Cotton Coder

Hono is a modern, multi-runtime JavaScript router. Hono v4.0.0 introduces a wealth of optional addon packages for static site generation, client components, and file-based routing. The core remains lightweight for simple routing. Probably a better choice than my own experimental router!

That’s right, the grandfather of front-end JavaScript libraries is still actively developed. This release removes deprecated APIs and drops support for IE10 and lower. The full build is ~29kB minified and compressed. The slim build is ~21kB. That compares to the 30kB and 24kB of v3.7.1. Source files are now ES modules. I’d never use jQuery on a new project but there are millions of websites built with jQuery being maintained.

I’ve written a guide on how to style RSS feeds when viewed in a web browser. Included is a basic XLST template you can use to get started. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Cotton Coder RSS feed!

Šime Vidas’ selection of Chromium and Firefox intents to ship or prototype new browser engine features with links to their relevant group discussions. Great resource to see what’s in development.

An interview with the creator of Svelte and SvelteKit on YouTube. I’m personally a big fan of Svelte for the DX and UX both server and client-side.

Jen Simmons’ guide to this year’s cross-browser web standards effort. I’m particularly keen on CSS Nesting so I can say goodbye to css preprocessors. The Popover API is also a huge DX and accessibility boon.

I’ve written an in-depth look into a somewhat unknown and not often used feature of String.replace() in JavaScript.

Does anybody actually like React? — a small website I’ve created to document the recent criticism of React. It seems like opinion is more negative than ever.

Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert hit landmark episode 600 discussing Where Will The Web Be 12 Years from Now? ShopTalk Show remains an unmissable podcast for people who build websites.

Dave Rupert demos the power of :focus-visible in CSS. This pseudo-class effectively ‘fixes’ the undesirable effect of :focus allowing state to only appear when necessary. Implementation is a big win for accessibility.

[…] to iOS, Safari, and the App Store in the European Union — will this be enough to appease the Open Web Advocacy? Or are Apple doing the bear minimum? Will this even apply to the UK? An alternate web rendering engine on iOS may be a reality, at least for my EU friends.

kitty is a cross-platform terminal that utilises GPU rendering. I’ve been using kitty in place of iTerm2 and it’s noticeably snappier. Reading the FAQ is necessary to solve some oddities but you’ll be rewarded with a set of cute alternative icons for your trouble.

A series of Modern CSS Solutions for Old CSS Problems by Stephanie Eckles is a must read for any front-end developer. Old CSS hacks are difficult to shake off, keep yourself up to date!

Release notes for v9.0 of DietPi. The Debian based Linux distro highly optimised for single board computers. My favourite distro for self-hosted Raspberry Pi servers.

A tool by Evil Martians to visualise the CSS oklch color function. Useful for testing wider color gamuts like P3 on supported screens and finding a suitable sRGB fallback.

Jarred Sumner introduces a new experimental embedded language and interpreter module for the Bun JavaScript runtime. Bun Shell allows you to run shell commands using a tagged template literal. Nice syntactic sugar and hopefully faster than spawning a child process like existing packages do (zx and execa, for example).

System font stack CSS organized by typeface classification for every modern OS. — The site provides a type tester, example article, and glyph tables. Get good typopgraphy without heavy web fonts.

My guide to SVG icons in CSS using the newer mask property.

Hurl is a command line tool built upon libcurl that runs HTTP requests defined in plain text format. Useful for testing API endpoints.

A guide on how to self-host the Deno KV key-value database server. Previously Deno KV was only available locally (as a single SQLite file) or on the Deno Deploy hosting platform.