#371 — December 19, 2018

Read on the Web

Frontend Focus

We’re taking a week off for Christmas so there won’t be an issue on Boxing Day, but we’re back on January 2nd, 2019 with a roundup of the best items from 2018, so we’ll see you then. Thanks for reading!

— Peter Cooper, editor

Handling Broken Images with Service Workers — A brief tutorial on using a service worker to serve an alternative image in the event the original doesn’t load in as expected. If you’ve not got your head around service workers yet, this could be an easy way in.

Ire Aderinokun

I Used The Web for a Day Using a Screen Reader — One of our most popular links this year was I Used The Web For A Day With Just A Keyboard. Well, the same author has now put himself in the shoes of a non-sighted user and describes what we can do as web developers to help. There’s a lot to take on board here.

Chris Ashton

Learn How to Plan an Angular Application — Angular devs—take a look at this checklist of things to consider when planning your next Angular app. Make an informed decision about tooling choices during development all the way through deployment. Get your free copy today.

Progress Kendo UI sponsor

Researching a Property in the CSS Specifications — One great thing about CSS is that all of the properties, values, and other features are documented in formal specs – but how can you dig around these mysterious-seeming documents? Rachel shows us how.

Rachel Andrew

Quicklink: Faster Subsequent Page-Loads by Prefetching Visible Links — A new project from Google Chrome Labs that aims to make subsequent page loads quicker by prefetching links that are currently in the view point during idle time.

Google Chrome Labs

A Recap of Frontend Development in 2018 — We’ll be back on January 2 to do our own 2018 recap, but if you can’t wait, this article does a neat roundup of the most important frontend developments of 2018.

Trey Huffine

‘Why I No Longer Use D3.js’ — Rather than automatically ‘jumping to D3’ for Web data visualizations, the author lists a few reasons as to why you should reconsider using it.

Paul Sweeney

? 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

Join Our Career Marketplace & Get Matched With A Job You Love — Through Hired, software engineers have transparency into salary offers, competing opportunities, and job details.

Hired

? Articles & Tutorials

Checking If An Input Is Empty With CSS

Zell Liew

When Do The :hover, :focus, and :active Pseudo-Classes Apply? — :hover, :focus, and :active are CSS pseudo-classes that are determined by a user’s actions.

Ire Aderinokun

What If Your Best Programmer Quit Tomorrow? — 51% of programmer turnover is preventable. Learn how to become the boss your team dreams of, today.

MarcusBlankenship.com sponsor

How and When to Use the tabindex Attribute

Ire Aderinokun

Keep Math in the CSS — Rather than pre-calculating certain values for your CSS, keeping the ‘working’ in the source has readability benefits.

Chris Coyier

Is There A Cold War Between Android and Chrome Because of PWAs? — A look at the potential friction between Chrome and Android’s handling of progressive web apps.

Maximiliano Firtman

Building Web Accessibility in 2019 — “I believe the web needs a new flexible and extensible technology to give web authors control over content they create.”

Alexander Surkov

? Code and Tools

Bootstrap 3.4.0 Released — An overdue update to the older v3.x line, addressing some quality of life issues, XSS fixes, and build tooling updates. There’s also some news on 4.x developments.

Mark Otto, Jacob Thornton, and Bootstrap contributors

Firefox Beta 65.0beta Adds Support for WebP Image Format

Mozilla

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

Manifold sponsor

A Minimal Google Analytics Snippet — Forget the 73KB of code Google’s ‘Tag Manager’ and Analytics library needs and use this 1KB of code instead to track your pageviews (and only pageviews) with Google Analytics.

David Kunnen

Rallax: A Vanilla JS Dynamic Parallax Scrolling Effect Library

Christopher Cavalea

PSone.css: A PlayStation 1-Style CSS Framework — Along similar lines to NES.css which we linked a few weeks ago.

98mprice and Igor Guastalla

Serverless Hosting Beta. $50 in Free Credits to NorthStack for Devs

NorthStack By Pagely sponsor

sandspiel: A ‘Falling Sand’ Web Game Built with Rust and WebGL — Including because it’s Christmas, I love powder toy style games, and it’s really smooth. It’s open source too.

Max Bittker