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The Web Weekly newsletter keeps you up to date, teaches you web development tricks and covers all things working in tech.

Hello, hello party people!

Last week has been the day many poor souls waited for. Internet Explorer 11 left Microsoft's support rotation. No patches and security fixes anymore!

I haven't dealt with IE for ages, but I know folks that still had to tackle it occasionally. But does no support mean the outdated browser will just disappear? As Adrian puts it: "This doesn’t mean that the copy of IE11 on your client’s computer will suddenly uninstall itself." And this is true, but I think now's really the time to forget about it.

If you want to go down memory lane for a moment and see some "great" IE hacks, Pawel collected some nice ones to say goodbye.

And with this, today you'll learn about:

  • AbortController use cases
  • CSS terminology
  • font-display: optional

... and, as always, GitHub repositories, a new Tiny Helper and some music.

Lastly, welcome to the 26 new subscribers! I'm super excited to have you around! 👋

Something that made me smile this week

Dog waiting behind a corner.

This one is for the dog lovers.

Use cases for AbortController

JS code: const controller = new AbortController(); const { signal } = controller;  window.addEventListener('resize', () => doSomething(), { signal });  // later controller.abort();

I've wanted to write about AbortController and its use cases for a while but never made it. Sam covers the topic perfectly. 💯

Abort everything

CSS terminologies

Complex vs. compound selectors

I'm terrible with terminology in any programming language. If you have ever wondered about the difference between complex and compound CSS selectors. Miriam has you covered.

Use fancy CSS terms

Devtools tips worth knowing about

Logo of "Dev Tools Tips"

I'm a massive fan of Patrick's devtoolstips.org. The site already includes over a hundred tiny devtools tricks. Jump over and start browsing; it's worth it.

And the best thing, it has an RSS feed, too!

Level up your devtools game

Playwright, Playwright, Playwright

Stefan screensharing with open VS Code

I'm learning Playwright as part of my job. Playwright is a library to write end-to-end tests, check visual regression and control headless Chromium, WebKit and Firefox. If you want to learn more about it, I kicked off a new weekly series on Checkly's YouTube channel.

Automate everything

Help this site to survive

This site will self destruct in 85,892 seconds

From the weird corners of the internet: this site will self-destruct itself if it doesn't receive a posted message in 24h. It's been alive for 25 months, so let's not make it die!

Save this site

Gotchas of client-side routing

When you build a web application that uses client-side routing, you’re taking control of navigation away from HTML and the browser and giving it to a JavaScript component. This has implications for accessibility.

You might know I'm not the biggest fan of today's JS overuse. Complex applications are great and all, but I don't think every site needs to be a complex crafted web app. And that's especially true when JS implementations break well-working browser behavior. Marcy shares how client-side routing breaks accessible browser functionality.

Be aware when JS breaks things

High performance font loading

Stop worrying and use "font-display: optional"

Performant font loading is a topic by itself. Sure, today, you shouldn't use Google Fonts and rather self-host your fonts, but have you considered using font-display: optional? Malte makes a strong case for it.

Don't wait for slow fonts

Random MDN – The Sanitizer API

JS code showing off the Sanitizer API

From the unlimited knowledge archive called MDN...

The new Sanitizer API isn't ready for prime time yet, but we'll have an in-browser API to sanitize unsafe strings for DOM insertion eventually.

Clean things up

TIL recap – Three Markdown tricks I learned

Here's an example for "cursive and(!) bold" (***) and an inline code quote:  This text is ***cursive and bold***. Here are escaped backticks: `` `foo` ``.  Which renders as follows:  This text is cursive and bold. Here are escaped backticks: `foo`.

Did you know that two backticks, three stars and even four backticks are valid markdown syntax? Now you do!

Mark it up!

If you learned something new, whether small or big, old or new, documented or not, I'd love to include more learnings in this newsletter. Send me an email, and I'm happy to share your discovery!

Three valuable projects to have a look at

A new Tiny Helper

GitHub Primer Prism – A color palette generator tool

I love looking at color palettes! It soothes me somehow. Primer Prism is GitHub's new color palette tool. It comes with standard color functionality and accessibility indicators, but what stands out are the reusable curves for hue, saturation and lightness. Check it out!

Color it

Find more single-purpose online tools on tiny-helpers.dev.

Thought of the week

I'm still struggling with my priorities and habits. So this week's quote is from Steph's Smith evergreen article How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably

Great is just good, but repeatable.

A song that makes you stop coding

Cover of &Me "The Rapture Pt II"

I just went for a run and "The Rapture Pt. II" by &ME let me forget about everything. It's a soft and dreamy electronic track with beautiful piano sounds.

Listen to "The Rapture Pt. II"

Thank you for reading!

And that's a wrap for the sixty-ninth Web Weekly! If you enjoy this newsletter, I'd love you to tell others about it. ♥️

If you're not a subscriber, you can change that! 😉

And with that, take care of yourselves, friends - mentally, physically, and emotionally. I'll see you next week! 👋

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Stefan standing in the park in front of a green background

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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