I love a good “I built a thing and here is how I built that thing” post, especially when it’s penned by someone like Chris who’s sure to keep you entertained along the way.
Wouldn’t it be neat to have aggregated data (for a website, daily email, push alert, etc) of kids events in our surrounding area so we know about them right away?
— My wife, possibly salty we missed out on Bluey Live tickets in Portland
This was my favorite moment from our episode with Chris Coyier. I asked him what’s interesting in the frontend world these days and Chris went off for almost five minutes. His enthusiasm is contagious!
Episode 500!!! And it has been a journey! Nearly 13 years ago we started this podcast and as of today (this episode) we’ve officially shipped our 500th episode. As a companion to this episode, Jerod and Adam shipped a special Backstage episode where they reflect on 500 episodes. And…not only has it been a journey for us, but it’s also been a journey for our good friend Chris Coyier and CSS-Tricks — which he grew from his personal blog to a massively popular contributor driven model, complete with an editor-in-chief, a wide array of influential contributors, and advertisers to help fund the way. The news, of course, is that CSS-Tricks was recently acquired by DigitalOcean in March of 2022. We get into all the details of this deal, his journey, and the legacy of CSS-Tricks.
What’s this? A Frontend Feud! The ShopTalk guys return to defend their championship over Syntax against new contenders: Una and Adam from The CSS Podcast!
Chris does a great job answering what will surely be the most common question about this acquisition in his announcement post:
The amount of value this team has given to the web world over the years is immeasurable.
I sincerely hope DigitalOcean turns out to be a worthy new steward of this precious resource and the site’s best years are ahead of it. 🤞
JS Party listeners and panelists celebrate our favorite moments from the past 100 episodes! You’ll hear from over 20 of your favorite voices across 14 episodes. We also share some behind-the-scenes and read/hear from listeners! Here’s to the last 200 episodes, and the next 200 as well. 🥂
The linked post is about a new book by Jeremy Wagner, but I just wanted to highlight the excellent aside on book writing by Chris Coyier near the end:
Write a blog post first, or maybe a whole bunch of blog posts. That’ll prove you clearly have words to say about this. Plus it will get the energy of your idea into the world. You might get feedback and constructive insights on the idea as it is shared. Then, hopefully, you can turn that blog post into a talk. That’ll really get you thinking deeply about your idea while getting even more comfortable with the idea of sharing it clearly. And, if all goes well, turn all of that into a book!
Looks like Jeremy did just that.
Chris Coyier does a great job rounding up and summarizing conversations around #AppleBrowserBan:
Just last week I got one of those really?! 🤨 faces when this fact came up in conversation amongst smart and engaged fellow web developers: there is no browser choice on iOS. It’s all Safari. You can download apps that are named Chrome or Firefox, or anything else, but they are just veneer over Safari. If you’re viewing a website on iOS, it’s Safari.
Chris Coyier on some of the new(ish) CSS compilers (such as Assembler) and how they’re flipping the script:
The popular Tailwind framework supports it. It kind of flips the mental model of Tailwind on its head, to me. Rather than providing a huge pile of CSS utility classes to use — then “purging” what is unused — it only creates what it needs to begin with.
Your favorite web dev podcasts join forces for a super collab that’ll knock you frontend off! Amelia joins Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert from ShopTalk Show while Divya teams up with Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski from Syntax. Let the FEUDing begin!
Chris Coyier is not too pleased about browsers changing the way cross-origin iframes handle certain native JavaScript calls such as alert and confirm:
Cross-origin iframes are essentially the heart of how CodePen works. You write code, and we execute it for you in an iframe that doesn’t share the same domain as CodePen itself, as the very first line of security defense. We didn’t hear any heads up or anything, but I’m sure the plans were on display.
The change is about security and performance, it seems. There’s a workaround using postMessage, but that comes with its own problems that Chris details. Overall, it seems the way this change is being rolled out is more of a concern than the change itself…
Believe it or not, I generally am a fan of Google and think they do a good job of pushing the web forward. I also think it’s appropriate to waggle fingers when I see problems and request they do better. “Better” here means way more developer and user outreach to spell out the situation, way more conversation about the potential implications and transition ideas, and way more openness to bending the course ahead.
I believe Chris Coyier put that period at the end of this post title for a reason:
Putting images on websites is incredibly simple, yes? Actually, yes, it is. You use
<img>and link it to a valid source in thesrcattribute and you’re done. Except that there are (counts fingers) 927 things you could (and some you really should) do that often go overlooked. Let’s see…
He goes on to list 15 bullet points of things to consider. This images situation is actually a microcosm of the web (and all software?) itself: it appears easy/simple at first, but the deeper you go, the more dizzying the depth.
The wonderful folks behind CSS-Tricks (maybe you’ve heard of it?) face off in our much beloved don’t-call-it-jeopardy game show. Can you out smart our intrepid contestants?
Play along while you listen (or watch). It’s JS Danger time, y’all!
Chris Coyier rounding up recent frontend moves (by Basecamp and React, specifically) back to server-side rendering techniques of old:
So: servers. They are just good at doing certain things (says the guy typing into his WordPress blog). There does seem to be some momentum toward doing less on the client, which I think most of us would agree has been taking on a bit much lately, which asset sizes doing nothing but growing and growing.
Let’s push those servers to the edge while we’re at it.
I agree. Servers are cool. Clients are cool, too. But so are servers.
Chris Coyier:
This is an extended version of my essay “When front-end means full-stack” which was published in the wonderful Increment magazine put out by Stripe. It’s also something of an evolution of a couple other of my essays, “The Great Divide” and “Ooops, I guess we’re full-stack developers now.”
This is a lengthy, sprawling piece on the evolution of frontend development by someone who really gets the web. It also has its own art-direction and design so you’ll want to read it onsite vs in an Instapaper-alike.
Chris Coyier:
You might reach for
<input type="number>when you’re, you know, trying to collect a number in a form. But it’s got all sorts of issues. For one, sometimes what you want kinda looks like a number, but isn’t one (like how a credit card number has spaces), because it’s really just a string of numbers. Even more importantly, there are a variety of screen reader problems.
(We discuss the uncanny valley of number inputs on this JS Party episode about the stale parts of browsers.)
Turns out the best practice (just use text inputs) has a twist to it: inputmode!
Chris Coyier:
The “official website” changed their language from JAMstack (evoking the JavaScript, APIs, and Markup acronym) to Jamstack. It’s nothing to be overly concerned about, but I care as someone who has to write the word in a professional context quite often. If we’re going to “Jamstack,” so be it.
I prefer JAMstack, myself, but I think the Ajax analogy he quotes is an apt one. Aside: if this trend continues, Chris and the team might need to rename the site to “Jamstack-Tricks” soon.
Oh, and while we’re here: It’s Changelog not ChangeLog 😄
Chris Coyier can’t help but chime in after listening to our recent debate episode of JS Party.
I enjoyed all the stumbling around the terminology of “web apps” and “web sites” (web things!). This is such a weird one. It’s so easy to picture the difference in your head: it’s like facebook versus a blog! But when you start trying to define it exactly, it gets really murky really quickly and the distinction loses any value, if it had any to start with. Here’s more on that.
Chris has a lot of great insights here. Whether you agree or disagree, I think we can all get on board with one thing: we make web things!
This article is Chris Coyier doing what Chris Coyier does best: pulling on people’s views from around the community, then sprinkling in his own take as he goes.
It’s easy to hate on the idea of a ‘full stack’ developer, with memes abounding and article after article claiming that ‘full stack’ developers are a myth.
In this piece, Chris Coyier asks an even more fundamental question: What does it even mean to be a ‘full stack’ developer? What do you think?
