~frontendfocus | Bookmarks (277)

HTML Attributes vs. DOM Properties — They’re completely different, but often coupled. Jake outlines the the difference, and why it matters.

Don’t Use the maxlength Attribute to Stop Users From Exceeding the Limit — “the maxlength attribute doesn’t improve UX, it degrades it”.

The F-Shape Pattern and How Users Read — When users consume your content they will be scrolling, scanning, and skipping around your page. Here’s what you need to know about typical reading behavior and design strategies you can consider to prevent potentially unwanted scanning patterns.

Long Alt — Keep your image alternative text brief, devoid of special characters, empty of URLs, and ideally in one language.

Quill 2.0: A Powerful Rich Text Editor for the Web — This is a major release for the popular open-source WYSIWYG editor, and represents a significant modernization of things. Here's the announcement post outlining what's new in 2.0 post, and the repo too. Not tried it before? There’s a playground.

Wedges: A Collection of UI Components for React — A well thought out, aesthetically pleasing set of UI and Tailwind CSS based components. You can also download a Figma file of them to use when mocking up layouts. GitHub repo.

The Ultimate CSS Shapes Collection — Single-element implementation. Lots to choose from, including some rather novel options. One click to copy the code!

MarkdownDown: Convert Any Web Page to Clean Markdown with Images Downloaded — Just enter a URL and choose from optional settings to remove non-content elements, link vs. download for the images, and apply further instructions to customize the code via GPT-3.5.

Mastodon Embed Timeline Widget — Easily embed a Mastodon timeline on your site. No dependencies, no trackers, cross-browser, WCAG compliant and fully responsive. Demo here.

Help Invent CSS Grid Level 3, Aka “Masonry” Layout — Masonry style layouts (above) see content laid out like a brick/stone wall. It’s a popular pattern, but one that rapidly becomes difficult to get just right. Real-world feedback is now being sought from devs and designers on how CSS should handle such layouts. This article runs through the current proposal, the debate at the heart of things,...

The Frontend Developer/Engineer Handbook 2024 — An in-depth, detailed, and free guide to the current web development landscape. It's a superb resource (by way of Frontend Masters) for getting up to speed on everything from code editors, CSS, UX, UI, the command line, popular tools and frameworks, performance, accessibility, testing, AI, and much more. One to bookmark/share.

Upgrading jQuery: Working Towards a Healthy Web — Yes, jQuery is still pretty much everywhere, so considering its staying power here’s what work is being done to ensure jQuery users stay up to date. This online tool can tell you if the version you’re running is out of date.

▶  A Conversation with Una Kravets: The Rapid Evolution of CSS — An interview with Una, the Web UI DevRel lead at Google, discussing web development, the progression of CSS over the years, and how layout/style ideas end up a reality.

Detect JavaScript Support in CSS — A way to provide alternative CSS rules depending on whether or not JavaScript is available in the user’s browser. It can also help reduce flashes of unstyled content or undesirable layout shifts. There are a few gotchas to be aware of though.

Modern CSS Patterns in Campfire — Advancements in CSS, such as :has(), oklch(), and others allow developers to replace client- and server-side code with CSS properties, enabling behavior that was previously difficult to impossible, all without a framework.

▶  New in Chrome 124: setHTMLUnsafe, Streams in WebSockets, & More — Plus here's a run down of what's new in DevTools for Chrome 124 too.

🗓️ Building Interactive Docs with the WebContainer API and StackBlitz SDK — Join StackBlitz's live stream later today on building interactive developer documentation.

CSS in React Server Components — An exploration of compatibility issues between React Server Components and CSS-in-JS libraries like styled-components, including what some of your options are and what’s coming in future.

Gap is the New Margin — Chris highlights how the use of the margin property is now on the decline, slowly.

What if You Had Real Control Over Light Mode / Dark Mode on a Per-Site Basis? — Bramus thinks that a dark mode toggle should be a browser-level feature, and notes that thanks to the Web Preferences API, that might become a reality someday.

CSS Gradients: A Gallery of 275 'Click-to-Copy' CSS Gradients — Includes quite a few unique examples (i.e. not just two-color gradients) that you might find useful or simply for inspiration.

Layer Cake: A Graphics Framework for Svelte — This library gives you a baseline for creating responsive web graphics via common elements (e.g. a coordinate system and scales). See numerous example components here.

Anchor Position Tool — CSS anchor positioning is on the way, and one rather neat layout mechanism that’s part of the spec is inset-area. This (Chrome Canary only) demo from Una demonstrates how it works. It’s super early days for this (you can see the draft spec here) but it should prove rather powerful once widely available.