It's been some while since there's been an update in this channel, but there's no panic on the ship. Front-end news is back! Also, my workload is growing, so I might post once a fortnight.
This week brings updates on React and Vue, an interesting read about preloading files, and an experiment with going build-less. On the CSS side, there are pushes for Masonry layout, display Content, and more.
“…it turns out that most sites on the internet ship code that is transpiled to ES5, yet still doesn’t work in IE 11 - meaning the transpiler and polyfill bloat is being downloaded by 100% of their users, but benefiting none of them.”
If you are in a hurry, The Final thoughts in the article summarise it, but it is worth reading all of it!
https://philipwalton.com/articles/the-state-of-es5-on-the-web/
Excellent article on the latest features in React 19 with code examples and explanations.
https://vercel.com/blog/whats-new-in-react-19
This article shows what an effort it is to get new features for JavaScript. Even just to get the process in place and move away from a single Word document. Instead of going from Stage 2 to Stage 3, the idea is to have Stage 2.7. Somehow, that reminds me of Platform 9 and 3/4, but that's my weirdness 🙂
https://thenewstack.io/inside-ecmascript-javascript-standard-gets-an-extra-stage/
I definitely remember those times when using FTP, changing Style.css, saving it, and seeing changes after refreshing the browser. Anyway, Max Böck did an interesting experiment to get things moving without building tools like in those old times.
https://mxb.dev/blog/buildless/
This version has no breaking changes but quite a lot of improvements. It has improved performance and memory usage, optimised reactivity tracking, and many more updates. I'm not sure why Vue is announcing it as a minor.
https://blog.vuejs.org/posts/vue-3-5
You can preload fonts and reduce font jumping when system fonts are replaced with loaded ones. This is an interesting discovery around crossorigin and Chromium browsers.
https://www.lkhrs.com/blog/2024/preloading/
This is the first working draft for the Masonry (or Waterfall) layout. It is similar to how the Pinterest website looks, but it is done with CSS only.
https://drafts.csswg.org/css-grid-3/
An interesting CSS property to build even smarter layouts.
https://ishadeed.com/article/display-contents/
https://component-odyssey.com/articles/13-improving-performance-by-changing-two-lines-of-css
I posted articles about the :has() selector many times, but this one is really good for understanding the benefits of knowing and using it.
https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/has/
Excellent summary from Nicholas C. Zakas on how to structure technical information.
https://humanwhocodes.com/blog/2024/09/present-technical-information-storytelling-approach/
It is amazing what people come up with simple checkbox site.
https://eieio.games/essays/the-secret-in-one-million-checkboxes/
Some of those are pretty good!
https://alvaromontoro.com/blog/68060/bad-css-dad-jokes
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