Friday Front-End

By Scott Vandehey

Friday Front-End - Issue #333: Cascade Layers are coming to your browser! Plus, browser support in 2022, CSS revert, keeping up with web development, and more!

#333・ Feb 11, 2022

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Friday Front-End - Issue #333: Cascade Layers are coming to your browser! Plus, browser support in 2022, CSS revert, keeping up with web development, and more!

By Scott Vandehey • Issue #333 • View online

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Cascade layers are coming to your browser

Cascade layers (the @layer CSS rule) are coming to Chromium 99, Firefox 97, and Safari 15.4 Beta. They enable more explicit control of your CSS files to prevent style-specificity conflicts. This is particularly useful for large codebases, design systems, and when managing third party styles in applications. Layering your CSS in a clear way prevents unexpected style overrides and promotes better CSS architecture.

developer.chrome.com • Share

What should your browser support strategy be in 2022?

“Taking all the data above in consideration, the new baseline for web development would be:

”Safari is the baseline in terms of web standards: The sites we develop must work in Safari versions at least 2 years old.

“Low-tier Android devices are the baseline in terms of performance: Low-tier Android devices have advanced little in the past few years so we must make sure our sites are super performant.

”4G is the baseline in terms of networks: Mobile networks have become a lot faster and stabler worldwide in recent years.“

This has some big implications for how we make things for the web, and that’s what I want to talk about for the rest of this article.

gomakethings.com • Share

Design system versioning: single library or individual components?

You can version a design system’s component library as a single package (e.g. Polaris v8.0), or you can version each component within the library as its own mini package (e.g. Atlaskit Badge v15.0.8) This post breaks down the pros and cons of versioning the whole library vs individual components.

bradfrost.com • Share

How to keep up with web development without falling into despair

Web dev as a field doesn’t have a common research methodology or standard tactics for keeping up with change. That’s why we’re all overwhelmed. Not because it’s uniquely fast-paced but because it’s unique in how it doesn’t invest in people, training or methodology.

We don’t teach people to ask the right questions.

The strategy you need to apply is simple: you keep following your feeds, your social media, your subreddits, etc., but you now default to not reading any of it.

Aside from Scott: I strongly endorse this strategy. It’s literally why I run this newsletter! It forces me to keep a high-level survey view of the industry. I rarely dive deep on a topic until it becomes applicable in my work. But it means I often have moments where I realize something the community was discussing might help with a challenge I’m facing.

www.baldurbjarnason.com • Share

The case for describing race in alternative text attributes

It’s important to be intentional about the impact we have on our society as designers, and to minimize the harm we cause. Being more intentional about the way we use alternative text attributes is a great place to start. Giving users as much relevant information as possible gives them the context to fully understand the story around images.

ux.shopify.com • Share

Videos

CSS Revert & Revert-Layer Keywords

Did you know the revert keyword in CSS actually rolls back a style via cascade origins? With the upcoming cascade layers implementation, a new keyword revert-layer will roll it back by a cascade layer.

www.youtube.com • Share

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