Weekend Reading–The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

Keeping up with all that goes on in the world of front end development is challenging–I know, because it's something I devote quite a lot of my time to doing.

A large part of why I do that is so that you, our audience, can keep up with what’s important without spending hours a week doing so. And no small part of that is compiling the "elsewheres" over at Conffab that form the basis of my weekly newsletter. If you're an RSS sort of user, then you can find the feed URL here.?

This week we launch the full program for our Developer Summit, in Sydney (and live streamed) November 127th and 28th. So, today I'm rounding up some recent reading on topics related to the Developer Summit program, including some pieces by speakers there.

The FrontEnd Treadmill

The conference opens with Marco Rogers and The FrontEnd Treadmill. I’ve been hounding politely encouraging Marco to come speak for some time now, and we’re really excited to have him. His opening keynote has the same name and themes as a piece he recently wrote. His thesis is that we, as professionals and organisations, are on a treadmill, of constantly chasing updates to our tooling, and it is exhausting and limiting.

Marco has thoughts about how we can start getting off that treadmill, so if this resonates with you, read his piece and hopefully get along to hear him in person.

Latency and performance

With all our (rightly placed) concern about performance, latency feels like it deserves a bit more focus. Much of our attention when it comes to performance is the size of payloads, and deferring the loading of resources. Very important strategies, but we can do more. At Developer Summit Kai Malcolm will argue that Reducing Latency is like Risk mitigation and explore strategies for addressing it.

Recently a couple of articles on latency crossed my screen, so perhaps there’s something going on?

Salma Alam-Naylor wrote How to make your web page faster before it even loads, while Web performance legend Harry Roberts recently penned??Optimising for High Latency Environments.

The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

Plain old HTML simply doesn’t get the attention and respect it deserves. This powerful story by Terence Eden about a homeless teenager accessing advice about housing support on a PlayStation portable’s web browser underscores how essential the web has become for people’s very existence. It also brought to mind Alex Russell’s recent 4 part piece on JavaScript-first frontend culture and how it broke US public services.

At Dev Summit Mandy Michael dives into the often underestimated power of HTML in shaping and improving the performance of our applications and websites in Performance Driven HTML.

Replacing React code with the CSS :has selector

Speaking of getting off the FrontEnd treadmill, speaker Nadia Makarevich, author of the book Advanced React will be giving a deep assessment of the React Compiler at Dev Summit.

But here she explores what the new CSS :has selector is and how it can be used to improve our React code.

Meanwhile at Dev Summit??Anton Ball will take an in-depth look at the :has selector and other recent improvements to CSS in CSS:has(.everything). And if you really want to go deep into modern CSS (which every front end developer really should), there’s a workshop by Miriam Suzanne covering this and much more the day after Dev Summit.

Let’s talk about web components

Yes, we sure will be at Dev Summit, with this great talk by Scott Jehl (and we have a workshop on Web Components as well from Scott).

Brad Frost is enthusiastic about web components and thinks you should be too. This piece explores why.

OK, that should keep you going for the weekend, or if you need more reading, read over to the elsewhere section of Conffab where you'll find links to hundreds of recent articles and more we've found interesting and valuable.?