Cotton Coder

Baldur Bjarnason writes: The deskilling of web dev is harming the product but, more importantly, it’s damaging our health – this is why burnout happens.

A Google initiative to see the entire web platform mapped as a set of features. Read out the announcement blog post. Looks like a useful resource to check baseline compatibility.

The results are in! The 2023 State of HTML survey ran from September 19 to October 19 2023, and collected 20,904 responses. Thanks to Lea Verou, Sacha Greif, Eric Burel, and others for their efforts putting this together.

Stefan Judis documents the rel attribute and noopener value. TL;DR it’s no longer necessary. Phew!

My annual rant on the sorry state of affairs that is modern WordPress development. I review the flagship WordPress theme showing the woeful lack of CSS strategy and absolutely bizarre templating system.

Ryan Bethel shares a PHP and WordPress plugin for custom components using Enhance. Until now SSR frameworks have always been JavaScript on the server (those I’ve seen). Using PHP opens up a whole new world of opportunities.

Support tables for HTML and CSS in emails — this looks useful! Personally I absolutely refuse to build or send HTML emails. They’re a blight on the internet. But alas, they’re here to stay. The MJML framework for building email templates also looks like a life saver.

Bramus guides us through some of the finer points around CSS specificity and corrects a few misunderstandings.

Jeremy Keith discusses the building blocks for a usable design system.

This article on JavaScript demos AbortController and AbortSignal with examples using fetch — useful stuff.

Jake Archibald goes into detail on the difference between attributes and properties. Listen to the latest episode of Off The Main Thread podcast for further discussion.

LLMs are all the rage but you can’t beat good old human support for app development. I blogged about my weekend project building a MacOS app.

I’ve been so focused on Container Queries I missed the latest addition to Media Queries. Ryan Mulligan provides a nice usage demo for the scripting query. Say goodbye to toggling CSS classes.

A tech layoff tracker created by Roger Lee with data from thousands of companies since 2022.

A big list of self-hosted apps most of which have an open source license. Take control of your data!

Ahmad Shadeed delivers another comprehensive guide with interactive demos for CSS Container Queries. Learn why they’re so useful compared to CSS media queries.

I like Heydon Pickering’s use of CSS selectors to highlight HTML anti-patterns such as anchors that are missing href attributes.

I’ve written a guide to using OffscreenCanvas in a Service Worker. Off-screen canvas can be used to resize images before they’re cached. The API is available in Web Workers unlike the original DOM canvas element.

Rob Eisenberg and Daniel Ehrenberg present a Stage 0 proposal to standard signals. Signals are a concept that modern UI libraries have settled on to manage state and update UI components. Rob’s blog post has more details. Stage 0 means it’s an early idea; something to get the conversation started. I’m eager to see how this evolves.

A curated gallery of minimal websites. The collection specifically avoids scroll-jacking and too much animation.