Photoshop in the browser? That needs JS.
But the reality is, most of what we build is either static HTML or mostly just forms and page reloads. We can build the web that way by default, and progressively enhance a more Ajaxy experience on top of it.
The result is an app that’s faster to load, faster to run, and less prone to breaking… without much additional work for your developers.
Lots of new features landing in Safari, and it’s worth paying attention to the new icon requirements now that websites can be added to the dock:
To provide the best user experience on macOS, supply at least one opaque, full-bleed
maskablesquare icon in the web app manifest, either as SVG (any size) or high resolution bitmap (1024×1024).
There’s a cost to using dependencies. New versions are released, APIs change, and it takes time and effort to make sure your own code remains compatible with them. And the cost accumulates over time.
This post is about more than web components:
If we want our work to be accessible in five or ten or even 20 years, we need to use the web with no layers in between. For all its warts, the web has become the most resilient, portable, future-proof computing platform we’ve ever created — at least, if we build with that in mind.
Before getting into the details of the code, Matt hits the nail on the head talking about the the one thing that web components have that no framework can offer: longevity.
Quoting Stuart Brand:
Old systems break in familiar ways. New systems break in unexpected ways.
Well! The web is an old system.
I also think the number of situations in which an SPA architecture can be recommended is dwindling, chiefly due to how good the web platform has become (and how much better it’s getting every day). And because so much of the rest of the ‘struggle stack’ (transpilers, unique dialects, etc.) was built to get around gaps in the web platform that no longer exist, the use cases for these tools is dwindling in tandem.
This is good news: not only can we avoid piling up transient knowledge about a seemingly endless stream of dependencies, we can also eject from the routine stress of those dependencies changing or breaking under our feet and throwing wrenches into our workflows — all while delivering more robust and performant websites to end users.
This is a terrific talk by Jack on how to deal with the tooling involved in modern front-end development:
- Maintaining control,
- Dependency awareness,
- Lean on browser primitives,
- Have an exit strategy.
If the JavaScript API requires a user gesture, maybe it’s time for a new button type.
It’s not because it’s declarative—it’s because it’s robust.
The Google developer relations team are dishing out some inconvenient truths.
The reality of unevenly-distributed browser features isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
From buttons to links.