Let’s get into the challenges and strategies of loading data in web applications, focusing on the comparison between client-rendered sites and server-rendered applications. There are some clear negative performance impacts of SPAs and server-rendered apps are *usually* better here, except when data is slow. Then what?
When you nest elements with border-radius, the inner element needs less radius than the outer element.
This is some classic advice on this, and a future-looking fix.
Git is one of the most important tools to any software engineer. It can also be one of the biggest headaches when attempting a complex merge or unwinding a tangled mess of commits. But what if you didn’t need to rage-quit and start over with git reset –hard? Well, ThePrimeagen is here to teach you Everything […]
A scroll progress indicator is a pretty straightforward thing to build with a scroll()-style scroll-driven animation. But here, we’ll build indicators for each section of a page using the view() style.
Let’s say you don’t know JavaScript. You’re a web designer and you’re focused largely on UI and UX. Let’s look at some things you could learn in a day that will give you that bang for the buck.
We can *mostly* use HTML alone for this API. But here, we’ll use CSS to style the “links” within paragraphs and a JS library to position them, in lieu of CSS anchoring.
I love that Alexander Keliris saw a paper sketch of that cool THX sound you hear in movie theaters and coded it using Tone.js. Sounds great I think. Great example of getting nerdsniped by an idea.
I also saw Lea Rosema needed some short/simple 8-bit sounds recently and got nerdsniped into making them herself.
First I read Nikhil Suresh’s angry rant about AI, then I read Frank M Taylor’s angry rant about front-end development. I agree and disagree with different points in each, like any good rant. Something that struck me is that, well, I don’t think either of them are actually particularly angry, it’s actually a schtick. I also watched Dan Olson’s I Don’t Know James Rolfe recently (aka “Angry Video Game Nerd”). I liked Dave Rupert’s take that “nerdrage” has turned into a genre of content. This genre has made it’s way all the way to technology writing. Heck, I do it myself sometimes, but I also agree with Chris Enns in that I wish we all generally wrote more about things we like.
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Ryan Seddon makes clear the potential performance problem with cross-page View Transitions:
… on a slow or spotty network, the transition may appear as if the screen is freezing, as the browser waits for the page to load before it can transition smoothly between the two screens—this is not ideal.
But also that our new friend the Speculation Rules API is a potential remedy:
Combining these two helps mitigate the original tradeoff of the “pause” between navigations while the browser loads the next document. With speculative prerender, it can render the page before the user clicks, making the transition near-instant.
Both these APIs are Chrome’n’friends only, so I guess it’s a you-break-it you-fix-it deal. They are also both progressive enhancements so no grave harm in using them now, unless you consider potentially unused pre-renders too wasteful.
I enjoyed Hugo Landau’s praise of PHP in The Demise of the Mildly Dynamic Website:
- PHP has the world’s simplest deployment model for web applications: copy some files to a directory. This deployment model is so simple, and so intuitively understandable, that almost anyone capable of using an FTP client could deploy a PHP application.
- Because PHP originated as a templating language, the initial behaviour of a PHP file is simply to print its contents. This means, in turn, that you can just “dip in and out” of PHP as you need it. Compare this in turn with even the simplest Perl or Python CGI script. For the latter, you’re writing a program which outputs HTML; with PHP, you’re writing HTML with some occasionally interwoven code. If a particular page doesn’t need to do anything dynamic, it needn’t contain any code at all.
- PHP scripts don’t consume any resources (persistent processes, etc.) when they’re not being used.
And PHP is a heck of a lot better today than it was back in those “Rise of PHP” years. You could do a lot worse than building in Laravel.
Here's our page on guest writing. It's a win-win-win!
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