CSS is what gives every website its design. Websites sure aren’t very fun and friendly without it! I’ve read about somebody going a week without JavaScript and how the experience resulted in websites that were faster, though certain aspects of them would not function as expected.

But CSS. Turning off CSS while browsing the web wouldn’t exactly make the web far less usable… right? Or, like JavaScript, would some features not work as expected? Out of curiosity, I decided to give it a whirl and rip the CSS flesh off the HTML skeleton while browsing a few sites.

Why, you might ask? Are there any non-masochistic reasons for turning off CSS? Heydon Pickering once tweeted that disabling CSS is a good way to check some accessibility standards:

1. Common elements like headings, lists, and form controls are semantic and still look good.
2. A visual hierarchy is still established with default styles.
3. The content can still be read in a logical order.
4. Images still exist as <img> tags rather than getting lost as CSS backgrounds.

A WebAIM survey from 2018 reported that 12.5% of users who rely on any sort of assisted technology browse the web with custom stylesheets, which can include doing away with every CSS declaration across a site. And, if we’re talking about slow internet connections, ditching CSS could be one way to consume content faster. There’s also the chance that CSS is disabled for reasons outside our immediate control, like when a server has hiccups of fails to load assets.

As an experiment, I used five websites and a web app without CSS, and this post will cover my experiences. It wound up being a rather eye-opening adventure for me personally, but has also informed me professionally as a developer in ways I hope you’ll see as well.

But first, here’s how to disable CSS

You’re absolutely welcome to live vicariously through me in the form of this post. But for those of you who are feeling up to the task and want to experience a style-less web, …

Ivan Akulov has collected a whole bunch of information and know-how on making things load a bit more quickly with preload and prefetch. That’s great in and of itself, but he also points to something new to me – the as attribute:

<link rel="preload" href="/style.css" as="style" />

Supposedly, this helps browsers prioritize when to download assets and which assets to load.

My favorite part of this post is Ivan’s quick summary at the end which clearly defines what all these different tags can be used for:

<link rel="preload"> – when you’ll need a resource in a few seconds
<link rel="prefetch"> – when you’ll need a resource on a next page
<link rel="preconnect"> – when you know you’ll need a resource soon, but you don’t know its full url yet

Make sure to check out our own post on the matter of prefetching, preloading, and prebrowsing, too. Adding these things to our links can make significant performance improvements and so check it out to add more resources to your performance toolbox.

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from CSS-Tricks https://3perf.com/blog/link-rels/…

Specific design systems, I mean. Design systems, as a concept, are something just about any site can benefit from.

A lot of hype goes into design systems these days. Just the other day, an organization’s published their design system publicly and I got a slew of DMs, emails, and Slack messages encouraging me to check it out. “Looks good to me,” I said. But I’m merely knocking on the hood of a new car, so to speak. I haven’t sat in it. I haven’t driven it around the block, let alone driven it cross-country or tried to dig Cheerios out from between the seats. I’m sure I’d have more opinions after building a site or 10 with it (excuse the mixed metaphors).

So that leads me to a few questions. Can I build a site with this design system? Should I build a site with it? Is it for me? Or wait… who is this for?

They all have accordions.

Well not all of them, but bear with me, because there is a point to be made.

Bootstrap has an accordion too! Developers totally understand Bootstrap.

Whatever you think of it, I don’t see much confusion around Bootstrap. You link up the CSS, you use the HTML they give you and — 💥 — you have components that are ready to rock.

It’s possible that Bootstrap is a more of a “pattern library” than a “design system.” I dunno. There is probably something to that distinction, but the naming semantics (if there are any) seem to be used interchangeably, so distinguishing Bootstrap as one or the other doesn’t alleviate any confusion.

Developers reach for Bootstrap because…

• It helps them build faster.
• They get good quality “out of the box” if they aren’t particularly great at HTML and CSS themselves.
• They want to be accessible and Bootstrap has been through the accessibility ringer.
• [Insert your reason.]

Appealing, yet these seem to be somewhat table stakes for any design system and not exclusive to Bootstrap alone.

Hmmmm… Maybe I’ll have a

A React component goes through different phases as it lives in an application, though it might not be evident that anything is happening behind the scenes.

Those phases are:

• mounting
• updating
• unmounting
• error handling

There are methods in each of these phases that make it possible to perform specific actions on the component during that phase. For example, when fetching data from a network, you’d want to call the function that handles the API call in the componentDidMount() method, which is available during the mounting phase.

Knowing the different lifecycle methods is important in the development of React applications, because it allows us to trigger actions exactly when they’re needed without getting tangled up with others. We’re going to look at each lifecycle in this post, including the methods that are available to them and the types of scenarios we’d use them.

The Mounting Phase

Think of mounting as the initial phase of a component’s lifecycle. Before mounting occurs, a component has yet to exist — it’s merely a twinkle in the eyes of the DOM until mounting takes place and hooks the component up as part of the document.

There are plenty of methods we can leverage once a component is mounted: constructor() , render(), componentDidMount() and static getDerivedStateFromProps(). Each one is handy in it’s own right, so let’s look at them in that order.

constructor()

The constructor() method is expected when state is set directly on a component in order to bind methods together. Here is how it looks:

// Once the input component is mounting...
constructor(props) {
  // ...set some props on it...
  super(props);
  // ...which, in this case is a blank username...
  this.state = {
    username: ''
  };
  // ...and then bind with a method that handles a change to the input
  this.handleInputChange = this.handleInputChange.bind(this);
}

It is important to know that the constructor is the first method that gets called as the component is created. The component hasn’t rendered yet (that’s coming) but the DOM is aware of it and we can hook …

Let’s say you’re rocking a JAMstack-style site (no server-side languages in use), but you want to do something rather dynamic like send an email. Not a problem! That’s the whole point of JAMstack. It’s not just static hosting. It’s that plus doing anything else you wanna do through JavaScript and APIs.

Here’s the setup: You need a service to help you send the email. Let’s just pick Sparkpost out of a hat. There are a number of them, and I’ll leave comparing their features and pricing to you, as we’re doing something extremely basic and low-volume here. To send an email with Sparkpost, you hit their API with your API key, provide information about the email you want to send, and Sparkpost sends it.

So, you’ll need to run a little server-side code to protect your API key during the API request. Where can you run that code? A Lambda is perfect for that (aka a serverless function or cloud function). There are lots of services to help you run these, but none are easier than Netlify, where you might be hosting your site anyway.

Get Sparkpost ready

I signed up for Sparkpost and made sure my account was all set up and verified. The dashboard there will give you an API key:

Toss that API Key into Netlify

Part of protecting our API key is making sure it’s only used in server-side code, but also that we keep it out of our Git repository. Netlify has environment variables that expose it to functions as needed, so we’ll plop it there:

Let’s spin up Netlify Dev, as that’ll make this easy to work with

Netlify Dev is a magical little tool that does stuff like run our static site generator for us. For the site I’m working on, I use Eleventy and Netlify Dev auto-detects and auto-runs it, which is super neat. But more importantly, for us, it gives us a local URL that runs our functions for testing.

Once it’s all installed, running …