(Bi)Monthly Reads: April - May 2017

Welcome to the newest selection of the Front-End articles I’ve read. This one is very CSS-skewed.

Linting HTML using CSS (article by Ire Aderinokun)

A brilliant example of creative usage of CSS. Attribute selectors feel pretty underutilized (I don’t think about them often when coding), and the author of bitsofcode blog uses them to highlight inline styles, unlabelled form elements and other mistakes one can make in HTML. Must read!

CSS :focus-within (article by Scott O’Hara)

A write-up on new CSS pseudo-class selector with easy-to-understand examples. Regardless the specific topic, this is a good reminder that new language features are - for real! - being implemented in browsers. I also like discovering little, concrete advices like the note about invalid selectors (see it in “Support” section).

More missed chances: What minifiers also leave behind (article by Remy Luisant)

CSS minifier is something I’d usually plug into the project and forget about. This article proves that these tools are not perfect, and shares their very interesting unexpected behaviors.

Fighting front-end fatigue with tooling recipes (article by Jasper Moelker)

Being aware of the immensity of available build tools, transpilers and preprocessors, it’s not easy just to decide about what to use. A front-end developer of De Voorhoede tells about the company choices for working with modern CSS, JavaScript and Express. While the solutions may not be the one-fits-all ones, they are definitely proven to be working and nicely wrapped into well-documented ‘recipe’ form, which can be a great starting point for defining my own tooling.

The Website Obesity Crisis (presentation by Maciej Cegłowski)

I haven’t seen this 2015 presentation until now, and now I’d come back to it every few weeks. The increasing weight of websites is a well-known concern, and there’s never enough effort to fight it. I like the piece for descriptive examples, literature comparisons, and exploration of the reasons behind heavy websites.

Document.elementFromPoint() (MDN article)

I got to know this part of Document API from reading BehindTheOverlay Extension docs. Nice and useful for UI scripts.