactive guide to the different effects you can achieve with delays and variables.

Jhey Tompkins codepen