You’ve probably heard of WebAssembly and why it’s a powerful tool in the browser. In this article, Robert Aboukhalil will explore why serverless WebAssembly might be equally powerful outside the browser, and how to get started using it. Certain types of applications — such as data analysis and image processing, to name a few — can greatly benefit from such an approach. Though the runtime suffers because of the additional round-trips to the network, this approach does allow us to process more data at a time and not put a drain on users’ resources.
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Do you know the impact unused CSS has on performance? Spoiler: It’s a lot! In this article, Luke Harrison will explore a Sass-oriented solution for dealing with unused CSS, avoiding the need for complicated Node.js dependencies involving headless browsers, and DOM emulation. He will then touch upon some existing solution for removing it from stylesheets.
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The support of multiple writing modes is key to the way that our new layout methods of Flexbox and Grid Layout have been designed. An understanding of CSS Writing Modes is useful if you want to work with vertical scripts, or change writing mode for creative reasons. However, they also underpin our new layout methods, and those ideas are increasingly being applied across all of CSS. In this article, find out why Rachel Andrew believes understanding writing modes is so important.
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Margins in CSS seem simple enough at first glance. Applied to an element it forms a space around the element, pushing other elements away. However, in this article, Rachel Andrew will take a look at some of the things which trip people up with regard to using margins. In particular, you will be looking at how margins interact with each other, and how margin collapsing actually works. As with anything in CSS, share with your team the decisions you make, and comment your code!
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You may not have thought much about lists, although we use them frequently in our markup. Many things can be marked up quite logically as a list. There is more to styling lists in CSS than you might think. In this article, Rachel Andrew starts by looking at lists in CSS, and moving onto some interesting features defined in the CSS Lists specification — markers and counters.
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There is a wide variety of choices when it comes to creating a PDF from a web application. In this article, Rachel Andrew takes a look at the tools that are available and shares her recommendations to help you find the tool that works best for you. She’ll explore ways in which we can generate a PDF directly from a web application on the fly. It isn’t a comprehensive list of tools, but instead Rachel is aiming to demonstrate the different approaches. If you have a favorite tool or any experiences of your own to share, please add them to the comments below.
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CSS Grid Layout is switched on by using display: grid. What this single value property actually means is display: block grid. We get a block level box which is defined as a grid container, with direct children that are grid items and participate in grid layout. Continuing a series on the display property in CSS, this time Rachel Andrew takes a look at what happens when you use grid as a value of display, with added information about how subgrid changes that behavior.
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The display specification is a very useful spec to understand as it underpins all of the different layout methods we have. Continuing a series on the display property in CSS, this time Rachel Andrew takes a look at the values which control box generation, for those times when you don’t want to generate a box at all.
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Many performance optimizations can be made when we can predict what users might do before they actually do it. Resource Hints are a simple but effective way that web developers can help the browser to stay one step ahead of the user and keep pages fast. Think of them as a way for the developer to tell the browser about what’s likely to happen in the future so that the browser can factor that into its choices for how it loads resources. In this article Drew McLellan will take a look at the main types of Resource Hints and when and where we can use them in our pages.
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We talk a lot about Flexbox and CSS Grid Layout, but these layout methods are essentially values of the CSS display property, a workhorse of a property that doesn’t get a lot of attention. Rachel Andrew takes a better look in a short series. Rachel is going to take a look at the way that the values of display are defined in the Level 3 specification. This is a change to how we defined display in earlier versions of CSS. While it may seem unusual at first, we think these changes really help to explain what is going on when we change the value of display on an element.
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