That HTML Blog: Weekly Digest #2
Friday, July 28, 2023
Well folks, we made it to newsletter #2, which means it's a trend not a fluke! 😄 By the way, I've been enjoying some good conversation around some of these topics in The Spicy Web Discord, so if you're not on there already, you might want to join.
One topic we're still keeping on eye on is Google's proposal to add "attestation" checking to Chrome for "web environment integrity" which has gotten a ton of people rightly concerned. It looks like they're dialing back an immediate push for this for now, and hoping to synthesize feedback into possible changes for a newer proposal. I certainly hope so, because while we can all agree improving the resilience and security of web access is a noble goal, adding a form of DRM to the web is categorically and unequivocally wrong.
Another topic I hope to write on over the weekend and publish next Monday is the seeming death of the term "Jamstack" as popularized by Netlify. JAMstack (later changed to just Jamstack) had a major effect on how many of us build websites—in ways both bad and good…and the term changed focus so many times we might as well consider it meaningless at this point. It's a real shame, but something about the impetus to rally around the original idea of is was extremely valuable and I'd like to unpack that.
But without further ado, on to this week's links! 🔗
Building a Greener Web (Video) ➦
Michelle Barker over at CSS in Real Life shares a presentation she gave on environmental sustainability in web development & production. How “green” is my website is honestly not something I’ve given much thought to, but I definitely should.
handleEvent() is Mindblowing ➦
Thanks to Andrea Giammarchi in a comment on a pretty rad article about events in general, I learned about a web feature I had no idea existed, and it is blowing my mind. I am of course talking about handleEvent(). It shouldn’t surprise us that it works beautifully with web components, and now I’m wondering why I ever wrote vanilla JS without it…
Blockquotes in Screen Readers ➦
Adrian Roselli is back at it again with a detailed runthrough of how screen readers announce various arrangements of blockquote markup.
Shining Light on the Shadow DOM (Video) ➦
I’m just starting to watch through all the videos from CSS Day held in June in Amsterdam. This talk by Cassondra Roberts provides an excellent look at building web components using shadow DOM, design systems, and the latest browsers APIs.