The Slow Death of Internet Explorer and the Future of Progressive Enhancement · An A List Apart Article

The Story of CSS Grid, from Its Creators · An A List Apart Article

It must be the day for documenting the history of CSS. Here’s an article by Aaron on the extraordinary success story of CSS Grid. A lot of the credit for that quite rightly goes to Rachel and Jen:

Starting with Rachel Andrew coming in and creating a ton of demos and excitement around CSS Grid with Grid by Example and starting to really champion it and show it to web developers and what it was capable of and the problems that it solves.

Then, a little bit later, Jen Simmons created something called Labs where she put a lot of demos that she created for CSS Grid up on the web and, again, continued that momentum and that wave of enthusiasm for CSS Grid with web developers in the community.

A Redesign with CSS Shapes · An A List Apart Article

Eric walks through a really nice use of CSS shapes and @supports on a page of the An Event Apart site.

It’s a nice little illustration of how we can use advanced features of CSS right now, without the usual wait for widespread support.

A List Apart: Articles: Prefix or Posthack

An excellent argument in favour of vendor prefixes in CSS, from Eric.

If Not React, Then What? - Infrequently Noted

Put the kettle on; it’s another epic data-driven screed from Alex. The footnotes on this would be a regular post on any other blog (and yes, even the footnotes have footnotes).

This is a spot-on description of the difference between back-end development and front-end development:

Code that runs on the server can be fully costed. Performance and availability of server-side systems are under the control of the provisioning organisation, and latency can be actively managed by developers and DevOps engineers.

Code that runs on the client, by contrast, is running on The Devil’s Computer. Nothing about the experienced latency, client resources, or even available APIs are under the developer’s control.

Client-side web development is perhaps best conceived of as influence-oriented programming. Once code has left the datacenter, all a web developer can do is send thoughts and prayers.

As a result, an unreasonably effective strategy is to send less code. In practice, this means favouring HTML and CSS over JavaScript, as they degrade gracefully and feature higher compression ratios. Declarative forms generate more functional UI per byte sent. These improvements in resilience and reductions in costs are beneficial in compounding ways over a site’s lifetime.

Developers Rail Against JavaScript ‘Merchants of Complexity’ - The New Stack

Perhaps the tide is finally turning against complex web frameworks.