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Welcome to Web Weekly #11

How's everybody doing? I had a super unspectacular week, and my biggest highlight was that I bought myself some new slippers (don't judge πŸ™ˆ). They made me laugh every day.

But next week, I'll be speaking at the CityJS conference. The lineup is fantastic, and I'm so excited to be part of it. Tickets are still available.

CityJS Logo

This week's Web Weekly includes nifty CLI tricks and snippets, rarely used HTML elements/attributes, tips to deal with interruptions at work, and, as always, GitHub repositories, new Tiny Helpers and some music.

3, 2, 1, let's go!

Zsh tips and tricks

ZSH tricks to blow your mind

I use Zsh for years now and I'm very pleased with my terminal setup. Lizzie Siegle wrote an insightful article that includes many useful Zsh tricks. I learned quite a lot!

Level up your Zsh skills

What's in your <head>?

A free guide to HTML5 head elements

The head element plays an essential role in every website. If you're wondering what should be included in your head or want to see an extensive list of options, Josh Buchea maintains the wonderful resource htmlhead.dev.

Check out htmlhead.dev

How to leverage search engines to make your client-side search work without JavaScript

Source code: <form method="get" action="https://www.google.com/search">   <input type="text" id="search" name="q" />   <button type="submit">Search</button> </form>

The idea of including a search on my blog is on my mind for quite a while. What's holding me back from using a service such as Algolia is that I want to provide a functional search even when JavaScript fails or is still loading. Jim Nielsen shared a great trick that leverages search engines to provide an acceptable search experience even when JavaScript fails.

Enhance your JavaScript search

Be prepared when asking for help

When you see advice, first write down everything you tried.

I'm not the biggest fan of this whole "never get a developer out of their zone" topic. But I do think that asking for help in a structured way helps everybody. Ian Miell's describes how to figure out when to ask for help (the included formula is maybe a bit much πŸ™ˆ) and advises to write down what you tried before interrupting. I love that approach!

Be prepared when asking for help

Today I learned – there's a native ping attribute

Source code: <a href="https://www.stefanjudis.com/popular-posts/"     ping="https://www.stefanjudis.com/tracking/">Read popular posts</a>

Did you know that HTML provides a way to track users clicking links? I didn't and had a look at the ping attribute.

Learn more about the ping attribute

A life without a smartphone and social media

Then something socially curious happened: everybody started speaking to each other on Facebook and WhatsApp to try to figure out what was wrong. Some of them even contacted my family multiple times. They all had my phone number, email address and other ways of contacting me. However, none of them did.

Gregory Alvarez shared his journey when quitting social media. I don't plan to follow his path, but I can relate to everything he shares.

Are you ready to quit social media?

Today I learned – the output element is an ARIA live region

Example showing the functionality of the output element which announces changes to screen readers

ARIA live regions play an essential role in communicating DOM changes to assistive technologies such as screen readers. This week I learned that you could use the output element to make DOM changes more accessible.

Learn more about the output element

The false promise of scripts claiming to make your site accessible

No overlay product on the market can cause a website to become fully compliant with any existing accessibility standard and therefore cannot eliminate legal risk.

There's been a lot of discussion in the accessibility community around a new company that promises to make websites accessible using JavaScript. That's nonsense, and Karl Groves shared why.

Learn more about overlay products

Safety at conferences

I don't feel safe at conferences

I've been at many web development conferences over the years, and let's face it, I never felt unsafe at an event. Laura Kalkbag shared her experience at conferences. It's a required read for everybody organising/attending events.

Learn about better events

How to highlight columns in HTML tables

 The author adds a class to the col element, which does nothing with the col element itself, at least not visually, because the element doesn’t get rendered on the page, but it applies the styles from the class to all the cells in the column.

Manuel Matuzovic shared a nifty CSS detail about tables. If you apply styles to a table's the col element, the styling will be applied to the complete row. 😲 Manuel describes how to leverage this behaviour to highlight table columns.

Highlight your table columns

Interactive pull request handling on the command line

Interactive pull request selection on the command line

Do you handle your version control on the command line? If so, I found a handy snippet to check out pull requests quickly on the command line. Enjoy!

Check out all the pull requests

New tiny helpers

Screenshots of CSS Duotone Generator, CSS Grid Cheatsheet and Moiva

Three useful projects to have a look at

A quote to think about

Often I find myself asking the question if another tool or app can make me more productive. Here's the thing, though; productivity rarely depends on the tools you use, it's always about you and your commitment. That's why @rands tweet is this week's quote of the month.

Blaming a tool for your productivity is like blaming a pencil for your bad writing.

A song that makes you stop coding

Cover of the African Dream

This week's track is a housy remix from "The African Dream". I love the vocals, and I can't wait for the time we're allowed to dance outside again.

Listen to The African Dream

And that's a wrap for the eleventh Web Weekly! πŸŽ‰

Writing this newsletter takes me three hours every week. If you enjoyed it, a quick share means the world to me. β™₯️

Stay safe, and I'll talk to you next week! πŸŽ‰ πŸ‘‹

PS. I heard the cool kids use RSS. You can find multiple feeds on my site.

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About Stefan Judis

Frontend nerd with over ten years of experience, freelance dev, "Today I Learned" blogger, conference speaker, and Open Source maintainer.

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