Friday Frontend: Starting off 2021 Edition

Hey there,

Hope you had a good holiday, and didn’t miss this newsletter too much. I had intended to just take a 2 week break but was in no shape to do anything last week because my mother passed away after a long decline due to Alzheimer’s disease.

I’m still nowhere near my best, but life continues, and so will this newsletter. Enjoy. 

Best,

KBall from ZenDev

CSS & SCSS

Custom Properties as State

This is a super interesting idea. It starts from the observation that pretty much anything can go into CSS custom properties, and explores different ways we could use that to expose state to our websites via CSS rather than JavaScript or a server-side language. It seems like this is just waiting for some experimentation and tinkering with to find a set of super cool applications.

State of CSS Survey Report

Interesting dive into what folks in the industry are using, aware of, and more. Major caveat on this survey (and the State of JS survey below) is that these surveys follow a “broadcast and get as many people as possible to respond” approach, rather than any sort of controlling for demographic and other characteristics. So take this as useful information and a way to find new ideas, but be wary of assuming it is representative of the industry as a whole.

Styling Code In and Out of Blocks

Interesting discussion of the <code> tag and how to style it.

The Art of Building Real-life Components

Great in-depth walk through of all of the thinking and nuance that goes into building components that work across a wide range of variations and states

Whack-a-Mole: The CSS Edition

This is wild. An entire reaction-based game, feeling random, encoding multiple states, without a single line of JavaScript. The author does a nice job of introducing the concepts involved - I love the idea of using animations to manage states. While certainly not very practical, this is a lot of fun.

JavaScript

React Server Components

“Everything old is new again” in terms of moving sets of rendering back to the server. It is fascinating how we move through these cycles between client-heavy and server-heavy approaches. That said, it is true that React and related frameworks enable much more powerful and functional application UIs, and that innovations like this improve our ability to have those UIs also be extremely fast to load. Definitely worth keeping an eye on and trying as it matures.

An Annotated Guide to React Server Components

Same topic area, but in this case with an annotated guide based on the talk that announced them.

Why Promises Are Faster Than setTimeout()?

Huh. This is an interesting nuance of the JavaScript runtime that I wasn’t aware of. Promises have their own separate resolution queue that is prioritized above other asynchronous callbacks. Very cool.

State of JS Survey Results

Interesting dive into what folks in the industry are using, aware of, and more when it comes to JavaScript. Same caveat is the above State of CSS Survey: these surveys follow a “broadcast and get as many people as possible to respond” approach, rather than any sort of controlling for demographic and other characteristics. So take this as useful information and a way to find new ideas, but be wary of assuming it is representative of the industry as a whole.

Other Awesomeness

10 Powerful Life Skills for the New Decade

You may not be in a place to be looking for growth much right now. 2020 was a chaotic year; for many of us simply surviving was success. But if you do have mental and emotional bandwidth for growth, I think this is a useful article.

Front-end predictions for 2021

Predictions are hard. We live in an extremely uncertain world, and things are changing rapidly. That said, front-end web development has been somewhat sheltered from the uncertainty in the world, and while things continue to evolve rapidly the rate of complete paradigm shifts has been pretty slow recently. All that is to say, I think this is a domain that is reasonable to do some prediction on, and the predictions of this article feel pretty safe.

SMART goals are not so smart: make a PACT instead

Another life-approach article, this one around how we handle things like goals and resolutions. One part of this that super resonates with me, especially given the year we just had, is the focus on process and what you can control more than outcomes. Most of my goals from last year were completely missed because COVID-19 through the world into a tailspin. The places I was able to make progress were where I refocused on process and things more tightly under my control.

2021 accessibility predictions

This feels (unfortunately) over-optimistic to me, but I think it’s worth looking at and thinking about for our own practice of improving accessibility in our work. In particular I love one of the points around how enabling personalization can both help everyone but also provide a massive improvement to the accessibility of our applications.