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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.

Guten Tag! πŸ‘‹

Did you see that View Transitions shipped in Chrome stable? Have you used the relatedTarget JS event property? Or do you know what content: no-close-quote does in CSS?

All the answers and much more are included in this week's Web Weekly. 🫣

You might have noticed that hosting providers are keen on supporting (employing) framework maintainers. Netlify sponsors 11ty and Solid development and even bought Gatsby.

Vercel, on the other hand, obviously develops Next.js, but also hired Svelte lead developer Rich Harris.

Everybody tries to be friends with the framework folks. And that's no surprise – if a trending framework recommends a hoster, chances are high that users will try things out there. No complicated math here... πŸ€·β€β™‚οΈ

But what if independent Frameworks stop recommending but start integrating with their favorite hosting provider? Sounds wild? Well, that's what we see with Next. Sure, it's Vercel's framework, so it's fair game that it works best when deployed on their infrastructure.

But what will happen with all these independent frameworks? If hosting recommendations become infra integrations, choosing a framework means choosing a hoster.

And what about the idea of having Frontend code that runs everywhere? Is it time to let this idea go?

With Next, it's already tricky. Initiatives like Open Next try to make the compiled output work on different providers, and Netlify plays catch-up with their Next runtime. But Vercel leads the way, and Next simply works best on their infra.

Architecture diagram of Next and its inferred infrastructure.

What's in for us when frameworks become BFFs with hosters? We'll get stellar DX; things "just work". I still have to sort out my feeling about this movement. Obviously, there are pros and cons...

But to close this thought, what should we call this new framework / infra love relationship? Vercel's CTO Malte Ubl calls it FdI (Framework-defined infrastructure) β€” not as fancy as "Something as code", but hey, I take it. πŸ€·β€β™‚οΈ

VS Code extensions I don't want to miss

"Better folding" and VS Code code folding comparison showing that Better folding displays the number of hidden lines, fold smarter and doesn't include dangling characters.

After learning about the "Better Folding" VS Code extension, I shared my three favorite VS Code tweaks that blend in so well that it's weird that the editor doesn't support this functionality natively.

Improve your editor

Beautiful desks

A beautiful desk setup with one monitor and a macbook.

I love looking at people's working stations. What keyboards are on there? Are there pictures on the wall? What tables do people have?

And while all these things aren't the core of "55 Tips for Working from Home (2023)", it comes with over fifty home office photos! πŸ’™

Pimp your work station

Firefox ships import maps

An import map example.

Firefox shipped <script type="importmap"> (yay!) and explained how import maps work on the SpiderMonkey blog.

But are import maps ready for prime time yet? We're close β€” only the compass browser is missing.

Import with style

Do we need CSS flex-wrap detection?

.site-header {   display: flex;   flex-wrap: wrap;   align-items: center; }  .site-header:has(.nav:wrap) {   /* Hide the navigation, and show the mobile menu toggle. */	 }

The CSS snippet above is not a thing yet, but Ahmad Shadeed makes solid points for a :wrap pseudo-class. And I'm on their side; having it would be handy!

Dream of wrapping

The wonderful weird web – Rotating Sandwiches?

A sandwich.

As always, I'm amazed by folks putting in the effort to buy a domain, set up WordPress, and collect 32 different... rotating sandwiches. πŸ€¦β€β™‚οΈ

If you want to reach out to the maker, they're available at rotating.sandwiches.inquiries@gmail.com. πŸ˜†

Be hungry

What are your favorite internet corners? Shoot them my way, and I'll include them in Web Weekly!

All the "new" JS features

This article goes through almost all of the changes of the last 3 years (and some from earlier) in JavaScript / ECMAScript and TypeScript.

New web platform features ship every day right now. This post is a comprehensive summary if you want to catch up with all the new'ish JavaScript features.

Catch up with JS

Five underrated CSS properties

YouTube thumbnail showing the isolation, inset, couter-increment, filter and contain propertiers.

Kevin Powell went into five CSS properties that he thinks need more attention. As always, Kevin explains things well; if you haven't used one of the above, this video is for you.

But as a bonus, Kevin also explains content: no-close-quote that I haven't seen before!

Learn some tricks

Opinions on the great divide

The Great Divide is now a Great War β€” JavaScript critics are effing mad right now. For well-documented reasons. And they do not mince matters any longer. The web development community has never been so divided. The Great Divide is now a Great War.

There's been plenty of hot takes in the web development community lately. As Mathias SchΓ€fer describes it, "The great divide has become a great war" between the "JavaScript" and the "Progressive Enhancement" folks.

But what should we do about it?

I'm always up for shipping less code, but sometimes screaming "Use the platform!" to someone maintaining a one million LOC React app isn't the solution.

If we tell web developers to β€œuse Progressive Enhancement, duh!”, [...], we need to bring along a bouquet of tutorials, best practices and case studies that reflect their needs.

Help each other!

View transitions land in Chrome stable!

The View Transition API is currently only available in Chrome; thankfully it can be used as a progressive enhancement. The guide includes a helper function that you can use across browsers, but only browsers that support view transitions will get the animation.

Chrome 111 went stable two weeks ago, and it includes all sorts of goodies like the color-mix() function or the :nth-child(an + b of S) enhancement.

But the biggest deal is that view transitions are now available. If you haven't heard of them: they let you transition and animate DOM updates.

They're only available in Chrome for now, but with a market share of over 60%, it's time to sprinkle some delight into the web! πŸ’ͺ

Start animating

Random MDN – clear-site-data

The Clear-Site-Data header clears browsing data (cookies, storage, cache) associated with the requesting website. It allows web developers to have more control over the data stored by a client browser for their origins.

From the unlimited knowledge archive called MDN...

Did you know that you can clear cookies, localstorage and browser caches with a single header? Now you do!

Note: If you look at the Compat data and wonder when Safari will ship it, the new header is already included in the recent beta release.

Clear everything

If you want to learn more about web development, my @randomMDN Twitter bot posts random MDN pages multiple times a day.

TIL recap – relatedTarget

document.querySelector('button')   .addEventlistener('focus', (event) => {     console.log(event.target);             // πŸ‘† the element that received focus     console.log(event.relatedTarget);      // πŸ‘† the element that lost focus (if any)   });

Emitted JavaScript events include a target property, but focus events are little snowflakes. They also come with a relatedTarget property.

Learn what it's about on the blog.

Focus!

Find more short web development learnings in my "Today I learned" section.

Three valuable projects to have a look at

A new Tiny Helper

transform.tools interface showing all transformation options.

Whether you want to transform SVGs to JSX, JSON to YAML or Vanilla CSS to Tailwind, transform.tools has you covered. πŸ’―

Transform all the things

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

Thought of the week

There's nothing more to add to Derek Sivers post.

When you think something nice about someone, you should tell them.

A song that makes you stop coding

I Will Possess Your Heart (Album Version video)

I mentioned it last week; I went out to see Death Cab for Cutie and expected a calm and chilled concert. In German, I'd say that I expected a "Schunkelkonzert".

But in the first ten minutes, they made it clear that that's not how they roll. There was a lot of energy on the stage, and I loved every minute!

Listen to "I Will Possess Your Heart"

This is all, friends!

Writing Web Weekly takes me roughly five hours every week, and I pay real money for sending over 3.5k emails. If you enjoy it, consider supporting me on Patreon. β™₯️

Or tell your friends about it:

If you're not a subscriber, change that! πŸ˜‰

And with that, take care of yourself - mentally, physically, and emotionally.

I'll see you next week! πŸ‘‹

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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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