Monthly Web Development Update 9⁄2018: Native Lazy Loading And Imaginary Work

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Anselm is a freelance front-end developer who cares about sustainable front-end experiences and ethical choices in life. He writes the WDRL, and is co-founder … More about Anselm ↬

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The web is evolving at such a fast pace that it can be hard to stay on top of things. To give you an overview of what happened in the web dev world in the past few weeks, Anselm once again compiled his monthly update.

It’s an interesting concept to compare JavaScript with CO2 and yet a very valid one. Alex Russel who works for the Chrome team and has a lot of insights into the current state of the web says that using too much JavaScript or using it exclusively (without progressive enhancement/graceful degradation) will have the same effect as too much CO2 for the ecosystem on planet Earth — the ecosystem will fall apart. And just like we need a certain amount of CO2 to live, we need JavaScript on the web. It’s that fine line that makes the difference — the line between not too much and none at all.

I feel that with the native browser APIs that we have these days we have a fantastic opportunity to build great web services without bloating them too much and without relying only on JavaScript. We can enhance native elements with the Custom Elements API easily via ES6 Classes, with so little code that it seems ridiculous to build all that on your own in a third-party framework. Coincidentally, the Github engineering team published an article about how they dropped jQuery entirely and what they now use instead: native JavaScript and small, lean code that is progressively enhancing their platform. Less code, better maintainability, and more stability.

News

  • Chrome 70 is now in beta, bringing shape detection as an origin trial that allows us to perform QR code reading, face detection, and text recognition in images. The Web Authentication API got some updates, too, and referrerpolicy support was added to `