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
If you haven’t already—or even if you have already—check out the new Versioning newsletter site. It even featured on the home page of Product Hunt.
If you’re like me and still don’t get what material Design is all about, perhaps you’ll be interested in material design lite—an effort to bring MD to websites using vanilla CSS, HTML and JavaScript—which is introduced in this Medium article.
Inspired by the Three Billy Goats Gruff, New Zealand has now officially banned trolls. Yep, good luck with that.
Vitaly Friedman has written an interesting article titled “Web Design Is Dead.” No, It Isn’t. (I really wish he would make up his mind.)
Anyone for takeaway? Here are three takeaways for web developers after two weeks of painfully slow internet. (Some of us have painfully slow internet all the time. 
)
In Brief
- It’s tax time in Australia, and the tax office has just launched its new cloud service. In the great tradition of government cloud services, it crashed.
- Affinity Photo—another PhotoShop rival, has launched, complementing Affinity Designer, an Illustrator rival.
- Apparently, software sucks.
- Safari is the new IE.
CSS
Apparently, the new element queries suck, but container queries don’t—except maybe for the name.
Here’s a look at structuring CSS class selectors with Sass.
And here’s a look at how to structure your typography in Sass.
If you hate CSS, you’re in for a treat. Grab some popcorn, sit back and relax, while you watch CSS get bludgeoned to death.
Here’s a vision of what it would be like for some busybody with a clipboard to come around and review your CSS code.
Here’s an interesting writeup on native CSS scroll snap points.
Here’s a guide to working with shapes in CSS
And to break up all the reading, here’s a video on complex CSS animations.
Apparently, scrolling performance with CSS will change.
Addy Osmani presents his critical path CSS demo.
JavaScript
Warning: here are five JavaScript errors that attack without warning.
Here’s a nice lazy load plugin for someone called Jake Weary.
HTML
Bruce Lawson looks at whether or not HTML is complete.
Design
Here’s a great article on product design that focuses on what end users actually need.
Here’s the world’s smallest portfolio—presented in the world’s smallest font …
History anyone? Here’s a scary little history of icons.
Here’s an exploration of dynamic layouts in Sketch.
Here’s a handy plugin for Sketch allowing for CSS Flexbox layouts using stylesheets and prototypes. Huh? I think I’ll just stick with Affinity Photo …
Here’s some recommended reading for designers.
UX
Here’s a crash course in UX design. (Better than a crash course in driving, I guess …)
Some UX inspiration for you.
Here are 5 simple UX principles to guide your product design.
Content
Content is a beggar this week.
Typography
The latest ShopTalk Show episode talks with Tim Brown of Typekit, where Tim mentions a cool project they are running to help you learn about fonts and stuff.
Podcasts
There are lots of great podcast discussions out there these days. Here are a few of my favorites this week:
The ShopTalk Guys are joined by Andy Budd, to talk about progressive enhancement, Safari #hotdrama, Dave’s new web app, and more.
The Podcast Dude looks at what’s stopping you from starting your own podcast. (If you’re interested in podcasting, this series is awesome.)
The Big Web Show talks modern layouts, with Jen Simmons.
CodePen Radio talks JavaScript security.
CTRL+Click Cast discusses content-first design with Steph Hay.
The Web Ahead talks about animating the web, with Rachel Nabors.
The RWD Podcast discusses Google+, and how Google makes a responsive site that performs as fast as possible across a variety of different browsers.
And the Boag World Podcast discusses selling your soul services.
Know of any other good podcasts that should be listed here? Please feed my addiction in the comments!
If you have any links you’d like me to put in the next edition, please just message me [beware of the dog, though].
If you enjoyed any of these articles, or if they got you thinking, tell us about it below. Otherwise it gets lonely in here!