Hello 👋
I finally had a chance to work with the WP Block Editor a bit deeper for a client project, this week. After neglecting most of the latest developments in the past few months, it was fun to get my hands dirty with theme.json etc. and I quite like what was introduced since last time I worked with it.
One thing that I found hard, is to find out the best practices, which features are safe to use or which are experimental at the moment. Also, tutorials can be out of date soon after being published and the official documentation has a hard time keeping up as well. This is not to blame anyone and just speaks for the sheer speed of development that the whole block editor goes through, which is a good thing, but makes it hard to get your head around things. I’ll add a few links next week, to resources that helped me getting started.
Also this week, after two weeks or so of raising my little sourdough starter like a newborn, I did my first two attempts at baking bread. To be honest, I aimed for nothing more than “barely edible” for the first ones and was surprised when they came out pretty good already! Still lots to improve, but I like the process so far. Guess all those YouTube tutorials payed off – even though the algorithm probably thinks I’m about to switch careers and open a bakery soon.
Anyway – Here’s some of what I’ve been reading this week:
Frontend Development
🤩 What’s coming to CSS in the near future?
In this article on Smashing Magazine, Michelle Barker shows a few of the very interesting new features that are coming to CSS (hopefully) soon. Container Queries, the :has() selector, @where/@else conditionals, accent-color, all of the other upcoming CSS Color Functions, Cascade Layers, Subgrid and Scroll Timeline, the future certainly looks bright for CSS.
Smashing Magazine – New CSS Features In 2022
🛴 Progressive Enhancement
In a post by Chris Ferdinandi (famously known as the “Vanilla JS guy”), he mentions his surprise by the number of people who didn’t know what progressive enhancement is, when Sara Soueidan asked about it on twitter.
There are a lot of myths about progressive enhancement.
Many of them were popularized by JS library “thought leaders” as a way to dismiss legitimate feedback about the tools they were building.
Chris Ferdinandi
He goes on to show with a simple example what progressive enhancement is, and then busts some of the more popular myths out there. He ends the post by listing some of the “low hanging fruits”.
For me, progressive enhancement boils down to:
- Use native features as far as possible (HTML can do loads of cool stuff today)
- Make your code resilient and tolerant to errors (whatever might be the cause of those)
- You can still go crazy with enhancements, but will have a much more stable base this way
GoMakeThings – Progressive Enhancement, the New Hotness™
😳 CSS-Tricks is being acquired by DigitalOcean
Didn’t see that one coming: CSS-Tricks is joining DigitalOcean! The announcement post reads like any other “nothing-will-change” merger announcement. Digital Ocean promised to keep the old content up, which is great (how on earth would anyone write proper Flexbox without the Flexbox Guide ?) and I guess time will tell if this acquisition will be a good thing for CSS-Tricks in there long run.
CSS-Tricks is joining Digital Ocean!
👩💻 Is HTML a programming language?
Spoiler: Yes it is! Now go watch this video.
Webbed Briefs – Is HTML A Programming Language?
Other / Random
🦠 How Millions of Lives Might Have Been Saved from Covid-19
A great assessment of all the many things that went wrong during this pandemic in the last two years, and what we could/should be learning, so that we are better able to handle the next one.
It’s quite impressive to see all the things laid out in front of you, that could have been done and had the potential to end this pandemic early on or even stop it before it began in the first place. I hope we collectively have learned enough to be prepared for the next one.
Zeynep Tufekci – How Millions of Lives Might Have Been Saved from Covid-19
☀️ Have a lovely weekend, everyone!