~frontendfocus | Bookmarks (255)

Eleventy v3.0 Is Now Available — A popular Node.js-based static site generator. This release is written in ESM with full ESM support, is 20% smaller, has 11% fewer dependencies, and installs faster. The Eleventy Image utility hit v5 too.

tailwind-to-inline: A Tailwind CSS to Inline Styles Converter — The target use case is email template creation. Quickly craft the templates using Tailwind CSS, but then inline everything for the final version.

TinyJS: A Lightweight Library to Easily Generate and Customize DOM Elements — Includes a jQuery-like syntax for element selection, iteration, and appending content and adding properties to elements. Nothing you couldn’t do with vanilla JS, but a much simpler API.

OctoPalm.js: A Lightweight JavaScript Utility to Add Customizable Search Functionality to Your Apps — Includes features like animated results, customizable scrollbars for lengthy search lists, and real-time results as the user types.

Get Ready for Interop 2025: Your Chance to Shape the Web — An invite to “help shape the future of web interoperability”. Submissions for ideas/proposals are being taken now, with the deadline on October 9th. Here’s what 2024 has focused on.

Improving Rendering Performance with CSS content-visibility — When a page has 20,000 custom emoji on it, things may well get a touch slow. Nolan set out to fix things.

A Redesign Case Study — Like Josh Comeau (above), Ahmad Shadeed, whose excellent frontend articles we often feature, has too recently rebuilt his website, though with a stronger focus on the design. This case study digs into his rationale and process.

The Frontend Treadmill — Some candid advice and musings on the frontend ecosystem, technical decisions, and wasted energies: “our current framework layer is working against the grain instead of embracing the platform”.

Monitor Your Local and Real-User Core Web Vitals Performance in Chrome 129 — The latest Chrome features a completely redesigned Performance panel landing page featuring a live view of your local Core Web Vitals performance.

Clever Polypane Debugging Features I'm Loving — A nice look at some of the handy features to be found in the stand-alone dev browser, Polypane.

Dark Patterns Hall of Shame: Learn About Dark Patterns and Unethical Designs — Real examples showcasing what not to do in UI design, with details/screenshots from real websites that have made such poor UI choices.

CSS Almanac — The almanac over at CSS Tricks has been spruced up. It’s a great resource packed with references for various CSS selectors and properties.

Generate Dynamic JSON Forms and Collect Data Right in Your App — Integrate SurveyJS UI libraries to design secure, custom forms in minutes. Code-free interface, easy integration with any backend, and fully customizable.

Vue-Multiselect 3.1: A Complete 'Selecting Solution' for Vue.js — There’s a lot on offer here, complete with SSR support, Vuex support, strong test coverage, and with no dependencies.

Departure Mono: Monospace Pixel Font with a Lo-Fi Technical Vibe — It’s open source and takes inspiration from “the constraints of early command-line and graphical user interfaces”, along with late 90s and early 2000s pixel fonts. Cool website!

blocks.md: Generate Forms and Web Pages from Markdown — Not a free tool, but an interesting one to try out. It has its own syntax along the lines of something like Haml or Pug, and you can use it free locally.

How to Create a Chrome Extension with React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS and Vite — Covers everything you need to know right through to publishing in the Chrome Web Store.

The First Public Working Draft of CSS Grid Level 3 / Masonry Layout — This new draft represents progress on masonry layout as a built-in capability of CSS in two possible syntactic forms: a grid-integrated syntax, and a grid-independent syntax, both outlined as alternatives. The CSSWG has resolved to adopt fully mixed track sizing for this new layout model, allowing all the possible track listings...

▶  CSS Masonry Layouts — As we’ve covered in recent months (and as alluded to above) there’s differing, strong opinions on how best masonry layouts should finally be realised in CSS. Nicole does a good job of bringing us up to speed on the various sides both clearly and fairly.

How Josh W. Comeau Rebuilt His Blog, App Router Style — We’re huge fans of Josh’s blog (particularly its wealth of CSS articles). He’s just rebuilt it entirely using Next.js, MDX, Sandpack, and an array of other technologies, and gives a detailed, behind the scenes look at a modern React-driven frontend project.

The State of ES5 on the Web — Early JavaScript build tools often focused on allowing modern features to be used on the Web at the time by compiling down to ES5 code that could run anywhere. Time has moved on, but have the tools or popular libraries? Philip investigates, and shares some recommendations.

Free Public APIs: A Collection of Free Public APIs for Developers — Categorized and searchable, these are tested daily via bots so if any API is taken down or moved behind a paywall, it gets removed from the site.

DECK.GL: GPU-Powered Large-Scale Data Visualization Framework — Particularly well suited to geospatial data visualization use cases that go beyond typical 2D views. There are plenty of examples to show you what it can do. Can be used through both vanilla JS and React interfaces.

The First HTML LSP That Reports Syntax Errors — A new Language Server for HTML that catches various syntax errors (either in popular editors such as VSCode or as a CLI tool). It claims to deliver immediate feedback on HTML errors, and common typos.