Cassie Evans' blog animations
There are so many wonderful animations on Cassie Evans’ website that I love, from the way the site title is drawn in to all the effects when you hover/interact with certain things.
Snippets
Keeping Browserslist (and Autoprefixer) up to date
You need to run
npx browserslist@latest --update-dbevery month to keep browsers data up to date.Otherwise,
last 2 browsersor> 1%will return outdated browsers, Autoprefixer and Babel will add unnecessary polyfills.
Trix: A rich text editor for everyday writing
Trix is an open-source project from Basecamp, the creators of Ruby on Rails. Millions of people trust their text to Basecamp, and we built Trix to give them the best possible editing experience.
[…]
Different By Design
Most WYSIWYG editors are wrappers around HTML’s contenteditable and execCommand APIs, designed by Microsoft to support live editing of web pages in Internet Explorer 5.5, and eventually reverse-engineered and copied by other browsers.
Because these APIs were never fully specified or documented, and because WYSIWYG HTML editors are enormous in scope, each browser’s implementation has its own set of bugs and quirks, and JavaScript developers are left to resolve the inconsistencies.
[…]
Trix sidesteps these inconsistencies by treating contenteditable as an I/O device: when input makes its way to the editor, Trix converts that input into an editing operation on its internal document model, then re-renders that document back into the editor. This gives Trix complete control over what happens after every keystroke, and avoids the need to use execCommand at all.
Stimulus Handbook: Designing a Resilient User Interface
We should also expect people to have problems accessing our application from time to time. For example, intermittent network connectivity or CDN availability could prevent some or all of our JavaScript from loading.
It’s tempting to write off support for older browsers as not worth the effort, or to dismiss network issues as temporary glitches that resolve themselves after a refresh. But often it’s trivially easy to build features in a way that’s gracefully resilient to these types of problems.
This resilient approach, commonly known as progressive enhancement, is the practice of delivering web interfaces such that the basic functionality is implemented in HTML and CSS, and tiered upgrades to that base experience are layered on top with CSS and JavaScript, progressively, when their underlying technologies are supported by the browser.
Stimulus: A modest JavaScript framework for the HTML you already have
Stimulus is a JavaScript framework with modest ambitions. It doesn’t seek to take over your entire front-end—in fact, it’s not concerned with rendering HTML at all. Instead, it’s designed to augment your HTML with just enough behavior to make it shine. Stimulus pairs beautifully with Turbolinks to provide a complete solution for fast, compelling applications with a minimal amount of effort.
[…]
Sprinkle your HTML with controller, target, and action attributes:
Write a compatible controller and watch Stimulus bring it to life:
Code language: JavaScript
// hello_controller.js
import { Controller } from "stimulus"
export default class extends Controller {
static targets = [ "name", "output" ]
greet() {
this.outputTarget.textContent =
`Hello, ${this.nameTarget.value}!`
}
}
Turbolinks
Turbolinks® makes navigating your web application faster. Get the performance benefits of a single-page application without the added complexity of a client-side JavaScript framework. Use HTML to render your views on the server side and link to pages as usual. When you follow a link, Turbolinks automatically fetches the page, swaps in its
<body>, and merges its<head>, all without incurring the cost of a full page load.
- Optimizes navigation automatically. No need to annotate links or specify which parts of the page should change.
- No server-side cooperation necessary. Respond with full HTML pages, not partial page fragments or JSON.
- Respects the web. The Back and Reload buttons work just as you’d expect. Search engine-friendly by design.
- Supports mobile apps. Adapters for iOS and Android let you build hybrid applications using native navigation controls.
Spoiler: server-rendered HTML can work offline
The architecture astronauts who, for the past decade, have been selling us on the necessity of React, Redux, and megabytes of JS, cannot comprehend the possibility of building an email app in 2020 with server-rendered HTML 😴
[…]
The effects are truly toxic. Last decade’s obsession with SPAs has poisoned the minds of even the brightest teachers in our industry.
Like, there’s no way this stuff can work offline, right?!
Briefly read up on how HEY is implemented. Is this a correct summary of the pros and cons of its [server]-centric approach?
– Pro: Works fast on older devices.
– Con: Can’t be used offline.