Web Weekly #173
- Published at
- Updated at
- Reading time
- 9min
Do you know how SVG pathLength can make it easier to animate path elements? Have you noticed that dns-prefetch only recently went into the baseline? And which Frontend framework is the fastest in 2025?
Turn on the Web Weekly tune and find some answers below. Enjoy!
Jules listens to "Snarky Puppy & Metropole Orkest - Waves Upon Waves" and says:
10 years after their glorious Sylva album they're back together again. I was lucky enough to be present at one of their recording nights. It was amazing. The rest of the album is gonna be great.
Do you want to share your favorite song with the Web Weekly community? Hit reply; there are four more songs left in the queue.
Last week I shared some of my favorite CLI util functions and aliases and asked what's on your machine. Here are some of my favorite replies.
Pawel cleans up his machine with a byebye_node_modules command. :D
Boris prefers to see what aliases do in his environment and uses zsh-abbr to expand the commands.
And Andreas bets on git-extras which enriches Git with commands like git continue or git undo.
I love this! If you have a CLI trick that the world should know of, let me know! I'd love to share some more community tips another time!
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Want to know what really slows down your site? DebugBear's in-depth guide explains how to analyze request waterfalls to identify high-impact web performance optimizations.
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Guess what you'll find at chihuahuaspin?
AI isn't your friend ➡︎ Hello Friend – The Friendship App I Won't Build
No surprise here, you know I'm a fan of writing ➡︎ Good Managers Write Good
It's very sad, but I still have to find or work with a direct manager who follows all this excellent manager advice out there ➡︎ Running 1:1s for Engineers
Watch out; this post is long. Very long. Loren investigated framework performance by building the same app in multiple modern frameworks. I can only applaud this approach to choosing the right framework!
Is it just me, or are dithered images becoming more popular lately? Damar put out an interactive guide explaining how dithered images are created. It's always good to know about the details!
I've been a proud member of the "Big Cursor" club for years. My macOS cursor is 25% larger than the default size. It's so much better. If you haven't tried it, do it!
But what happens on websites that increase the cursor size when you're "coming in big" already? David did some investigative research.
I haven't seen Apple's "Liquid Glass" in action yet and I'm still holding back updating macOS, but all this seems so absurd. Thomas shares how to keep websites accessible while "dealing" with the design language's rough edges. I have no words.
That's scary. Nick shares that everybody can pretend to be you on GitHub. 😱 How can you prevent this? Get verified!
Wowza! Would you enjoy getting Web Weekly straight to your inbox?
Here's a single-purpose URL that you can send to people sending you sloppy facts...
... this article is a good start. It highlights what you need to know about the color function with good lookin' visuals.
And if you want to go deep on color spaces, this article is worth a look, too!
Man, I love this. Eric created a custom element to create automatic side notes in his blog posts. It comes with feature detection for anchor positioning and progressive enhancement. Great stuff. This is how things should be done!
Anchor positioning landed in Safari 26 and is actively being worked on in Firefox (available behind a flag). Slowly it's time that we all start to learn how they work. Temani put together a guide with many demos that will get you up to speed!
And if you're confused about position-anchor and position-area, here's an interactive tool explaining the concepts.
You probably know about scroll-margin. But do you know that there's also scroll-padding? Matthias explains the difference.
If you don't want to read the article, here's an interactive example.
Yes, plural! There are two new split views.
First, Chrome supports experimental split views. 😲
And second, with Chrome 142, the DevTools allow you to move the bottom drawer that usually includes the JS Console to the side. Why's that cool? Now you can move one of the main panels to the side to look at "Elements" and "Network" at the same time. 🎉
From the unlimited MDN knowledge archive...
If your framework or application requires immutable data structures, you'll dig this one! Array lets you update an array and provides a new reference!
You know these "hand-drawn" signature effects that some people apply to SVG paths? They're usually done with a combination of stroke-dasharray, stroke-dashoffset and some cryptic numbers reflecting the SVG path length. I learned that you can create them with easier-to-handle numbers, too!
Find more short web development learnings in my "Today I learned" section.
You've probably heard of <link rel=dns-prefetch> which lets you kick off DNS resolution for resources before they are requested. The quick-to-add link element shines if you want to speed up delayed 3rd party requests. But isn't this functionality supported for ages?
You're right. It's supported in Chrome since v46, in Firefox since v127 and in Safari Desktop since version v5 (yes, you've read that right). But here's the catch, mobile Safari didn't support early DNS resolution until the fairly new v26 release.
- lume/nimble-html – A light-weight
htmltagged template string function for writing declarative-reactive web apps. - fatihak/InkyPi – E-Ink Display software for Raspberry Pi with a Web Interface.
- pengzhanbo/caniuse-embed – CanIUse compatibility embed.
If you wonder if you should bet on progressive web apps and their current cross-browser support, the PWA Browser Scorecards will give you a great overview.
Find more single-purpose online tools on tiny-helpers.dev.
This is just a quote from a random redditor, but regardless this sentence made me laugh.
Vibe coding is just roleplay for guys who want to feel like hackers without doing the hard part.
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Frontend nerd with over ten years of experience, freelance dev, "Today I Learned" blogger, conference speaker, and Open Source maintainer.