That HTML Blog Weekly Digest #7: Open Props, “Turbo” Architecture, and Top Blog Posts in Web Dev History
Friday, September 1, 2023
It's hard to believe we're in September already and the summer is winding down. I don't know about you, but I'm ready to start taking road trips now! 😅 (Fall time in Oregon, USA is pretty magical.)
What's NOT winding down is the pace of web development, and once again, we've got some juicy links which might catch your eye. Starting with: Turbo, Astro, Server Components, and HTML Over the Wire, the latest Just a Spec episode where Ayush and I talk about the rise and fall and rise again of HTML-first approaches to application architecture. I think some people have incorrectly assumed that Turbo is only relevant to folks who use Ruby on Rails, but it's actually a general-purpose library you can use with any tech stack. Other tools like htmx, Alpine.js, and Unpoly have made major waves in this space, and with the arrival of the View Transitions API, we're increasingly looking at "MPA" solutions which can directly leverage the latest browser innovations. Exciting times! 🥳
Using CSS Color Functions for Automated Tints ➦
It really feels like for the longest time, you couldn’t do anything to derive new colors from a base color using vanilla CSS. Sure, you could use a preprocessor. But, gosh, we want our code to run in a browser! And work throughout a design system with user-customizable variable tokens!
Thankfully, the future has finally arrived this year in the form of color-mix(), and to help us get a sense of what’s possible, Cory LaViska has the lowdown…
Influential Blog Posts Throughout Web Development History ➦
Zach Leatherman of Eleventy fame recently asked folks on Mastodon to share their favorite inspirational blog posts which had made a huge impact on their careers as web developers. He then compiled many of the top hits into a permanent archive called Educational Sensational Inspirational Foundational.
Open Props Wins Award from State of CSS 2023 ➦
The results are in for the 2023 State of CSS survey, and among many surprising (and some not so surprising) takeaways is that the honor of winning the “Highest Retention” award went to…Open Props!
According to State of CSS, this award goes to “the technology with the highest percentage of returning users”, with runners-up being CSS Modules and UnoCSS…