RWD Weekly #418
Hello and welcome to RWD Weekly Newsletter edition 418.
Last week I said that the longer we go through our status codes the less I know… and this week is no exception.
Status code 418 is possibly the greatest status code of all time, and I’d almost prefer this over a 200.
From the MDN articles
The HTTP 418 I'm a teapot client error response code indicates that the server refuses to brew coffee because it is, permanently, a teapot. A combined coffee/tea pot that is temporarily out of coffee should instead return 503.
I kid you not.
These were created in 1998 and 2014 as April Fools jokes and have remained as part of the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol.
In 2017 Mark Nottingham made official requests to Node.js, Go, Pyton, ASP.net to remove the 418 I’m a teapot codse from the codebase. In response, a fifteen-year-old Shane Brunswick created our feature site this week, Save Error Code 418 and stated
“It’s a reminder that the underlying processes of computers are still made by humans. It’d be a real shame to see 418 go…”
The site took off with Reddit exploding and twitter trending with #418. In response to this Mark started the process of making 418 marked as a reserved HTTP status code.
If you ask me, we work in the greatest industry in the world.
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Article
The Thirteenth Fourth
CSS Tricks turns 13 and there has been a tonne of stuff that has happened on that site over the past 12 months. I’ve always loved Chris’s writing style and his willingness to share everything.
We need more inclusive web performance metrics
Scott Jehl reflects on how a lot of our performance metrics are around visual elements, like First Contentful Paint and Largest Contentful Paint, two things that might not matter to someone visually impaired and using assistive technologies. Yes, those are valuable metrics for some of our users, but are we also focussing on what makes a website performant for everyone else?
Rel=prefetch and the Importance of Effective HTTP/2 Prioritisation
Take care if you’re using Prefetch to improve the loading of the next page your users may be going to. Andy has found that in some cases on Chrome/Edge and Safari you can harm the performance of your current page load.
CSS News July 2020
A lot of exciting updates for the July edition of CSS news from Rachel Andrew (also check out our responsive interview with Rachel too). Gap is coming to flex box to avoid us using margins and padding (and using fukol grids), aspect ratio has shipped in Canary behind a flag, and ::marker is available for us to target list items style with CSS rather than the whole list item.
Tutorials
Monetizing Your Blog With Coil
I’ve got this running on most of the sites I maintain now and it’s probably made me a few dollars in the past six months… but that’s a few dollars more than I would have got. I’d encourage you to set this up, it literally costs you nothing and the more people that join the more valuable this will become.
Ten modern layouts in one line of CSS
Okay, so it’s not exactly one line of CSS for all of these, but the layouts are achieved with brevity.
CSS Animated Google Fonts
Now that Google Fonts are supporting variable fonts you can start controlling their appearance with CSS… which means you can start to animate them in CSS.
A case study of complex table design
We only use to design within tables, and now tables have become one of the most difficult things to design (go figure). Here’s a look at some tips to improve the design of complex tables.
Making a lil’ me – Part 1
A couple of weeks back we featured Cassie’s new site in the newsletter, and now she’s doing a series of posts on how some of the site elements were created (thanks Cassie). This one is the SVG animation of her avatar at the footer of the site.
Tools and Resources
Responsively App
Develop responsive web apps 5x faster! A must-have DevTool for all Front-End developers that will make your job easier.
New in Chrome: CSS Overview
This was timing out when I tried it on my Chrome Canary version, but the article shows some screenshots of what it looks like when run on CSS Tricks. Get a view of the media queries, selectors, colour palette and more.
Tooling.Report
It’s a quick way to determine the best build tool for your next web project, or if tooling migration is worth it, or how to adopt a tool’s best practice into your existing configuration and code base.
Wireframe Season 3 Coming Next Week
If you’re looking for a new podcast to keep you company on long walks or your weekly exercise, season 3 of Wireframe is back with Khoi Vinh. The trailer sounds pretty good.
Finally
Intrinsic image sizes
A little tweet from Addy — Tip: Set width & height on your <img> elements. This now allows modern browsers to infer their intrinsic size pre-download, reducing layout shifts.
That’s all for this week. As always thank you to those that sent through link recommendations, if you’ve come across something or have written something please send it through.
Cheers,
Justin.
