Instant Web Site Tools

Scott Turner, who has an entire blog “Exploring procedural generation and display of fantasy maps”, gets into why vector graphics seems on these surface why it would be bad for the look of a pencil stroke:

Something like this pencil stroke would require many tens of thousands of different elements.  Basically each little blob of gray in that image would be separately defined. 

But, SVG filters to the rescue.

It’s all about <feTurbulence.

Squigglevision!

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The post Creating a Pencil Effect in SVG appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

from CSS-Tricks https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/2020/02/creating-pencil-effect-in-svg.html…

Nada Rifki demonstrates the scroll-snap-type and scroll-snap-alignCSS properties. I like that the demo shows that the items in the scrolling container can be different sizes. It is the edges of those children that matter, not some fixed snapping distance.

I like Max Kohler’s coverage as well, which includes a demo where the snapping can happen in multiple directions.

This is one of those things where, if you didn’t know about it, it’s worth a solid golf clap for CSS.

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from CSS-Tricks https://blog.logrocket.com/how-to-use-css-scroll-snap/…

Here’s an outstanding idea from Max Böck. He’s created a boilerplate project for building websites that fit within a single HTTP request. This is extremely important for websites that contain critical information for public safety. As Max writes:

In cases of emergency, many organizations need a quick way to publish critical information. But exisiting (CMS) websites are often unable to handle sudden spikes in traffic.

What’s so special about this boilerplate? Well, it does smart stuff like:

• generates a static site using Eleventy,
• uses minimal markup with inlined CSS,
• aims to transmit everything in the first connection roundtrip (~14KB),
• progressively enables offline-support with Service Workers,
• uses Netlify CMS for easy content editing, and
• provides one-click deployment via Netlify to get off the ground quickly

The example website that Max built with this boilerplate is shockingly fast and I would go one step further to argue that all websites should feel as fast as this, not just websites that are useful in an emergency.

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from CSS-Tricks https://mxb.dev/blog/emergency-website-kit/…

Real talk from Dave:

I, Dave Rupert, a person who cares about web performance, a person who reads web performance blogs, a person who spends lots of hours trying to keep up on best practices, a person who co-hosts a weekly podcast about making websites and speak with web performance professionals… somehow goofed and added 33 SECONDS to their page load.

This stuff is hard even when you care a lot. The 33 seconds came from font preloading rather than the one-line wonder of font-display.

I also care about making fast websites, but mine aren’t winning any speed awards because I’ll take practical and maintainable over peak performance any day. (Sorry, world)

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from CSS-Tricks https://daverupert.com/2020/03/maintaining-performance/…

In previous articles, we explained what consistency is, the difference between “strong” and “eventual” consistency, and why this distinction is more important than ever to modern application developers. We also introduced the notion of ‘consistency tax’: the extra time and effort that a development team needs to invest if they choose a system with only eventual consistency or limited consistency guarantees. 

Several modern databases use state-of-the-art algorithms to eliminate the tradeoff between consistency and performance. Of course, we would not want you to take our word for it without a proper explanation. Therefore, in this final article, we dive into the technical details behind some of these databases. Typically, the only source of information for these technical details are research papers, so the point of this article is to explain these systems in simpler terms.  Because these systems are far more complex in reality, we’ll provide the links in the text in case you want to know more and love to read research papers.

Introduction

In parts 1 and 2 of this article series, we explained how distributed databases use different replicas to spread the load and/or serve users in different regions. To summarize here, for new readers, a replica is just a duplication of your data. And this duplication can live either in the same location for redundancy, or in another location to offer lower latencies to users in those locations. Having multiple replicas that can handle both reads and writes has a strong advantage, because the database becomes scalable and can offer lower latency to all your users, no matter where they are. However, you do not want each of the replicas to have their own interpretation of the data. Instead of small data differences between each replica, you want one unique interpretation of the data, which is often referred to as a single source of truth. In order to achieve that, you need to have some …

In this piece, Eric Meyer argues that performance is more important than ever right now — especially for websites that contain critical information for the public:

If you are in charge of a web site that provides even slightly important information, or important services, it’s time to get static. I’m thinking here of sites for places like health departments (and pretty much all government services), hospitals and clinics, utility services, food delivery and ordering, and I’m sure there are more that haven’t occurred to me. As much as you possibly can, get it down to static HTML and CSS and maybe a tiny bit of enhancing JS, and pare away every byte you can.

What Eric means by “it’s time to get static” is that we need to serve regular ol’ HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files to the browser with server-side rendering. That way, our sites are faster and with fewer bottlenecks that can render the whole website useless.

On this note, Zach Leatherman recently looked at 200 sites built with Eleventy and found that the mean Lighthouse performance score was 93.7! In other words: static site generators are gosh darn fast. And if that’s not a great reason to make the switch or to start learning about static site generators in general, then I don’t know what is.

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from CSS-Tricks https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2020/03/22/get-static/…