The Frontenders Kaleidoscope ~ Ed.11 ~ 2018
Just as I was about to hit publish on this edition of the Frontenders Kaleidoscope I realised I have literally one release notification. That seemed very wrong so, I thought it might be a GDPR thing and I missed a notice where I needed to opt in again. Nope, turns out Sibbell.com that I was using for email notifications of watched repos on Github shut down on 15 May :(
There are some alternatives to it or, you can just subscribe to the atom feed of each repo. I still feel like a service such as Sibbell would be useful so, would you be interested in a service such as that? Curious to know.
I lieu of that, there are a number of posts for you to read as well as two great podcast episodes. Until the next edition.
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Introducing npx: an npm package runner
This post has by Kat Marchán has been on my backlog for some time, and wow am I sad and happy all at the same time. Sad, because it took me this long to learn about npx. Happy, because wow this is definitely a situation where the use of awesome is valid ;) From the post:
npx is a tool intended to help round out the experience of using packages from the npm registry — the same way npm makes it super easy to install and manage dependencies hosted on the registry, npx makes it easy to use CLI tools and other executables hosted on the registry. It greatly simplifies a number of things that, until now, required a bit of ceremony to do with plain npm
7 Basic Rules for Button Design
A great post by Nick Babich over on UX Planet. This core UI element is often not given enough though and attention. Keeping these 7 tips in the back of your mind as you look at your current UI, or your next project, will definitely make for a better user experience. From the post:
Buttons are an essential element of interaction design. They have a primary role in the conversation between a user and the system. In this article, I’ll review seven basic principles you need to know to create effective buttons.
A Look at the Resize Observer JavaScript API
Over on alligator.io they posted a nice little article, with a pretty neat demo, covering Resize Observer. From the post:
Resize Observer is a new JavaScript API that’s very similar to other observer APIs like the Intersection Observer API. It allows for elements to be notified when their size changes.
HTML5’s Global `hidden` Attribute
I wonder how many more of these little nuggets are out there with regards to HTML in general, and HTML5 specifically. As the title suggests, there is a hidden attribute that was added to the language that behaves in a similar fashion as display: none; From the post:
As you probably know, there are a number of HTML attributes that are considered global because they can be applied to any HTML element. Common examples include
class,id,style, andtabindex.One that was added a number of years ago in HTML5, and you may have forgotten about
The Slow Death of Internet Explorer and the Future of Progressive Enhancement
Over on A List Apart, Oliver Williams posted a great read that is very timely for myself. I have been wanting to make this exact switch on MDN Web Docs, and after reading his post, I again feel it is the right thing to do. This actually opens up one’s content to a much wider audience. It improves developer workflow, avoids presenting users with a broken experience, and does not bleed a user’s data plan by clobbering them with megabytes of polyfills.
Which accessibility testing tool should you use?
Over on the Pulsar blog, Paul Stanton gives a very good run down of some automated testing tools developers can use as a first step in ensuring the accessibility of our web experiences. I would definitely add the tools at pa11y.org to this list. From the post:
I took some time to experiment with a handful of popular accessibility testing extensions and tools which we use to validate the accessibility of our user interfaces. These tools will give you a good foundation of accessibility before you move onto user-centric testing with real people and/or full blown accessibility audits.
Notable Releases
- The HTML game engine impact.js has been open sourced
Listen Up
JS Party ~ A tooling extravaganza!
Kevin Ball, Alex Sexton, Nick Nisi, and Christopher Hiller talk all things tooling. Build tooling, linting, formatting, IDEs, and a small tangent on Vim.
The Web Platform Podcast ~ NG-CONF 2018
Ng-conf has happened! There were a bunch of excellent talks and and excellent people. Jeff Whelpley was one of them! Jeff helps us dive into what is coming in Angular. Angular 6, the new Angular CLI, RxJs 6 and more! There is a ton to unpack in this week’s episode.
That is it for this week. Stay curious.
