This article is for anyone interested in the emerging ecosystem of tools and technologies related to Jamstack and serverless. We’re going to use Fauna’s GraphQL API as a serverless back-end for a Jamstack front-end built with the Redwood framework and deployed with a one-click deploy on Vercel. In other words, lots to learn! By the end, you’ll not only get to dive into Jamstack and serverless concepts, but also hands-on experience with a really neat combination of tech … Read article R
My 2020 was colored by the considerable amount of time I spent analyzing data about CSS usage in the wild, for the CSS chapter of the Web Almanac, by the HTTP Archive. The results were eye-opening to me. A wake-up call of sorts. We spend so much time in the bubble of bleeding-edge tech that we lose touch with how the web is really built. Most of the web favors old, stable tech instead of new bling. CSS-in-JS? Only … Read article “How The Web is Really Built”
The post How The
It’s December! Lots of things are published this time of year, like developer advent calendars and organizations reflecting on the past year. We have even our own end-of-year series where we asked folks what they learned in 2020. But we also see lots of research come out around this time. Some of it we’ve already linked up. But let’s round up what we’ve seen so far. In no particular order:
2020 MDN Web Developer Needs Assessment HTTP Archive’s annual state
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I really appreciate a real-world walkthrough of a technology. Not only in what that technology does, but why it was chosen and how it worked for a team. Anybody can read the docs, but what you know after years of real-world usage is far more valuable. Hugo “Kitty” Giraudel:
I want to properly reflect on the choice of going with Fela instead of any other CSS-in-JS library you might have heard of.
I’d never heard of Fela before. … Read article “Retrospective on Fela”
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Images take up to 50% of the total size of an average web page. And if images are not optimized, users end up downloading extra bytes. And if they’re downloading extra bytes, the site not only takes that much more time to load, but users are using more data, both of which can be resolved, at least in part, by optimizing the images before they are downloaded. Researchers around the world are busy developing new image formats that possess high … Read article “Converting and Optimizing
I’ve learned to be more comfortable not knowing. “I don’t know”, comes easier now. “I don’t know anything about that.” It’s okay. It feels good to say. Whether it’s service workers, Houdini, shadow DOM, web components, HTTP2, CSS grid, “micro-front ends”, AVIF… there are many paths before us. This list doesn’t even broach JavaScript frameworks and libraries. Much of this tech isn’t even novel in 2020—but together act as a clapperboard cueing in me a familiar fear of missing out … Rea
Recently, I’ve become more deeply aware of the inherent tension between change and inertia, as it applies to the evolution and use of web technologies. These forces have always been present and opposed to each other, but it seems to me that the side effects of these collisions are impacting web development more noticeably. On one hand, we’ve never seen more progress in the expansion of the array of web platform capabilities; the web is powerful and mature in ways … Read article
Something I learned (or, I guess, re-learned) this year is how important it is to pay close attention to the bit depth of images. Way back in the day, we used to obsessively choose between 2-, 4-, or 8-bit color depth on our GIFs, because when lots of users were using dialup modems to surf the web, every kilobyte counted. Now that a huge number of us access the web via broadband, guess what? Every kilobyte still counts. Because … Read article “Optimizing Image Depth”
The post
Tim Severien:
I feel we, the community, have to acknowledge that CSS is easy to get started with and hard to master. Let’s reflect on the language and find out what makes it hard.
Tim’s reasons CSS is hard (in my own words):
You can look at a matching Ruleset, and still not have the whole styling story. There might be multiple matching rulesets in disparate places, including in places that only apply conditionally, like within @media queries. Even
… Read article “What Mak
This year, I learned a lot about how “old” tricks can solve a lot of modern problems if you use the right tools. Following the growth of Jamstack-style development has been both a learning experience, while also a nostalgic one. It’s been amazing to see how you can power plain ol’ HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with the rise of headless CMSes, API-driven databases, e-commerce services, and modern frameworks. I feel like the biggest hurdle that all of the different framework &#