Top picks — 2018 August
Your skip links are broken
Hampus Sethfors published a really great post about “Skip links” that we all tend to implement on out web projects as an accessibility feature. Turns out that they don’t work well on mobile devices. There is a temporary solution suggested by Paul J. Adam but it should be fixed by browser developers eventually.
CSS Grid Layout Visual Cheatsheet
This is my new favorite CSS Grid cheat sheet. Thanks Chris Malven!
Blink LazyLoad
It is amazing to see that Google Chrome team is actively working on native image / frame lazy loading. It will make such a big impact on web performance! I can’t wait for some info from other vendors.
This.Javascript: State of Mobile
Can’t recommend enough to every front-end developer focused on mobile platforms this 90 minutes session about the state of mobile platforms. Platforms discussed are: PWAs (Aditya Punjani), React Native (Parashuram), Ionic (Mike Hartington), Nativescript (Jen Looper) and Cordova (Jesse MacFayden). The current state and future of all of platforms listed above in one video.
Babel 7 Released
Babel — one of the fundamental tools in JavaScript ecosystem just dropped a seventh version. The detailed list of breaking changes can be found on an official website but to quickly give you an overview: drop support for old versions of Node (0.10, 0.12, 4, 5), using @babel namespace, remove presets and stages packages, rename official transforms to presets. The migration process is well detailed on migration guide — thanks to babel-upgrade which makes it a breeze. The babel.config.js configuration file adds one more setup option to well-known .babelrc file and object in package.json file. Selective configuration allows us to have a separated setup for client, server and tests. The most exciting for me is TypeScript support! React developers will benefit from JSX Fragment support (<>). Of course Babel has its own song now too - Hallelujah—In Praise of Babel!
On Switching from HEX & RGB to HSL
Sara Soueidan on switching from HEX and RGB values to HSL color format across the whole stylesheet. The color system explainer, list of advantages and process of implementation. Great article Sara, as always.
Affinity Publisher
Serif, the company behind all the Affinity products doesn’t slow down. I use Affinity Photo and Designer on daily basis and now Affinity Publisher joined the collection of my favorite creative apps. It is an alternative to Adobe InDesign. Currently in beta — stable version to come later on this year. To get you running in no time, have a look at the set of tutorials for the new Affinity app created by the Serif team.