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The Web Weekly newsletter keeps you up to date, teaches you web development tricks and covers all things working in tech.

Happy Sunday, party people!

Sometimes new web platform features ship in one browser (cough Chrome cough), and we all get excited about it only to find out that it has been abandoned because the other browser vendors won't ship it. These situations are always unfortunate.

But how do you figure out if all browser makers consider a new web platform feature a good idea?

First, the three major browsers offer feature status pages:

The pages vary in detail and maintenance level but are a good start.

Screenshots of chromestatus.com, Mozilla specification Poisitions and Webkit feature status

But what about features listed nowhere? What should you do then? Could you go somewhere and ask?

Jup! The WebKit folks continued to invest in the community and released a new standards-positions repo where you can go and do precisely this. Ask questions. Mozilla has a similar repo, too! I couldn't find anything for Chromium, but hey... Chromiums are shipping all the cutting-edge stuff anyways, and Chrome Platform Status is really good! ๐Ÿคทโ€โ™‚๏ธ

And with this, today you'll learn about:

  • Resilient CSS
  • Custom property hacks
  • The new v RegExp flag

... and, as always, GitHub repositories, a new Tiny Helper and some music.

Lastly, welcome to the 21 new subscribers! I'm super excited to have you around! ๐Ÿ‘‹

On that note, every Web Weekly takes me at least 4-5 hours to write, and I also started paying for sending all these emails a while ago.

If Web Weekly is valuable to you and you can, please consider supporting me on Patreon.

Something that made me smile this week

Feeling Sad? Want to see some blรฅhaj's doing human things?

Here's a fun fact: the IKEA toy shark's name is Blรฅhaj. Sara Vieira built a website showing the shark in everyday situations. It's surprisingly funny, and I'm there for it!

Watch out for the sharks

Be the browserโ€™s mentor, not its micromanager

.flow > * + * { margin-top: var(--flow-space, 1rem); }

I don't see many people talking about CSS architectures because many prefer to work around CSS rather than playing its strengths.

But how can you write resilient and reuseable CSS? Andy Bell blew my mind with a minimal CSS approach that lets the browser do the hard work.

Scale your CSS

On writing well

If you have something complicated to say, you should always take the space you need to say it. But when your prose is unnecessarily wordy and repetitive, you tax your readers by asking them to focus their attention on figuring out what youโ€™re saying rather than thinking about what youโ€™re saying.

I like writing blog posts, and I love crafting this newsletter every Sunday. I also enjoy writing docs, Readmes, and heck... even writing a well-structured email sparks joy sometimes.

But here's a secret; writing something that also reads well is not only about the writing. Editing is as important. A first draft is often just messy and unstructured headlines with raw thoughts, and only after removing all the unnecessary things a piece comes together.

Sadly, editing hurts! A "shiny" thousand words article can often be trimmed to 700 words. And this sucks, but fewer words lead to clearer thoughts, especially in technical writing.

Jane Rosenzweig shared great advice on how to edit well:

  • Delete rigorously!
  • Cut the overlap!
  • Just do it!

Cut all these words

Custom properties can do this?

"Invalid at comupted value time" examples

CSS custom properties are way more than just variables. If you want to learn more, Lea Verou shared secrets to getting the most out of them. And while Lea shows some hacks in this talk, they're valuable to understanding custom property internals.

Level up your property game

Make ugly things

A red LEGO brick followed by the words "Creative block"

Srishti Mehrotra wanted to draw more but somehow never made it. They felt blocked and uninspired and just couldn't do it.

"Ugly sketching" helped. Once a day, they sat down to scribble. No matter if good or bad, what counts is drawing a tiny thing a day. Consistently.

I love this story because it applies to everything you want to get better at.

Do things

An under-engineered multi-select

A custom styled multi select element

Adrian Roselli wrote an excellent guide explaining how to leverage checkboxes, native HTML and some JavaScript sprinkles to build an accessible multi-select element. It's a fantastic read!

Use the platform

Tip: the upcoming selectmenu element will help out with these UI elements. Hidde de Vries covered it on his blog.

Individual CSS transform properties are coming to the web

div {   /*      The order of operations is pre-defined!     translate -> rotate -> scale   */   translate: 50% 0;   scale: 1.5; }

Safari and Firefox already support the translate, rotate and scale CSS properties. Now, Chromium joins the party, too. The new properties make transformations easier to grasp and animate, but you must be careful! You won't be able to change all your transform properties to their counterparts. Learn why on the blog!

Clean up your transforms

TIL โ€“ alias has a -s flag

# "Run" the file to look at its content # $ index.html # -> cat index.html alias -s html=cat

I learned that the alias command has a -s flag on Zsh this week. It's called a suffix alias, and you can use it to save even more keystrokes if you perform the same action for a file extension.

Define file default actions

The new v RegExp flag

const re = /^\p{RGI_Emoji}$/v;  // Match an emoji that consists of just 1 code point: re.test('โšฝ'); // '\u26BD' // โ†’ true โœ…  // Match an emoji that consists of multiple code points: re.test('๐Ÿ‘จ๐Ÿพโ€โš•๏ธ'); // '\u{1F468}\u{1F3FE}\u200D\u2695\uFE0F' // โ†’ true โœ…

โ— Disclaimer: the following doesn't work in any browser yet.

Detecting Emojis in JS strings is surprisingly tough because one rendered icon can consist of one, two or ten code points. Mathias Bynens maintains the emoji-regex to help out for a while. But there's hope!

Mathias is also involved in the new unicodeSets mode for regular expressions, and I can't wait for this one to ship in browsers. You can use it with Babel today, though!

Detect Emojis

There's a new JS runtime in town

Bun - Bun is a fast all-in-one JavaScript runtime

There's quite some movement in the JavaScript runtime space.

Deno not only pushes Node.js to adopt more Web Platform features but also fixes Node's security flaws while offering TypeScript and JSX support. I didn't play with it yet, but I like what I see.

It looked like Deno and Node would make it out between each other, but then...

Bun appeared! Bun is a new JS runtime that claims to be faster, better and stronger. Obviously. We'll all see if this holds, but the project comes with some surprises.

Bun isn't built on Chromiums V8 engine but Webkit's JavaScriptCore. That's fantastic because V8's dominance is concerning.

The project also aims for completeness by being a bundler, transpiler, package manager. That's a lot, but I welcome a more straightforward and opinionated stack.

There isn't more than a fancy landing page, a Readme and Tweets showing off Bun, but for the runtime diversity alone, I'll keep an eye on it!

Check Bun

Random MDN โ€“ inset-block

inset-block demo on MDN

From the unlimited knowledge archive called MDN...

The inset property can be used as a top, right, bottom and left shorthand. But did you know that there's also inset-block and inset-inline? It seems obvious, but I never thought about it!

Learn more about inset-block

TIL recap โ€“ Replacement patterns in String.replace

const msg = 'This is a great message';  msg.replace('great', 'wonderful');  // "This is a wonderful message" // // -> 'great' is replaced by 'wonderful'  msg.replace('great', '$&-$&'); // "This is a great-great message" // '$&' represents the matched substring // // -> 'great' is replaced by 'great-great'

Do you know that String.prototype.replace supports special character sequences such as $& and $'. Now you do! ๐Ÿ˜‰

Replace with style

If you learned something new, whether small or big, old or new, documented or not, I'd love to include more learnings in this newsletter. Send me an email, and I'm happy to share your discovery!

Three valuable projects to have a look at

A new Tiny Helper

bundlejs - a quick npm package size checker

When installing npm packages, it's impossible to know how much stuff you'll be pulling in. Tools like Bundlephobia can help by giving an idea about the increased bundle size.

bundlejs is a new tool solving the same problem. It runs esbuild in your browser on the fly to show you the bundle size. ๐Ÿคฏ

Test bundlejs

Find more single-purpose online tools on tiny-helpers.dev.

Thought of the week

Nolan Lawson shared more thoughts on the MPA/SPA topic, and they included this week's quote.

The best SPA is better than the best MPA. The average SPA is worse than the average MPA.

A song that makes you stop coding

Cover of "Glass Museum - Electric Silence (Official audio)" showing hills cut out in a circle.

This week's track is one of my favorite running songs. Glass Musuem's "Electric Silence" is a beautiful piano track which's electronic beat makes you move.

Listen to "Electric Silence"

Thank you for reading!

And that's a wrap for the seventy-first Web Weekly! If you enjoy this newsletter, I'd love you to tell others about it. โ™ฅ๏ธ

If you're not a subscriber, you can change that! ๐Ÿ˜‰

And with that, take care of yourselves, friends - mentally, physically, and emotionally. I'll see you next week! ๐Ÿ‘‹

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About Stefan Judis

Frontend nerd with over ten years of experience, freelance dev, "Today I Learned" blogger, conference speaker, and Open Source maintainer.

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