🚀 The Top 15 Frontend Links of 2018
By: Chris Brandrick
Tags: Browsers, Frontend, HTML, Web Development, CSS

🚀 The Top 15 Frontend Links of 2018

The frontend highlights from the past twelve months

Every week, email digest Frontend Focus goes out to over 85,000 frontend developers and designers — keeping folks up-to-date with the best links, articles, tutorials, videos, and inspiration from across the web.

Here, we’ve gone through all the data from the past twelve months and bought together the highlights and most popular links shared.

So, here’s what frontend developers have been reading in 2018.

David Dias| Shared in August’s Issue 355

An extensive list of things you should check or at least be aware of as a front-end developer trying to make your sites work as fast as possible.

Rahul Nanwani | Shared in September’s Issue 359

If you want your pages to load and render faster, you can ‘lazy load’ your images so that they slot into place later in the process. This popular article introduces the concept and some different ways to achieve it.

Shared in July’s Issue 347

A very quick online way to put together a CSS grid layout and get the code needed to make it happen. This tool got plenty of love on Twitter and proved popular in our newsletter too.

Zell Liew | Shared in May’s Issue 339

Widely available web technologies like CSS Grid, CSS custom properties, CSS shapes and CSS writing-mode are allowing designers to exercise creativity in all new ways. Zell Liew explains how.

Adidas Rolls Out Mini-Site Inspired by 1990s Web Design

Shared in October’s Issue 362

This 90s inspired site is something of a throwback to the early days of the web, rocking a GeoCities vibe.

Ire Aderinokun | Shared in January’s Issue 322

HTML 5.2 became an official W3C Recommendation back in December of 2017, here’s a refresher on what it introduced and changed.

Sarah Drasner | Shared in February’s Issue 327

Some developers aren’t keen on complex workflows that involve build tools and they’re not mandatory to use the latest JavaScript tech anyway. Here’s how to use Vue.js in a similarly detached way as you might use jQuery now.

Keith J Grant | Shared in January’s Issue 323

A primer to HTML’s then-new dialog element for adding native modal boxes.

Rachel Andrew | Shared in February’s Issue 326

Explores the use of media queries in responsive design, and how they work alongside Flexbox and Grid Layout.

Shared in May’s Issue 340

Over 5,000 frontend developers took part in this wide-ranging survey. The results look at what tools and techniques devs used in 2018.

Russell Brandom | Shared in April’s Issue 335

This Web Authentication spec (a.k.a. Webauthn) has been working its way toward W3C approval over the past couple of years — this announcement in April marked the first major move towards browser support for such a standard for password-free logins.

MaxArt | Shared in June’s Issue 344

Explores draft CSS units, including lh , vi and grad .

Martijn Cuppens | Shared in Issue 348

This neat demonstration of how specs don’t guarantee an identical result across browsers got plenty of attention, acting as a good reminder for multi-browser testing.

Here’s the CodePen, if you want to play about with it for yourself.

Eiji Kitamura, Dave Gash, Durga Pandey| Shared in October’s Issue 360

Documentation on how the emerging Web Payments standard works, providing a generalized way to handle payments on the Web.

A Straightforward Introduction to ‘Houdini’

Sam Richard | Shared in September’s Issue 357

A few years ago, Houdini was called ‘maybe the most exciting development in CSS you’ve never heard of’ — a few years on it can still be tricky to understand what this collection of mostly incomplete CSS related APIs and technologies really represents. This popular mini-site helps clear it up.

Enjoyed this look back? Give it a 👏 clap or 👏👏👏 three! 😉

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