Your weekly roundup
This week we launched the full programs for our Code and Code Leaders conferences in Melbourne in June. It’s a really fantastic program if I do say so myself, so hope to see you there (in Melbourne or via the stream).
Interview with a Senior JS Developer 2024
The satirical interview series from Programmers are also human is always worth a watch, with a genuine understanding of the technology, and obsessions and rituals and beliefs of various types of developer.
This recent one is absolutely spot on. It captures the frenetic, chaotic state of Front End Development in 2024 so well.
Coming Soon to JavaScript Near You? (TC39 Stage 2 Proposals)
It’ll definitely be a while before we see some of these getting prototyped in browsers, but it’s always fun to take a sneak peak at the future of this vital web language.
Source: Coming Soon to JavaScript Near You? (TC39 Stage 2 Proposals)
When in person events we’re a thing, we developed a number of online conferences, with very narrow deep focus. The sort of thing that it is very hard to do economically with in person events.
GlobalScope was one of these, where we focused on advances in JavaScript, including as yet finalised language features.
These included Records and Tuples, and Modules, among the approaching language features covered here.
Things That Can Break aspect-ratio in CSS
CSS has an aspect-ratio property, which has had full support since around 2021. It can be a very satisfying property to use, because it can help match how your brain 🧠 works or what the desired design outcome does better than forcing dimensions does. “I need a square here” or “I need to match the 16:9 size of a
<video>” are very reasonable design needs. Especially in a fluid environment where you’re purposely trying not to think in exact dimensions because you know they can change.
Source: Things That Can Break aspect-ratio in CSS
Once upon a time dealing with CSS gotchas was largely about dealing with browser inconsistencies and bugs. Now, many new CSS features are are sufficiently complex as to cause challenges with standard behaviour that may not be intuitive.
This article on one of my favourite, seemingly simple CSS features, aspect-ratio, has some subtleties you may not have considered as Chris Coyier at Front End Masters outline here.
A primer on the cascade and specificity
Often feared by developers, the cascade and specificity is actually really simple if you utilise the right mental model when authoring CSS.
Source: A primer on the cascade and specificity
The internet meme goes “men will literally … to avoid going to therapy”. Often I have a similar thought as people struggle with (or work incredibly hard to avoid) CSS–”developers will do literally anything to avoid using CSS directly”.
And this often boils down to one thing–well two things–misunderstanding the cascade (listen it’s the firs word in the name that should be a strong hint it’s important) and specificity.
So if you struggle with these (or even if you don’t) this one comes highly recommended.
Foundations are important. We tend to think of them as simple, or easy, rather than as the bedrock on which everything else is built, like closures in JavaScript.
So refresh your understanding or take it to a new level with this great primer.
Why Good Captioned Videos Are Important
With the growing number of tools for captioning videos making do-it-yourself captions possible, so is the growing number of captioned videos with crappy captions. Sometimes people don’t realize the importance of something until they see a good and bad example side-by-side.This series of side-by-side videos tell the story of why each rule of awesome captions matter.
Source: Why Good Captioned Videos Are Important – Meryl.net home
As more and more of the Web becomes video, it’s likely many if not most developers (and designers, and product folks, and content folks, and…) will start working with it.
Video presents significant challenges for accessibility. We might think of this primarily as a challenge for the visually impaired, but it is also a very real challenge for the Deaf and hard of hearing.
And for that matter folks whose first language isn’t that of the video itself.
So captioning really matters. Here Meryl Evans highlights several areas where captioning can be improved, with great examples and I highly recommend it (and today and for the next few days I will be transcribing for captions a few dozen videos for Conffab so it’s vert apt for me.)
Great reading, every weekend.
We round up the best writing about the web and send it your way each Friday.
