Hello 👋🏼 frontendies! Welcome to the fifth issue of our newsletter!
Can you believe how many conferences have been happening lately? Big, small, and everything in between - even Tailwind CSS has one! It's fantastic to see people finally getting together again, growing communities, and sharing their experiences. In this issue, we've got some cool stuff from Google IO and RemixConf, along with the usual goodies like new browser APIs, podcasts, and articles. Happy reading!
Not long ago, we got a native <dialog> element, and now, to complement it, Chrome released the popover API in their latest version, v114. On the plus side, you don't need JavaScript to use it (but you may) because it can be controlled declaratively using HTML attributes.
This is an excellent summary of what happened on the web platform in the past few months. Container/style queries, text-wrap: balance, dynamic viewport units, wide-gamut color spaces, color-mix(), nesting, popover, anchor positioning, and much more - worth scrolling!
Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is a new metric that measures how responsive a web page is to user interactions, i.e. latency after click. Google decided to move it to the Core Web Vital metric that will replace First Input Delay (FID) in March 2024, which means that it's something that you'll need to care about (if you don't already).
The job market has been through profound changes in recent years, especially in our industry. The good news is that we've got an excellent episode of Frontend Happy Hour With Ryan Burgess and Jem Young where they'll be discussing all of this from the perspective of an engineer, manager, and recruiter. Stay tuned!
If you enjoyed What's new in CSS and UI: I/O 2023 Edition, you may also be interested in the SyntaxFM episode about the very same topic. Wes Bos, Scott Tolinski, and Adam Argyle discuss some of the most notable updates from the past few months and share their thoughts and enthusiasm about them. Great way to stay up-to-date on everything happening in the world of CSS.
What does it take to build a web app these days? Apparently, about 25 tools and libraries, that have to work together in perfect harmony! Kent C. Dodds talks about its complexity, friction, decision paralysis, and more in his RemixConf talk.
If you work with Angular, you probably know about this already - v16 has been released this month with fully redesigned reactivity which seems to put Angular back in the "modern framework" club! Authors call v16 "the biggest release since the initial rollout of Angular" so if you haven't considered this framework for a while, it's a good moment to give it a second chance.
Another frontend framework/library reached a production-ready version number! Qwik was designed to be fast and performant and offers a couple of unique features that no competitor has, like resumability, JavaScript streaming, speculative code fetching, and more.
If you have ever wondered how these excellent documentation sites for Vue, Vite, Vitetest, etc. are built, you must look at Vitepress! It's a great tool, and it finally reached 1.0.0 beta, which means it's pretty safe to use it in a production environment...or at least get ready for it :)
Vue 3.3 was released with several new features, including improvements to <script setup> with TypeScript, experimental features like reactive props destructure and defineModel, and other notable features like defineOptions, better getter support with toRef and toValue, and JSX import source support.
Astro just got a minor upgrade with version 2.5! This one includes new features, like data collections, hybrid rendering, custom client directives, HTML minification, parallelized rendering, and polymorphic type helper.
If you liked Adam Argyle's View Transitions demo mentioned above, you should check this one out. Dave Rupert will take you step by step on how to use View Transistions in your app, today!
Maybe you thought once, "Frontend is too easy", or perhaps you heard that from someone else - either way, Christian Heilmann is happy to explain why this is false! As frontendies, we have a lot of responsibilities, and from time to time, it's good to reiterate what it entails.
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