I’ve worked with Web Components a little bit over the last few, but really struggled to understand the use case for them. Until this week. Between Jeremy Keith’s article on HTML Web Components, plus using one for a client project with NASA, something just clicked in my brain … | Continue reading

Chris walks through a really good example of an HTML web component he made for NASA: wrapping a regular form element in a custom element to add Ajax functionality. This approach let me slash the JavaScript used for this project in half, easily progressively enhance the UI, and … | Continue reading

There are absolutely use-cases for SPAs (media sites, primarily). Most of the other things we use them for make the user experience notably worse or band-aid over the real underlying issues without addressing them. adactio.com/links/20493 | Continue reading

JavaScript is great. I love using it, and it does amazing things. But maybe it’s time we stop repeating these same patterns of development over and over again. Maybe we can use JavaScript more responsibly, and focus more effort on HTML and CSS. adactio.com/links/20239 | Continue reading

Yesterday, I wrote about how awful React is for web performance. One of my readers wrote to ask me… You don’t recommend React as an front end framework? What do you recommend? The answer is just a little nuanced (but not very), based on your goals and priorities.I’m privileged en … | Continue reading

Last week, I somewhat flippantly wrote… Honestly, the only difference between a junior and senior developer is that you get better at identifying all the places where your code goes to shit. My friend Sarah Dayan (the brilliant dev behind dinero.js) politely took me to task for s … | Continue reading

A few weeks ago, Laurie Voss tweeted a screenshot from an upcoming talk of his that said… There’s no such thing as fundamentals. If you take one thing away from this talk it should be that there’s no such thing as fundamentals. That’s gatekeeping nonsense. This resulted in a leng … | Continue reading

Yesterday, I wrote about how SPAs were a mistake. Today, I want to talk about how you can build multi-page apps (or, you know, regular websites) that are as fast as SPAs.Let’s dig in!A quick summary The sites and apps I build are absurdly fast. They load nearly instantly.Even on … | Continue reading

In last week’s article on the ideal browser support strategy in 2022, I wrote: Things can fail if JS is unsupported if they’re “nice to have” features. Anything critical needs to work without JavaScript. In response, reader Caleb Stauffer asked how I would handle a flyout or draw … | Continue reading

Last week, I learned that the Google Chrome team is planning to deprecate alert(), prompt(), and confirm(), the three browser-native ways to surface a modal window to users.The phrasing of the ticket implies that this is only on cross-domain sites (ie. third-party iframes), which … | Continue reading

A few weeks ago, Twitter use @McgarrDana tweeted: Accessibility isn’t more work, you were just cutting corners before. The work was incomplete. And she’s right! If what you built isn’t accessible, it’s not complete.There’s no such thing as a website or web app that doesn’t need t … | Continue reading

Last year, I wrote about Felix Baumgartner and Michel Fournier, two skydivers who were both trying to jump from the edge of space.Baumgartner’s dive was sponsored by Red Bull. Fournier’s was self-funded and multiple decades in the making. Unfortunately, a series of setbacks preve … | Continue reading

Way back in March, I announced that I was working on an advanced version of my Vanilla JS Academy.I originally hoped to launch it early summer. Then late summer. Then early fall. I built 80 percent of it, threw it out, and built it again. Then I threw that out and rebuilt it agai … | Continue reading

Yesterday, a popular programming education website sent a marketing email titled, “Beware of vanilla JS.” In it, the author wrote: But just vanilla JS by itself is a dangerous road to take. No, it’s not, for a multitude of reasons. Let’s unpack them.Vanilla JS is powerful and cap … | Continue reading

Last week, I wrote an article about Black Lives Matter.While most of the feedback was positive, I did predictably receive some negative responses, too. Some where particularly racist, but most of them were like this: I follow you for tech, not politics. Here’s the thing: all tech … | Continue reading

I’ve written a few articles lately on the performance of various vanilla JS approaches. I’ve also gotten some interesting responses from folks asking about the performance of other approaches.Today, I wanted to teach you how to write your own performance tests.This can be an inva … | Continue reading

Last week, someone sent me an email commenting on how fast every single page of my website loads.Most pages on my site are fully loaded in less than a second (typically around 500-700ms) on a high speed internet connection, and less than 3 seconds on 3G. So how do I make that hap … | Continue reading

Over the last year, I’ve had quite a few people ask me to write about the Fetch API for making Ajax requests.Truth is, I still prefer using good old XHR. Today, I want to explain why.A quick overview of XHR vs. fetch() JSON Placeholder is an awesome service for testing API calls. … | Continue reading

I often advocate for older approaches over newer ones.I still use concatenated strings over template literals. I use XHR instead of Fetch. I always use var, never const or let.But also uses newer methods and APIs, too. I love Array.map() and Array.filter(). I’m a big fan of the C … | Continue reading

Yesterday, we looked at how to create your own small vanilla JS helper library—a kind of mini Lodash or Underscore.js.Today, I’m going to show you how to build a tiny DOM manipulation library. This one will be more like a micro-jQuery.Setting up the library Just like yesterday, w … | Continue reading