JavaScript

Leaflet is the leading open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps. Weighing just about 38 KB of JS, it has all the mapping features most developers ever need.

Leaflet is designed with simplicity, performance and usability in mind. It works efficiently across all major desktop and mobile platforms, can be extended with lots of plugins, has a beautiful, easy to use and well-documented API and a simple, readable source code that is a joy to contribute to.

The term brutalism is often associated with Brutalist Architecture, however it can apply to other forms of construction, such as web design.

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The term brutalism is derived from the French béton brut, meaning “raw concrete”. Although most brutalist buildings are made from concrete, we’re more interested in the term raw. Concrete brutalist buildings often reflect back the forms used to make them, and their overall design tends to adhere to the concept of truth to materials.

A website’s materials aren’t HTML tags, CSS, or JavaScript code. Rather, they are its content and the context in which it’s consumed. A website is for a visitor, using a browser, running on a computer [or mobile device] to read, watch, listen, or perhaps to interact. A website that embraces Brutalist Web Design is raw in its focus on content, and prioritization of the website visitor.

Brutalist Web Design is honest about what a website is and what it isn’t. A website is not a magazine, though it might have magazine-like articles. A website is not an application, although you might use it to purchase products or interact with other people. A website is not a database, although it might be driven by one.

They list the following principles:

• Content is readable on all reasonable screens and devices.
• Only hyperlinks and buttons respond to clicks.
• Hyperlinks are underlined and buttons look like buttons.
• The back button works as expected.
• View content by scrolling.
• Decoration when needed and no unrelated content.
• Performance is a feature.

This is one of the best responsive navigation menus I’ve seen, implementing the priority+ pattern while mixing in drop-downs and other features.

Ever get annoyed with carousels and similar widgets that have that sort sticky pause when you swipe and release? Well, Flickity totally fixes that by handling momentum in an intuitive way.

This is a great visual example of why you shouldn’t assume that having a touch screen always equals a phone or tablet.

I just recently updated a bunch of my click handlers to not act when the Ctrl or Shift keys are pressed during the click, so that links can be opened in new tabs or windows by the user if so wanted:

This looks like an excellent, accessible starting point for the priority navigation pattern:

Or the priority navigation pattern, or progressively collapsing navigation menu. We can name it in at least three ways.

There are multiple UX solutions for tabs and menus and each of them have their own advantages over another, you just need to pick the best for the case you are trying to solve. At design and development agency Kollegorna we were debating on the most appropriate UX technique for tabs for our client’s website…

We agreed it should be a one-liner because the amount of tab items is unknown and narrowed our options down to two: horizontal scroll and adaptive with “more” button. Firstly, the problem with the former one is that horizontal scroll as a feature is not always visually obvious for users (especially for narrow elements like tabs) whereas what else can be more obvious than a button (“more”), right? Secondly, scrolling horizontally using a mouse-controlled device isn’t a very comfortable thing to do, so we might need to make our UI more complex with additional arrow buttons. All considered, we ended up choosing the later option[.]

More evidence that we don’t fully control our web pages and that a non-zero number of page views don’t execute JavaScript fully or correctly, despite it being enabled.

Says @ianfeather at #AllDayHey — “our monitoring tells us that around 1% of requests for JavaScript on BuzzFeed timeout. That’s around 13 million requests per month.” A reminder if one were needed that we should design for resilience

Hajime Yamasaki Vukelic has come to the conclusion that, if you’re dealing with a really big number of DOM nodes that need to be updated in real time, frameworks are usually incredibly slow on top of the already-slow DOM operations you have to do. The solution they settled on is to avoid frameworks altogether for these scenarios and use vanilla JavaScript. Also of note are that repaints and reflows are going to be big bottlenecks regardless of what you use.

• If you are looking for performance, don’t use frameworks. Period.
• At the end of the day, DOM is slow.
• Repaints and reflows are even slower.
• Whatever performance you get out of your app, repaints and reflows are still going to be the last remaining bottleneck.
• Keep the number of DOM nodes down.
• Cache created DOM nodes, and use them as a pool of pre-assembled elements you can put back in the page as needed.
• Logging the timings in IE/Edge console is unreliable because the developer tools have a noticeable performance hit.
• Measure! Always measure performance first, then only fix the issues you’ve reliably identified.

This is an excellent and comprehensive list of how to minimize your JavaScript performance impact on a user’s device.