Web Design: #331: Firefox 59, Houdini and the 2018 Frontend Tooling Survey

Wednesday, March 14, 2018

#331: Firefox 59, Houdini and the 2018 Frontend Tooling Survey

#331 — March 14, 2018

Frontend Focus

Understanding Margin Collapse in CSS — A visual look at a fundamental CSS concept: margins that 'collapse' against each other. Except when they don't.

Jonathan Harrell

Say Hello to Houdini and the CSS Paint API — Houdini is a W3C effort to build ways for developers to get low-level access to CSS features and the CSS Paint API leans on that work in letting you dynamically generate graphics that are then used in CSS properties. Still experimental but this is a fine intro to tech that may be big news later on.

Will Boyd

Why Your Site is Slow — Issues like slow queries and redundant JS files are often blamed when a site is slow, although there are numerous factors that can affect performance. This presentation dives into the many answers to this question and looks for the root causes.

Pantheon sponsor

▶ Using Chrome's 'Local Overrides' to Test Performance Hypotheses — A practical look at local overrides, introduced in Chrome 65, a feature to maintain changes you make in DevTools across fresh page loads.

Harry Roberts

Swapping Images with the 'sizes' Attribute — sizes lets you help the browser in picking the right image when multiple options are available via srcset, but it can be used creatively to good effect as seen in the loupe demo here.

Scott Jehl

Take the 2018 Front-End Tooling Survey — Looking to gather input from frontend devs and shed some light on the tooling habits across the web dev industry. This has been run a few times before with interesting results.

Ashley Nolan

Firefox 59 Released: What's New for Developers — Firefox 59 has entered general release. Nothing huge for developers, but some cool stuff including calc() is now supported in color values and media query values, font-optical-sizing, Pointer Events, and developer tool improvements.

Mozilla

💻 Jobs

Frontend Developer at X-Team (Remote) — We help our developers keep learning and growing every day. Unleash your potential. Work from anywhere. Join X-Team.

X-Team

Senior Frontend Engineer (Berlin) — Explore conversational commerce with Google Assistant, chatbots, and social media to bring the best experience to our customers.

ZALANDO

Find a Job You're Passionate About — Vettery connects you directly to hiring managers at over 4,000 top companies. Make a profile today and land your dream job.

Vettery

📰 News

Happy 29th Birthday to the World Wide Web — Without it, you might be reading Gopher Weekly right now.

Coralie Mercier (W3C)

CSS Text Decoration Module Level 4: First Public Working Draft — Covers CSS features relating to text decoration - underlines, shadows, etc.

W3C

CityJSConf: March 26 (London) — Tickets for the Kyle Simpson workshop sessions are still available.

Firefox to Disable W3C Proximity & Ambient Light Sensor APIs

Catalin Cimpanu

📝 Articles and Tutorials

CSS Grid One Year On — It's a year since Firefox became the first browser to ship spec-compliant CSS Grid support (IE 10 had an earlier variant.)

Rachel Andrew

▶ CSS Variables: A New Hope — Truths, myths, and lies about CSS variables. Plus some neat demos.

Mauricio Palma

Auto-Sizing Columns in CSS Grid: `auto-fill` vs `auto-fit` — "At first glace of the names, it might seem like auto-fill and auto-fit are opposites. But in fact, the difference between is quite subtle."

Sara Soueidan

Building a Static Site With Components Using Nunjucks

Smashing Magazine

Notched Boxes with 'clip-path' — Forget rounded corners on elements, what about angled corners?

Chris Coyier

▶ Writing CSS with Accessibility in Mind

Manuel Matuzovic

A DIY Web Accessibility Blueprint

Beth Raduenzel

Stitch: The Latest (And Best) Way to Build Your App

mongodb sponsor

How to Find and Fix Brittle CSS