~frontendfocus | Issue 662 - The Web Components debate (16)

Catching Up on the WordPress & WP Engine Situation — There’s been plenty of continued drama in the WordPress world between Automattic and WP Engine — and this post attempts to bring us up to speed. More has happened since including ▶️ Matt Mullenweg sitting down with Theo Browne for a chat about the situation, and some new terms have been shared.

The HTTP QUERY Method — A draft spec for a new QUERY HTTP method, a “safe, idempotent request method that can carry request content”. It’s said to be desirable “when the data conveyed in a request is too voluminous to be encoded into the request’s URI”. It's not quite GET, but it's not quite POST..

Build a Native App Experience with PWAs — Join Maximiliano Firtman for a detailed video course exploring how to create installable, offline-capable web apps. You'll learn how to create impressive Progressive Web Apps, explore various UI techniques, dig into how best to test and debug, and how to deploy your efforts to end users.

Web Components Are Okay — Spent any time on social this week? You may have spotted many in the frontend community talking about and questioning the overall merit and utility of Web Components. Nolan ties a few of these arguments together, concluding that folks are generally “talking past each other because they’re building different things with different constraints”.

CSS Masonry & CSS Grid — As mentioned last week, steam is picking up on a formal CSS solution for masonry layouts, but with two competing proposals and lots of various opinions on both flying around, it’s good to take a high-level overview of where things stand — that’s what this is.

Interview With Björn Ottosson, Creator of the Oklab Color Space — A chat with the Swedish engineer who created the Oklab color space, covering how he approached developing an effective model, with good hue uniformity, while also handling lightness and saturation well.

What’s the Difference Between HTML’s Dialog Element and Popovers? — Whilst pretty similar in both look and functionality Chris highlights the important distinctions, differing APIs, and overall use cases.

How To Manage Dangerous Actions In User Interfaces — An exploration of different strategies we can use to prevent users from making mistakes (such as unintentionally sending an email, placing an order, hitting publish on something, etc).

How To Make a “Scroll To Select” Form Control — This is an interesting little experiment, turning the humble <select> element into a dial of sorts, kinda like the scrollable date picker often seen on iOS. You select an option by scrolling it into position.

▶  Fundamentals of Frontend Architecture — A free video course that covers “everything you need to know to build robust and scalable frontend applications”. It covers architectural drivers, documentation, decision making, prototyping, implementation, and more.

SVG Coding Examples: Useful Recipes for Writing Vectors by Hand — Explores the basics of hand-coding SVGs, how to leverage JavaScript along the way, plus practical examples to demystify the inner workings of common SVG elements.

CrUX Vis — A new, experimental, browser-based Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) tool to allow you to visualize CrUX History API data. This related blog post from Matt Zeunert explains what it does in more detail.

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.

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.

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.