#416 — November 6, 2019

Read on the Web

Frontend Focus

Things We Can’t (Yet) Do In CSS — A look at some common layout patterns that aren’t yet achievable in currently widely supported CSS standards and the forthcoming CSS specifications that might enable them in future.

Rachel Andrew

Getting Your Sites Ready for The New Microsoft Edge — Microsoft Edge Beta version 79 is now available. It’s the final beta before the stable release which is expected early next year. Here’s what you need to know to get ready. (Oh, and it’s sporting a new look logo, but more on that below.)

Kyle Pflug and John Jansen (Microsoft)

Become a Full Stack Software Engineer with Flatiron School — Learn the technical skills you need to launch a career in tech as a Software Engineer, Data Scientist, or UX/UI Designer in just 15 weeks. Our dedicated career coaches will work with you one-on-one and help place you in a brand new job, or your money back (see terms).

Flatiron School sponsor

?  New CSS for Styling Underlines on the Web — Jen Simmons runs through some new CSS properties, including text-decoration-thickness and text-underline-offset. It’s worth noting however that these have limited support right now.

Mozilla Developer

ScrollToTextFragment: A Proposal to Allow Specifying A Text Snippet in A URL Fragment — Proposes adding support for specifying a text snippet in the URL. When navigating to such a URL, the browser will find the first instance of the text snippet in the page and bring it into view.

Web Incubator CG

A Business Case for Dropping Internet Explorer — Still supporting IE11? Ollie Williams puts forward how the distance between it and every other major browser is an increasingly gaping chasm, and that dropping support for it may now be a financially prudent decision.

CSS-Tricks

? Jobs

Frontend Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Work with the world’s leading brands, from anywhere. Travel the world while being part of the most energizing community of developers.

X-Team

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

Vettery

? News, Tutorials & Opinion

Microsoft Unveils New Edge Browser Logo That No Longer Looks Like Internet Explorer — The new version of Edge will ditch the the blue E logo of old for a new look, which I guess you could sum up as ‘surfing the web’ in logo form. How do you like it?

Tom Warren

A Comparison of Static Form Providers — A high level comparison of several providers who essentially provide the backend for your HTML forms.

Silvestar Bistrovi?

AirPods Pro Page Performance — When Apple launched their latest earbuds last week, our corner of Twitter was quick to point out the page was rather bloated, making loads of requests. Here’s an expanded critique on the page in question.

Holger Bartel

WebSockets Vs Server-Sent Events (SSE): Which Should You Use When? — When should you use SSE over WebSockets, and vice versa? Check this comprehensive protocol comparison.

Ably sponsor

Creating Online Environments That Work Well For Older Users — A significant part of the Internet-using population is aged 50 or older (including the people who invented it!) Here are some considerations developers need to take into account concerning older users.

Barry Rueger

The Evolution of Material Design’s Text Fields — How user research reshaped the design of Google’s open-source text fields, seeing them move to a more traditional form field design.

Susanna Zaraysky

Signs Your Website Feels More Like A Haunted House Than A Welcoming Home — A look at ‘offputting’ Web design. Admittedly, I have a soft spot for some of these quirky examples(!)

Suzanne Scacca

The Trick to Animating the Dot on the Letter “i” — A neat little technique that combines the Turkish letter “?” and a period.

Ali Churcher

Microsoft Confirm Their New Chromium-Powered Edge Browser Is Coming to Linux

Liam Dawe

Learn How to Build a Sales Dashboard with React

Progress KendoReact sponsor

Firefox to Discontinue Sideloaded Extensions

Mozilla

The Myths of Color Contrast Accessibility

UX Movement

? Code, Tools & Resources

Pure CSS Oil Painting — Another piece of highly detailed CSS-only art from Diana Smith. This is best viewed in Chrome, but it’s interesting to see how it looks in other browsers.

Diana Smith

Recursive Sans & Mono — This is a new ‘highly-flexible’ type family that takes advantage of variable font tech. It’s due to be available through Google Fonts at some point, but in the mean time you can follow the repo for updates.

Arrow Type

A Web Extension Starter Kit — A kit for building ‘Write Once, Run on Any Browser’ extensions via the Web Extensions API.

Abhijith Vijayan

vue-interactive-paycard: Credit Card Form with Smooth Interactions — This is really slick. Check out the live CodePen demo.

Muhammed Erdem