Welcome to This Week on the Front End, our weekly roundup of news from the world of the front-end web.
You can check out the other editions under the frontendnews tag, and don’t forget to check out our weekly JavaScript and .Net roundups too!
News and Views
Beware: Windows 10 is spying on everything you do.
Recently, web design was declared to be dead. Well, it seems some people breathed life into it again, only for it to be killed deader again.
There’s a great barney going on right now about the development of web technologies, with PPK pleading for us to take a break for a year. It sure has sparked a poo storm—both on Twitter and a bunch of blogs, such as this response and this one.
And here’s a piece on how to become a great front-end engineer.
In Brief
- A new newsletter by Rachel Andrew delivers CSS News to your newsbox—um, I mean inbox.
- Love it or hate it, you’ll have to deal with Edge. Here’s a recent review.
- Sure, Chrome, Firefox, Edge and all that. But Opera is updating too.
- Apparently, front-end development actually is development.
CSS
Seems you can do pretty much anything with CSS, including cutting mustard.
CSS pre-processing getting you down? Want to try something new(er)? Post processing seems to be the hotness now—even working on codePen.
A very comprehensive guide to em vs rem.
Intro to scroll snap points.
Here’s a CodePen demo (but it only works on the latest Firefox and IE10+ at this stage):
Here’s a cool post on advanced CSS filters.
Here’s a cute story of a dad teaching CSS to his kid.
Here’s an interesting post on making and breaking the web with CSS gradients.
And here are some responsive solutions for feature comparison tables.
And now they want localized constants in CSS. Jeesh, what next?
Check out the latest fuss with vendor prefixes.
JavaScript
Here are 10 Javascript Utility Functions That You Should Probably Stop Rewriting.
Here’s a select list of JavaScript videos from the past few years that you must watch.
Um, forget Grunt. You need Gulp. O, wait, no, Browserify is the thing. What? That was last week? O, right, so this week Webpack is the thing. (Could someone push my jaw up so I stop dribbling, please?)
Here’s a nice script for adding fancy captions to your images.
HTML
Test yourself to find out if you really understand semantic HTML
MediaElement.js is worth checking out if you need reliable HTML5 video and audio support.
Unsplash is a nice place to go if you want nicer placeholder images. It has some cool options, too.
SVG
Some cool SVG articles this week, including designing flexible pie charts and creating graphical text effects.
Design
Here’s an absorbing article on learning to make a font the hard way.
Want to create an icon font? Go for your life.
Here’s a list of things you really should stop doing.
Not from this week, but this video on web typography you could be doing now is well worth a butchers.
Kind of interesting for you designer types: a visual history of the iTunes logo. (What would be more fun is a visual history of my facial reactions to each iteration of iTunes … although might not be safe for work.)
Material design isn’t the only pattern around these days. Flat design still has a future … maybe.
Performance
Site performance is a big topic these days. Here’s a handy guide to speeding up your sites.
And on performance, you look look over Paul Irish’s shoulder as he does this rather fascinating page load audit via the Chrome dev tools.
Content
Interesting question: Is the internet killing the paragraph?
The Coolness
Check out this origami bird:
Off the Wall
An here’s what you can do if you buy yourself 36 iMacs. You use the boxes to create a giant wheel, right?
If you have any links you’d like me to put in the next edition, please just message me [the dog loves computers, but he doesn’t byte].
If you enjoyed any of these articles, or if they got you thinking, tell us about it below. Otherwise it gets lonely in here!
