Geoff Graham – CSS-Tricks

Healthcare, Selling Lemons, and the Price of Developer Experience

Geoff Graham — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 19:45:48 +0000

Every now and then, a one blog post is published and it spurs a reaction or response in others that are, in turn, published as blogs posts, and a theme starts to emerge. That’s what happened this past week and the theme developed around the cost of JavaScript frameworks — a cost that, in this case, reveals just how darn important it is to use JavaScript responsibly.

Eric Bailey: Modern Health, frameworks, performance, and harm

This is where the story begins. Eric goes to a health service provider website to book an appointment and gets… a blank screen.

In addition to a terrifying amount of telemetry, Modern Health’s customer-facing experience is delivered using React and Webpack.

If you are familiar with how the web is built, what happened is pretty obvious: A website that over-relies on JavaScript to power its experience had its logic collide with one or more other errant pieces of logic that it summons. This created a deadlock.

If you do not make digital experiences for a living, what happened is not obvious at all. All you see is a tiny fake loading spinner that never stops.

D’oh. This might be mere nuisance — or even laughable — in some situations, but not when someone’s health is on the line:

A person seeking help in a time of crisis does not care about TypeScript, tree shaking, hot module replacement, A/B tests, burndown charts, NPS, OKRs, KPIs, or other startup jargon. Developer experience does not count for shit if the person using the thing they built can’t actually get what they need.

This is the big smack of reality. What happens when our tooling and reporting — the very things that are supposed to make our work more effective — get in the way of the user experience? These are tools that provide insights that can help us anticipate a user’s needs, especially in a time of need.

I realize that pointing the finger at JavaScript frameworks is already divisive. But this goes beyond whether you use React or framework d’jour. It’s about business priorities and developer experience conflicting with user experiences.

Alex Russell: The Market for Lemons

Partisans for slow, complex frameworks have successfully marketed lemons as the hot new thing, despite the pervasive failures in their wake, crowding out higher-quality options in the process.

These technologies were initially pitched on the back of “better user experiences”, but have utterly failed to deliver on that promise outside of the high-management-maturity organisations in which they were born. Transplanted into the wider web, these new stacks have proven to be expensive duds.

There’s the rub. Alex ain’t mincing words, but notice that the onus is on the way frameworks haved been marketed to developers than developers themselves. The sales pitch?

Once the lemon sellers embed the data-light idea that improved “Developer Experience” (“DX”) leads to better user outcomes, improving “DX” became and end unto itself, and many who knew better felt forced to play along. The long lead times in falsifying trickle-down UX was a feature, not a bug; they don’t need you to succeed, only to keep buying.

As marketing goes, the “DX” bait-and-switch is brilliant, but the tech isn’t delivering for anyone but developers.

Tough to stomach, right? No one wants to be duped, and it’s tough to admit a sunken cost when there is one. It gets downright personal if you’ve invested time in a specific piece of tech and effort integrating it into your stack. Development workflows are hard and settling into one is sorta like settling into a house you plan on living in a little while. But you’d want to know if your house was built on what Alex calls a “sandy foundation”.

I’d just like to pause here a moment to say I have no skin in this debate. As a web generalist, I tend to adopt new tools early for familiarity then drop them fast, relegating them to my toolshed until I find a good use for them. In other words, my knowledge is wide but not very deep in one area or thing. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is my go-to cocktail, but I do care a great deal about user experience and know when to reach for a tool to solve a particular thing.

And let’s acknowledge that not everyone has a say in the matter. Many of us work on managed teams that are prescribed the tools we use. Alex says as much, which I think is important to call out because it’s clear this isn’t meant to be personal. It’s a statement on our priorities and making sure they along to user expectations.

Let’s alow Chris to steer us back to the story…

Chris Coyier: End-To-End Tests with Content Blockers?

So, maybe your app is built on React and it doesn’t matter why it’s that way. There’s still work to do to ensure the app is reliable and accessible.

Just blocking a file shouldn’t totally wreck a website, but it often does! In JavaScript, that may be because the developers have written first-party JavaScript (which I’ll generally allow) that depends on third-party JavaScript (which I’ll generally block).

[…]

If I block resources from tracking-website.com, now my first-party JavaScript is going to throw an error. JavaScript isn’t chill. If an error is thrown, it doesn’t execute more JavaScript further down in the file. If further down in that file is transitionToOnboarding();— that ain’t gonna work.

Maybe it’s worth revisiting your workflow and tweaking it to account to identify more points of failure.

So here’s an idea: Run your end-to-end tests in browsers that have popular content blockers with default configs installed.

Doing so may uncover problems like this that stop your customers, and indeed people in need, from being stopped in their tracks.

Good idea! Hey, anything that helps paint a more realistic picture of how the app is used. That sort of clarity could happen a lot earlier in the process, perhaps before settling on development decisions. Know your users. Why are they using the app? How do they browse the web? Where are they phsically located? What problems could get in their way? Chris has a great talk on that, too.

Healthcare, Selling Lemons, and the Price of Developer Experience originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

The truth about CSS selector performance

Geoff Graham — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 15:59:35 +0000

Geez, leave it to Patrick Brosset to talk CSS performance in the most approachable and practical way possible. Not that CSS is always what’s gunking up the speed, or even the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to improving performance.

But if you’re looking for gains on the CSS side of things, Patrick has a nice way of sniffing out your most expensive selectors using Edge DevTools:

Crack open DevTools.
Head to the Performance Tab.
Make sure you have the “Enable advanced rendering instrumentation” option enabled. This tripped me up in the process.
Record a page load.
Open up the “Bottom-Up” tab in the report.
Check out your the size of your recalculated styles.

From here, click on one of the Recalculated Style events in the Main waterfall view and you’ll get a new “Selector Stats” tab. Look at all that gooey goodness!

Now you see all of the selectors that were processed and they can be sorted by how long they took, how many times they matched, the number of matching attempts, and something called “fast reject count” which I learned is the number of elements that were easy and quick to eliminate from matching.

A lot of insights here if CSS is really the bottleneck that needs investigating. But read Patrick’s full post over on the Microsoft Edge Blog because he goes much deeper into the why’s and how’s, and walks through an entire case study.

To Shared Link — Permalink on CSS-Tricks

The truth about CSS selector performance originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

The Double Emphasis Thing

Geoff Graham — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 15:06:55 +0000

I used to have this boss who loved, loved, loved, loved to emphasize words. This was way back before we used a WYSIWYG editors and I’d have to handcode that crap.


  I used to have this boss who loved, loved, 
  loved, loved 
  to emphasize words.

(Let’s not go into the colors he used for even MOAR emphasis.)

Writing all that markup never felt great. The effort it took, sure, whatever. But is it even a good idea to add overload content with double — or more! — emphases?

Different tags convey different emphasis

For starters, the and tags are designed for different uses. We got them back in HTML5, where:

: Is used to convey “strong importance, seriousness, or urgency for its contents”.

: Represents “stress emphasis”.

So, gives the content more weight in the sense it suggests that the content in it is important or urgent. Think of a warning:

Warning: The following content has been flagged for being awesome.

It might be tempting to reach for to do the same thing. Italicized text can be attention-grabbing after all. But it’s really meant as a hint to use more emphasis when readingt the content in it. For example, here are two versions of the same sentence with the emphasis in different locations:

I ate the entire plate of burritos. I ate the entire plate of burritos.

Both examples stress emphasis, but on different words. And they would sound different if you were to read them out loud. That makes a great way to express tone in your writing. It changes the meaning of the sentence in a way that does not.

Visual emphasis vs. semantic emphasis

Those are two things you gotta weigh when emphasizing content. Like, there are plenty of instances where you may need to italicize content without affecting the meaning of the sentence. But those can be handled with other tags that render italics:

: This is the classic one! Before HTML5, this was used to stress emphasis with italics all over the place. Now, it’s purely used to italicize content visually without changing the semantic meaning.

: Indicating the source of a fact or figure. (“Source: CSS-Tricks“)

: Used to mark up contact information, not only physical addresses, but things like email addresses and phone numbers too. (
howdy@example.com
)

It’s going to he the same thing with . Rather than using it for styling text you want to look heavier, it’s a better idea to use the classic tag for boldfacing to avoid giving extra signficance to content that doesn’t need it. And remember, some elements like headings are already rendered in bold, thanks to the browser’s default styles. There’s no need to add even more strong emphasis.

Using italics in emphasized content (and vice versa)

There are legitimate cases where you may need to italicize part of a line that’s already emphasized. Or maybe add emphasis to a bit of text that’s already italicized.

A blockquote might be a good example. I’ve seen plenty of times where they are italicized for style, even though default browser styles don’t do it:

blockquote { font-style: italic; }

What if we need to mention a movie title in that blockquote? That should be italicized. There’s no stress emphasis needed, so an tag will do. But it’s still weird to italicize something when it’s already rendered that way:

This movie’s opening weekend performance offers some insight in to its box office momentum as it fights to justify its enormous budget. In its first weekend, Avatar: The Way of Water made $134 million in North America alone and $435 million globally.

In a situation where we’re italicizing something within italicized content like this, we’re supposed to remove the italics from the nested element… in this case.

blockquote i { font-style: normal; }

Container style queries will be super useful to nab all these instances if we get them:

blockquote { container-name: quote; font-style: italic; } @container quote (font-style: italic) { em, i, cite, address { font-style: normal; } }

This little snippet evaluates the blockquote to see if it’s font-style is set to italic. If it is, then it’ll make sure the , , , and
elements are rendered as normal text, while retaining the semantic meaning if there is one.

But back to emphasis within emphasis

I wouldn’t nest inside like this:

I ate the entire plate of burritos.

…or nest inside instead:

I ate the entire plate of burritos.

The rendering is fine! And it doesn’t matter what order they’re in… at least in modern browsers. Jennifer Kyrnin mentions that some browsers only render the tag nearest to the text, but I didn’t bump into that anywhere in my limited tests. But something to watch for!

The reason I wouldn’t nest one form of emphasis in another is because it simply isn’t needed. There is no grammar rule that calls for it. Like exclamation points, one form of emphasis is enough, and you ought to use the one that matches what you’re after whether it’s visual, weight, or announced emphasis.

And even though some screen readers are capable of announcing emphasized content, they won’t read the markup with any additional importance or emphasis. So, no additional accessibility perks either, as far as I can tell.

But I really want all the emphasis!

If you’re in the position where your boss is like mine and wants ALL the emphasis, I’d reach for the right HTML tag for the type of emphasis, then apply the rest of the styles with a mix of tags that don’t affect semantics with CSS to help account for anything browser styles won’t handle.

I used to have this boss who loved, loved, loved, loved to emphasize words.

I might even do it with the tag too as a defensive measure:

/* If `em` contains `b` or `u` tags */ em:has(b, u), /* If `strong` contains `em` or `u` tags */ strong:has(i, u) { color: #f8a100; }

As long as we’re playing defense, we can identify errors where emphases are nested within emphases by highlighting them in red or something:

/* Highlight semantic emphases within semantic emphases */ em:has(strong), strong:has(em) { background: hsl(0deg 50% 50% / .25); border: 1px dashed hsl(0deg 50% 50% / .25); }

Then I’d probably use that snippet from the last section that removes the default italic styling from an element when it is nested in another italiczed element.

Anything else?

Mayyyyybe:

Make sure your webfont includes bold and italic variations — otherwise, you’ll be relying on the browser to try to bold or italicize text for you. But limit your font files to just the weights and styles you need for better performance.

Consider re-writing the content if the formatting seems off. There are natural ways to phrase content so that certain bits gain emphasis.

Check your analytics for the browsers your visitors use and test accordingly. Even though I didn’t run into a browser that balked at in or the other way around, there may be a browser or several that will.

The Double Emphasis Thing originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

AR, VR, and a Model for 3D in HTML

Geoff Graham — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 14:15:43 +0000

Tucked down somewhere in the Safari Technology Preview 161 release notes is a seemingly innocous line about support for a new HTML element and attribute:

Added support for  and honor  attributes (257518@main)

Anytime I see mention of some element I don’t recognize, my mind goes straight to Huh! New to me, but probably old news for everyone else. It’s poor posture, I know, as it could just as easily be:

Hmm, looks like some propriatary experiment.

Wow, a truly new thing!

Truth is, it’s sorta all three.

It’s an evolving concept

As in, the first somewhat official-sounding thing I found on wasn’t in the W3C spec but in WebKit’s repo for explainers. All that’s in the README is a giant note from 2021 that “The element has moved to the Immersive Web CG.” I was about to hop over but my eye caught the HistoryAndEvolution.md file which has a nice rundown of early context on the concept:

The  element was born out of a desire to take the next step and improve the experience of Safari’s integration with iOS’s AR Quick Look feature.

I had to look at Apple’s splash page for AR Quick Look. You know the new feature that some stores have where you can transpose a 3D rendering of a product in your own home using your phone camera? That’s the sort of stuff we’re talking about, and Apple links up a nice case study from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As I understand it from this limited context:

Drop a element in the document.

Add an external source file, e.g. .

The original proposal is from the Immersive Web Committee Group

That’s the team looking make Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) part of the web. Apple linked up their repo, so I made the jump and went straight to the explainer. This isn’t the spec or anything, but the original proposal. A much better definition of the element!

HTML allows the display of many media types through elements such as , , or , but it does not provide a declarative manner to directly display 3D content. Embedding 3D content within a page is comparatively cumbersome and relies on scripting the  element. We believe it is time to put 3D models on equal footing with other, already supported, media types.

[…]

The HTML  element aims to allow a website to embed interactive 3D models as conveniently as any other visual media. Models are expected to be created by 3D authoring tools or generated dynamically, but served as a standalone resource by the server.

The basic example pulls this together. It really does feel like the or elements:

.usdz? .glb? Not the type of files that typically cross my desk. Guess I’ll need to brush up on those and any other file types that might support. Again, all of this is merely the original proposal.

The draft proposal isn’t stubbed out quite yet

But it does provide a nice outline of where things could possibly go:

Adding a model to a document

Enabling interactivity

Supporting multiple formats

Providing fallback content

Making it accessible

There’s a lot to figure out. Most of what’s there are documented issues that need addressing. It does, however, shed more light on like proposed attributes that make it feel even more like such as autoplay, controls, loop, muted, poster, etc.

It goes back even further

The very earliest mention of 3D modeling I found was Keith Clark’s 2018 post in which he prototypes a custom element called . He describes it as “a placeholder that provides access to the DOM and CSSOM” where the loading and rendering is done in three.js.

Keith’s idea is followed by the component Joe Medley shared in 2020 (and a subsequent update to it). There’s even a homepage for it and it’s fun to drag Neil Armstrong around in space.

It’s possibly just an experiment?

I mean, the draft spec hasn’t been fleshed out. Apple seems willing to play ball thanks to the Safari TP 161 announcement. That makes total sense given how bullish Apple is on AR as a whole. (Apple Glasses, anyone?)

Google seems to have its foot in the door, albeit on the Web Components side of things. It’s easy to see how there may be a conflict of interest between what Apple and Google want from AR on the web.

These are all just my notes from trying to grok everything. There’s gotta be a lot more nuance to it than what little I know about it so far. I’m sure someone smarter can tie neater bow around in the comments. 😉

And while we’re talking Safari Technology Preview, 162 just released the other day and it enables CSS nesting and the CSS relative color syntax.

AR, VR, and a Model for 3D in HTML originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

:has is an unforgiving selector

Geoff Graham — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 14:18:13 +0000

A little thing happened on the way to publishing the CSS :has() selector to the ol’ Almanac. I had originally described :has() as a “forgiving” selector, the idea being that anything in its argument is evaluated, even if one or more of the items is invalid.

/* Example: Do not use! */ article:has(h2, ul, ::-scoobydoo) { }

See ::scoobydoo in there? That’s totally invalid. A forgiving selector list ignores that bogus selector and proceeds to evaluate the rest of the items as if it were written like this:

article:has(h2, ul) { }

:has() was indeed a forgiving selector in a previous draft dated May 7, 2022. But that changed after an issue was reported that the forgiving nature conflicts with jQuery when :has() contains a complex selector (e.g. header h2 + p). The W3C landed on a resolution to make :has() an “unforgiving” selector just a few weeks ago.

So, our previous example? The entire selector list is invalid because the bogus selector is invalid. But the other two forgiving selectors, :is() and :where(), are left unchanged.

There’s a bit of a workaround for this. Remember, :is() and :where()are forgiving, even if :has() is not. That means we can nest either of the those selectors in :has() to get more forgiving behavior:

article:has(:where(h2, ul, ::-scoobydoo)) { }

Which one you use might matter because the specificity of :is() is determined by the most specific item in its list. So, if you need to something less specific you’d do better reaching for :where() since it does not add to the specificity score.

/* Specificity: (0,0,1) */ article:has(:where(h2, ul, ::-scoobydoo)) { } /* Specificity: (0,0,2) */ article:has(:is(h2, ul, ::-scoobydoo)) { }

CodePen Embed Fallback

We updated a few of our posts to reflect the latest info. I’m seeing plenty of others in the wild that need to be updated, so just a little PSA for anyone who needs to do the same.

:has is an unforgiving selector originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Thank You (2022 Edition)

Geoff Graham — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 15:46:15 +0000

You know, this is the time of year where Chris normally publishes a big ol’ reflection of the past year. The first one was published in 2007, the same year CSS-Tricks began, and it continued all the way through 2021 without missing a beat. Having been a CSS-Tricks reader myself all those years, I’d hate to see that change.

So, here we are! 2022 was sure a heckuva year as far as transition goes. At this time last year, we were looking ahead at some goals for the upcoming year (which we’ll get to) but wound up joining DigitalOcean. That was a massive sea change (pun intended) and yet you stuck with us the whole way. It really means a lot to me that so many of you come here to read the things that I and a slew of other guest writers publish here. It just ain’t a community (or any fun) without y’all.

Thank you!

This is the last post we’re publishing this year as we hang up our Gone Fishin’ sign for the holidays. We’ll be back January 9 with a spate of content that’s fresh from the oven.

OK, this is where we start digging into the site’s analytics. That’s something we’ve always been transparent about and will continue to do. It’s not like our numbers are in some off-limits black box, and the hope is that sharing them somehow helps you and your business.

Overall traffic

Overall, Google Analytics is showing a total of 64m pageviews for the entire year. That’s wayyyyy down from last year’s 88m, which is alarming at first glance. I mean, who wants to see a 27% drop in year-over-year traffic?

But there’s good reason for that because we published wayyyy less content this year. We all know Chris was a prolific writer (and still is, of course), often spitting out multiple posts a day. It’s sorta like we lost our most productive contributor for the bulk of the year. Let’s compare the publishing activity for the last few years:

2020: 1,183 articles

2021: 890 articles

2022: 390 articles

A 27% drop in pageviews is a lot less concerning considering we published 43% fewer articles than last year, and a whopping 67% fewer than 2020’s overall total.

Hmm, I don’t feel like I’m working 67% less…

And all of this comes with the caveat that this is just what we get from Google Analytics. In past years, Chris has compared those numbers with stats from Cloudflare (the CDN layer that sits on top of the site) and Jetpack (the plugin that connects our self-hosted WordPress site to WordPress.com’s SaaS-y features). The results are always consistently inconsistent to the extent that I’m not even bothering to look this time around. (Alright, alright maybe just Jetpack… which shows 59.9m pageviews — oddly more than 2021’s 55m total.)

Articles, by the numbers

This is what I always look forward to each year! Here are the top ten articles in 2022 that were published in 2022:

6 Creative Ideas for CSS Link Hover Effects — Harshil Patel

Explain the First 10 Lines of Twitter’s Source Code to Me — Anand Chowdhary

What Were the Hottest Front-End Tools in 2021? — Louis Lazaris

Replace JavaScript Dialogs With the New HTML Dialog Element — Mads Stoumann

Say Hello to selectmenu, a Fully Style-able select Element — Patrick Brosset

Reliably Send an HTTP Request as a User Leaves a Page — Alex MacArthur

grid-template-columns — Mojtaba Seyedi

A Complete Guide to CSS Cascade Layers — Miriam Suzanne

CSS Database Queries? Sure We Can! — Chris Coyier

CSS-Tricks is joining DigitalOcean! — Chris Coyier

I’m actually surprised that last one wasn’t higher on the list. And I’m really stoked to see one from the Almanac in there, especially because Mojtaba chipped away at all of the CSS Grid properties over the past year and half and he knocked it way out of the ballpark. I thought I had a good handle on grid until I started reading all of the gold nuggets he packed into each property. There’s so much to learn in there and Mojtaba has a knack for clearly explaining complicated things. I’m hoping to update the CSS Grid guide with all that fresh information (but more on that in a bit).

I love seeing the CSS Cascade Layers guide in there, too! I had so much fun working with Miriam on it. If you didn’t know it, she’s an editor for the spec. It’s a treat (and honor, really) to host her work here and make it available for us all to bookmark and reference.

Here’s 11-20 for kicks:

Animation With Basic JavaScript —Md Shuvo

Flutter For Front-End Web Developers —Obumuneme Nwabude

CSS Grid and Custom Shapes, Part 1 — Temani Afif

Write HTML, the HTML Way (Not the XHTML Way) — Jens Oliver Meiert

A Whistle-Stop Tour of 4 New CSS Color Features — Chris Coyier

Cool Hover Effects That Use Background Properties — Temani Afif

Let’s Create a Tiny Programming Language — Md Shuvo

Cool CSS Hover Effects That Use Background Clipping, Masks, and 3D — Temani Afif

A Perfect Table of Contents With HTML + CSS — Nicholas C. Zakas

CSS-Based Fingerprinting — Chris Coyier

All posts that were published in 2022 make up 4.8m pageviews, or about 7.8% of all pageviews. Our most viewed article is always the ol’ Flexbox guide which garnered 5.8m views this year. I’d love to see our new content outpace that one item, and I believe that would’ve easily happened if we’d kept up the pace of publishing. Back of the napkin math here, but we may have been around 67m pageviews if we had published 540 more articles to match last year’s number of published articles.

If we take a few steps back, then we can see the most-viewed articles from the past year, regardless of when they were published:

A Complete Guide to Flexbox

A Complete Guide to Grid

Perfect Full Page Background Image

The Shapes of CSS

Media Queries for Standard Devices

Using SVG

How to Scale SVG

CSS Triangle

Gradient Borders in CSS

Truncate String with Ellipsis

How to use @font-face in CSS

Yep, nearly identical to last year. And the year before. And the year before. And… well, almost. “Gradient Borders in CSS” is new, bumping the box-shadow property off the list. Everything else from the four spot on merely swapped places.

Speaking of the properties in the Almanac, I wanna see what y’all referenced most this past year:

::after / ::before

transition

box-shadow

scrollbar

justify-content

flex-wrap

gap

overflow-wrap

animation

white-space

One pseudo at the top and nothing but properties after that. Interesting, given that relational pseudo selector functions like :has(), :is(), and :where() are new kids on the block.

Newsletter

The numbers here are way too messy to draw any insightful conclusions. After moving to DigitalOcean, we had to scrub our list of 91K+ subscribers for compliance purposes and the number plummeted as a result. If you were dropped from the list, you can re-subscribe here.

The good news? We’re still doing the newsletter! We actually fired it back up in August after a five-month hiatus. We were on a weekly cadence, but are at once a month now while yours truly is authoring it. I sure hope to bump it back to a weekly publication. (I miss you, Robin!)

Site updates

It’s been mostly about keeping the ship afloat, if I’m being honest. Other than some minor tweaks and maintenance, the site is pretty much where it was at this time last year.

That will change big time in 2023. If you’ve been keeping up with our monthly Behind the CSScenes updates, then you know that we’re planning to migrate CSS-Tricks from WordPress to the same homespun CMS that DigitalOcean uses for all of its (stellar) community content.

That work kicked off a couple months ago and should be done within the first half of the year. You can bet that we’ll keep you updated along the way. Besides a fresh design and a new back-end, it should be business as usual. If you have any questions about that work and what it means for your favorite front-end publication, please do hit me up in the comments or shoot me an email.

If you haven’t seen it yet, here are a few comps that our designer, Logan Liffick, put together:

2021 goal review

Oy, I’m hesitant to even look. All the effort it’s taken to integrate with DigitalOcean and find a new rhythm dominated everybody’s time, leaving precious little to take a crack at Chris’ goals, which were:

✅ More SEO focus. I’ll give us a passing grade here. The truth is that Chris and I were already digging our heels into this prior to the acquisition. We replaced the Yoast SEO plugin with RankMath, taking advantage of its in-editor tools to help us learn how to optimize our posts for search results. And to be clear: it’s less about increasing traffic for more sponsorship revenue than it is recognizing that search is the primary way readers like you find us, and making it easier for you to find what you’re looking for. That’s especially true now that we’re backed by DigitalOcean and rely on sponsorships way less than we used to.

🚫 Another digital book. Swing and a miss! Well, we never actually swung in the first place, or stepped into the batter’s box for that matter. (Is this how sports analogies work?) Chris published a book of The Greatest CSS Tricks in 2020 and made it a perk of being a paid CSS-Tricks subscriber. The idea was to do another one this year, but we got rid of the paid subscriptions and opened The Greatest CSS Tricks up for everyone to enjoy, free of charge.

🚫 More social media experimentation. Nope! But that might be for the best, considering where Twitter is at right this second. We might be forced to experiment in this area next year more out of neccessity than interest. Twitter has always been a drip in the proverbial bucket of CSS-Tricks traffic; so much so that investing in it feels like putting our eggs in the wrong basket, er bucket. I dunno. Part of me just wants to sit on my hands and see how things shake out before deciding on anything new or different.

2023 goal-setting

New year, new goals, right? Allow me to put a bunch of words in the team’s mouth and project what I feel are top priorities for us heading into 2023:

A smooth site migration. Nothing would make me happier¹ than a hiccup-free move to DigitalOcean’s architecture. But c’mon, we all know something always comes up when it’s go time. This site has 7,000+ articles that have been written over 15 years, and there have been 19 versions of the site in that timespan. There are so many custom post types, custom fields, page templates, functionality plugins, integrations, and a database that’s over 6GB to move over and map to an existing system. Good thing we have a team of top-notch developers here to take it on!

Publish 1-2 new guides. I’d love to aim higher, actually. We went from nine new guides in 2020 to a paltry one new guide in 2021, and another one this past year: Miriam’s Complete Guide to CSS Cascade Layers. I have a list of 10 more that I’d love to write, but think we’ll set the bar super low given our recent track record. I mentioned earlier that I’d love to incorporate Mojtaba’s work in the Almanac into the existing CSS Grid guide. That’s no small amount of work and I’d count it towards the goal if we can pull it off.

Expand the Almanac. This is my moonshot. I’d love to see more types of documentation in there. We have pseudo-selectors and properties, which is great and always has been. But, geez, think of all the other things we could have in there: functions, at-rules, units, selectors, property values, etc. We’re only scratching the surface of what could possibly go in there! If we get even one of those, I’d be in place-self: heaven.

Thank you so, so, so much!

This is my dream job and I wouldn’t have it without readers like you. I can’t believe it’s been eight years since my very first article was published and that I’m still here, ~~working with~~ learning from the brightest minds in our field. I could ramble (more than I already have) on how much the CSS-Tricks community means to me, but what it really comes down to is… thank you, thank you, thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

And thanks to all the fine folks here at DigitalOcean who have made a great home for CSS-Tricks. Extra special high-fives to Haley Mills, Sydney Rossman Reich, Bradley Kouchi, Karen Digi, David Berg, Matt Crowley, Logan Liffick, and Kirstyn Kellogg for getting me personally up to speed and making me feel so welcome here. It’s a great place to be.

Forward, we go!

Well, as happy as a WordPress fanboy like myself can be. ↩️

Thank You (2022 Edition) originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

2022 Roundup of Web Research

Geoff Graham — Wed, 21 Dec 2022 15:03:50 +0000

We’ve started making a tradition of rounding up the latest front-end research at the end of each year. We did it in 2020 and again in 2021. Reports are released throughout the year by a bunch of different companies and organizations researching everything from web design trends to developer skills to popular coding languages and so many other things.

Last year, it seemed the overarching trend was around remote work and its impact on developer productivity and workplace environments. We also saw TailwindCSS continue to explode in usage, dismal accessibility on the top 1 million websites, and a massive growth in API usage, among other findings.

So, what’s in store for this year? Read on to find out.

Table of contents

HTTP Archive Annual State of the Web
The WebAIM Million 2022
State of CSS 2022 Survey
Interop 2022 Dashboard
Jamstack Community Survey 2022
2022 State of Open Source
StackOverflow 2022 Developer Survey
GitHub’s 2022 State of the Octoverse
GitHub Copilot’s impact on developer productivity and happiness
The Software House State of Frontend 2022
Sparkbox 2022 Design Systems Survey
UXTools.co 2022 Design Tools Survey
2023 HackerRank Developer Skills Report
Tower Git Mac Dev Survey 2022
Developer Nation 2022 Q1 Pulse Report
Postman 2022 State of the API Report
CodeinWP WordPress Hosting Survey 2022
WordPress LMS Websites: A Data Study
UN E-Government Survey 2022
LinkedIn 2022 Workplace Learning Report
UpWork: The Great Work Teardown
UpWork 2022 Labor Market Trends and Insights
Reblaze 2022 State of Web Security Survey
Trend Micro 2022 Midyear Cybersecurity Report
1Password: The realities of parenting and growing up online
The Eclipse Foundation 2022 IoT & Edge Developer Survey
CampaignMonitor Ultimate Email Marketing Benchmarks for 2022
Wrapping up

HTTP Archive Annual State of the Web

What it is: A study that looks at 8.3 million websites sourced from the Chrome UX Report that analyzes how the sites were made, breaking things up into sections that include page content, user experience, content publishing, and content distribution. The CSS chapter is written by Rachel Andrew (so you know it’s good) and reviewed by folks that include Chris Lilley and CSS-Tricks contributor Jens Oliver Meiert.

What it found: The last two years has shows that CSS continues to contribute to overall page weight. This year was no exception, with CSS weight increasing 7% at the 90th percentile. That’s on par with past years.

What was the most popular class name in 2022? .active. But you also see a bunch of vendor-specific prefixes in the list, like .fa- for Font Awesome, and many for WordPress, such as .wp-, .has-large-font-size, and .has-pale-cyan-blue-background-color (phew!) which I guess is an indication of what the most popular background color is for WordPress sites.

The report also shows pixels as the most commonly used CSS unit for the font-size property. Maybe we’ll see that number trend down next year after Josh Collinsworth published why that’s not a great idea.

There’s so much more to read in here that goes beyond CSS and is worth checking out.

Read Report

The WebAIM Million 2022

What it is: An evaluation of the accessibility of the top one million as evaulated by the WAVE stand-alone API. That group of sites consists of domains pulled from from the Majestic Millions list, the Alexa Top 1,000,000 web sites, and the DomCop top 10 million domains.

What it found: Well, hey, look at that! The number of distinct accessibility errors has decreased 1.1% since February 2021. That’s modest improvement, but we’re still looking at a grand total of 50,829,406 errors — or an average of 50.8 errors per site — and those are just the ones that could be detected! I think we’d all do well taking time to read Hidde de Vries’s post on how to fix the common accessibility issues outlined in the report.

Read Report

State of CSS 2022 Survey

What it is: This survey pokes at CSS usage each year, surveying developers on the features they use, as well as their understanding of and satisfaction with them. Co-creator Sacha Greif openly wondered if there is too much CSS in a post he wrote right here on CSS-Tricks and a good part of that was based on the rising number of CSS features in recent years. This year’s survey garnered 8,714 responses from developers around the world.

What it found: Some really neat stuff this year. With all of the new CSS stuff that’s shipped in the past couple of years, there are still plenty of them that have yet to gain traction, whether it’s an awareness thing or the lack of browser support. For example, a whopping 46.7% of folks are only aware of 40% or less of the features covered in the survey. Container queries are a good example of a feature with awareness (58% have heard of it) but little use (12.6% have used it). The :has() selector is a glaring success with 54% knowing about it and 34.8% already using it.

There’s a lot more in here, like CSS-in-JS trends (interest is downward), accessibility features (needs more awareness), and which blogs y’all read (thanks for making CSS-Tricks #1!).

Oh, and don’t miss Lea Verou’s conclusion, which predicts that CSS nesting and color manipulation will rule in 2023. I agree. Nesting would be a game-changer that could put a dent in CSS preprocessor usage. And there are so many new color features today and in the works that are sure to impact the way we define and use colors. But I also suspect that @container becomes a much bigger deal as browser support catches on and we find ourselves writing more container queries where we may have reached for media queries in the past.

See Results

Interop 2022 Dashboard

What it is: This is more of a live dashboard than a report. It analyzes data from a fixed point in time, displaying results from the web-platform-tests which are a group of test suites for many web platform specifications that run daily. The idea is that we can see which web features are broadly supported, which ones aren’t, and how browsers rank in terms of supporting them.

What it found: It’s less about what this dashboard has found than what it is currently showing. And right now, Safari is leading the pack as far as supporting what the focus areas are for 2022, which include newer features like Cascade Layers, Container Queries, the
element, Subgrid, and viewport units. Safari scores 89% in the tests, with Firefox right on its heels at 88% and Chrome/Edge not far behind at 84%.

If you look at the scores for the experimental versions of those browsers, Safari Technology Preview jumps way up to 94% while Firefox and Chrome/Edge sit at 88%. It’s really tough to make the whole “Safari is the new Internet Explorer” point these days, at least when it comes to these focus areas. There are other legitimate criticisms of it for way different reasons that are tied to iOS.

Open Dashboard

Jamstack Community Survey 2022

What it is: A survey of approximately 7,000 members of the Jamstack community that provides a snapshop of who Jamstack developers are and the sorts of things they’re working on.

What it found: This survey is interesting as heck because it offers a peek into things like job titles and employment on top of Jamstack-specific stuff. For example, four out of five developers are now working remote most of the time and half of those would quit their jobs if they had to return to the office.

Here’s another neat trend: In 2021, 32% of folks referred to themselves as “full-stack developers” in 2021 while 45% called themselves “front-end developers”. That practically swapped in 2022, with 44% of respondents calling themselves “full-stack” and 32% going with “front-end”.

You’ve gotta look at the full set of results to get even more insights on what Jamstack developers are building and how they are building those things. Like, WordPress is still the most widely-used CMS at 59% of respondents (22% of which is headless WordPress), but surprisingly, Notion is quickly gaining traction in the Jamstack CMS space, at 26%. I’ve been interested in Notion as a CMS ever since Chris wrote about it 2020.

See Results

2022 State of Open Source

What it is: A survey of 2,660 developers by the Open Source Initiative and OpenLogic that tracks the usage of open source projects and contributions to them. The survey was open for six weeks and attracted responses from 15 countries.

What it found: The Open Source Initiative published their 10 takeaways from the report. Among those? 79% say they sponsor open source organizations (which might be expected from this audience). Deeper in the report, jQuery (31%) is still ranked as the top technology for app development. React (27%) clocks in at second, and Angular (26%) comes in at third.

Download PDF

StackOverflow 2022 Developer Survey

What it is: A survey of more than 70,000 developers to measure how they learn, which tools they’re using, and what they want in the future.

What it found: I love this survey because it always affirms the amount of time I spend looking things up. 87% of folks spend at least 30 minutes searching for answers to problems, 25% of which spend an hour or more. The survey found that a team of 50 developers spends between 333-651 hours of time looking up answers per week.

Otherwise, JavaScript is the most used language for the tenth year in a row (but Rust is the most loved) and VS Code is the overwhelmingly popular IDE at 74%.

Survey Results

GitHub’s 2022 State of the Octoverse

What it is: Straight from the horse’s mouth: “An exploration of open source software including its impact on the world and companies, plus key trends shaping software development.” It draws on GitHub activity data rather than surveying a group of respondents.

What it found: Whew, 94 million developers used GitHub in 2022! That’s a whole lot more than the 2.8 million who used it in 2012. 20.5 million newbies joined this year alone. Also, there was a 20% year-over-year growth in the number of repos hosted on GitHub, and more than 3.5 billion contributions to GitHub projects over the year. Interestingly, only 20% of all GitHub repos are public, perhaps due to private repos becoming a free feature in 2019.

Nothing new has changed on the languages front. Last year, JavaScript was the most used language and that’s true this year as well. However, TypeScript seems to have slowed down in growth after skyrocketing in popularity last year. I suspected it would jump up a few spots this year, but it’s still in fourth behind Python and Java (which is far from dead).

Read Report

GitHub Copilot’s impact on developer productivity and happiness

What it is: GitHub published a report on GitHub Copilot, its AI-flavored development assistant. Is Copilot making developers’ lives easier? Is it making them more productive? Those are the sorts of things covered in this report, drawing on survey results they published in an academic paper, and external research on development productivity. There’s good qualitiative feedback in there as well.

What it found: Can you guess it? Yep, those who use Copilot feel more productive than those who do not use it. And those who use it complete tasks ~55% faster than those who do not use it for the same tasks. What it sounds like, if I’m reading this right, is that Copilot users enjoy the way it handles all the “fiddly” things for them — like auto-closing brackets.

Dave’s thoughts on Copilot seem to jive with the report’s description of Copilot being like a pair programmer with a calculator attached. Maybe not the best pair programmer in the world, but one in which your mental model shifts from writing code to checking code.

Read report

The Software House State of Frontend 2022

What it is: A survey of 3,703 developers to “see the real day-to-day perspective from [front-end] professionals of all levels and backgrounds.” What makes this survey a little different is that it also polls 19 invited experts in the field, including — you guessed it — Chris Coyier weighing in on styling tools.

What it found: You know, there’s really more findings here than a mere summary can do justice. This might be the most comprehensive set of results of the whole bunch. There’s so much to grok, from frameworks, hosting, and SSG to browser technologies, code management, and testing. And that only scratches the surface. If nothing else, it’s worth clicking through to the full report just for the analysis from the invited experts.

Read Report

Sparkbox 2022 Design Systems Survey

What it is: A survey all about design systems that’s focused on adoption, contributions, design, technical debt, and how design systems are used. This year’s results reflect the answers of 219 submissions, down from last year’s 376.

What it found: Last year, the survey found that 40% of folks consider their design systems “successful” or “very” successful. Those figures are less obvious in this year’s survey. But more interesting is what’s included in their systems. Sure, typography, colors, components, and layouts are common to most of them. But it’s the lack of things like developer-ready code (65%), accessibility guidelines (57%), and content guidelines (45%) that might be influencing the finding that only 65% of people who identify as design system subscribers say they get what they need from their systems.

See Results

UXTools.co 2022 Design Tools Survey

What it is: The sixth edition of a survey that looks at the tooling people use for things like prototyping, UI design, design systems, and user testing. This year received 4,260 submissions.

What it found: First off, we’re dealing with a bunch of designers. 82% have “designer” somewhere in their job title, compared to a mere 6% who call themselves developers. That’s reasonable for a survey that’s all about UX tooling.

So, what tools are they using? Figma by a loooooong mile for UI design. 73% report Figma as their design software of choice, followed by a neck-and-neck race between Adode XD (6%) and Sketch (5%) for a distant second. Figma also leads the pack when it comes to basic UI protoyping and managing design systems.

Do you want to know the top tool for storing, tagging, and organizing research? It’s Notion! Funny how it comes up as both an emerging CMS and a research repository in different surveys.

See Results

2023 HackerRank Developer Skills Report

What it is: A survey of HankerRank community members and their development skills, such as the languages they use and their experience with them.

What it found: I don’t know! I tried several times to download the report, but got nothing more than a spinning wheel. The link to the report takes you to a sneak peek with some basic findings, like the top five used languages — Java, Python, SQL, C++, and JavaScript, in that order — make up the overwhelming majority of all reported languages. There’s also findings on the fastest growing languages, which is where TypeScript (182%), PHP (172%), and Go (125%) are dominant. Swift usage fell hard at -42% which is interesting considering the findings in the next survey we’re going to look at.

Read Report

Tower Git Mac Dev Survey 2022

What it is: A survey of 2,506 developers (down from last year’s 4,072) working on the MacOS platform with the goal of understanding the profile of this specific developer niche.

What it found: Last year’s takeaway was the age of this crowd trending younger, suggesting a growth in Mac-related development. And lots of them really wanted to learn Swift. What changed? Not a whole lot! Most developer are still in the 30-44 age range (40.9%) even though that’s significantly down from 54.8% last year. And the largest age group (19.5%) is in the 35-39 range. They still work with JavaScript most (52.7%) and still want to learn Swift the most (28.2%).

See Results

Developer Nation 2022 Q1 Pulse Report

What it is: A report is based on a global online developer survey designed, produced, and carried out by SlashData over ten weeks between December 2021 and February 2022 to measure developer trends, technology preferences, and emerging technology patterns.

What it found: I like that this report breaks down its demographics by gender. And while the result is unsurprising — there are way more men (81%) than women (17%) — it’s still a confirmation of the almost tangible dismal gender equality in the development industry as a whole.

Wanna know this survey’s top five programming languages? It’s exactly the same as HackerRank’s top five, with one exception: C# knocked JavaScript off the list. I also find it interesting that the top emerging area of interest for this group is artificial intelligence software, beating out augmented reality, robotics, cryptocurrency, and blockchain. Maybe some of these folks are the ones influencing GitHub’s Copilot research findings?

Read Report

Postman 2022 State of the API Report

What it is: A survey of more than 37,000 developers (up from 28,000 last year and 13,500 in 2020!) that measures who is developing with APIs, what sort of work they’re doing with them, and how APIs are evolving.

What it found: Last year, I reported this:

67% of developers say they’ve adopted an API-first philosophy and 94% say they believe their companies will either invest more or the same in APIs in the next year. We’ll see when those results roll in next year!

The same data point this year says that number is down to 89% — and with a larger pool of survey participants. That said, Postman API requests skyrocketed from 855 million last year to 1.13 billion this year. Wow. I’d say last year’s prediction that more companies would investment in API usage this year is spot on.

The most popular APIs? That group includes known entities like Salesforce and Twitter, but welcomes Notion to the list — it’s really been a banner year for Notion according to many of the surveys in this roundup.

Get Report

CodeinWP WordPress Hosting Survey 2022

What it is: A survey all about WordPress hosting that polls people who read the CodeinWP blog. They received 3,400 submissions this year. They’ve apparently been doing this survey since 2016 but it’s slipped under my radar until this year.

What it found: GoDaddy is the hosting provider of choice for this group, which was the story in 2019 and 2020 as well. But it only represents 11.8% of survey participants. The market is pretty crowded with Bluehost (8.4%), Hostinger (4.8%), and HostGator (3.4%) trailing behind. LOLzzz for GoDaddy also falling dead last in hosting satisfaction with 6.3/10 satisfaction rate. WP Engine got the top rating score (9.2/10) but that’s based on just 21 survey participants, compared to GoDaddy’s 377. Plus, the survey notes that many specified “WordPress” as their host… which could either mean they use WordPress.com or are simply confused between WordPress.com and a self-hosted WordPress site. 🤷‍♂️

See Results

WordPress LMS Websites: A Data Study

What it is: Let’s look at another WordPress-centric survey while we’re at it. This one is run by a group called Sell Courses Online, which is a dead giveaway that it’s focused on learning management systems (LMS) in the WordPress ecosystem.

What it found: I admit I’m super interested in this report because I teach web development in higher education and have played with a bunch of LMSs. WordPress is ripe software for for it, too, with quite a few plugin options. It’s super affordable as well, with most folks (41.3%) spending less than $50/month on their tech stack, and 76.2% spending less than $250. Most of those low-spend sites rely on a freemium-based LMS model.

And what’s included in that stack? 65.3% rely on WooCommerce for selling courses, 57.5% use Elementor as a page builder, 19% use the Astra theme (while 66% specify others), and 13.5% use Paid Memberships Pro for user accounts.

Hey, what about the actual LMS functionality? LearnDash is is the most popular LMS plugin with 34%, followed by LearnPress (31%) and Tutor LMS (19%). I’ve worked with LearnDash and love it, especially the number of add-ons to extend the functionality with more features as needed.

View Research

UN E-Government Survey 2022

What it is: It’s funny, but I have a degree in Economics that I clearly haven’t used in my professional career, and there’s a bunch of stuff in here that’s way over my head. What it boils down to, if I’m understanding correctly, is that this report measures the online development of governments across United Nations member states, drawing on a composite of three different indices.

Has the United States progressed in its digital infrastructure and strategies? That’s the sort of thing this report looks at, taking in factors like what online services a country provides, how it approaches cybersecurity, efforts to increase digital proficiencies, and even how technology has been used to address crises like the COVID-19 pandemic.

The first survey was published in 2001. This 2022 survey is the eleventh edition of this biennial publication.

What it found: Honestly, you’d do better reading the press release (PDF) than relying on my uneducated insights. But at a super high level, Denmark, Finland and the Republic of Korea lead the 2022 digital government rankings, “scoring the highest when it comes to the scope and quality of online services, status of telecommunication infrastructure and existing human capacity.”

See Results

LinkedIn 2022 Workplace Learning Report

What it is: The name of the report sorta says it all — LinkedIn looks at the state of the professional learning landscape in workplaces. This is the sixth edition, surveying 1,444 learning and development professionals (L&D), and 610 learners in November 2021.

A lot of this year’s report is written around the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on learning in the workplace, like how learning has been affected by layoffs and remote work arrangements.

What it found: Learning continues despite The Great Reshuffle/Great Resignation or whatever you want to call the relatively new trend of quitting jobs and changing careers. For example, 46% of L&D professionals say there is a wider technological skill gap on their teams, and 49% say execs are concerned that employees do not have the right skills to meet business strategies. That suggests the post-pandemic technological landscape has created higher expectations as far as employees having relevant technical skills, particularly when it comes to what’s needed for successful remote work.

That, in turn, has led to a rise in demand for workplace learning programs and profressionals. L&D professionals are in higher demand and make more money than they did before. And only 8% expect their L&D budget to decrease in the coming year.

What sorts of learning programs have top priority? Diversity, equity, and inclusion (45%), leading through change programs (42%), in-person training (41%, up from 25%!), upskilling and reskilling (41%), and digital fluency (30%). A lot of soft skills in there!

View Report

UpWork: The Great Work Teardown

What it is: While we’re on the topic of changing workplace environments, let’s look at this one that investigates the workplace trends that are changing perspectives on when, where, and how people work — and how businesses are adapting to those changing perspectives.

What it found: The stats are super interesting, but I couldn’t find any information on the methodology it used to get them. Like 50% of businesses have reported higher turnover compared to pre-pandemic times, 38% plan to spend more on independent remote freelancers, and 37% are fully remote today with 28% expecting to go fully remote in a year. What’s going to happen to all those empty office buildings?!

On the employee side of things, 61% say they are more productive when they work remote. 45% of business also report an increase in productivity as a result of remote work and a whopping 63% reduction in unscheduled work absences.

There are other interesting stats on how other things are changing, like traditional work hours, where people choose to work, and the perception of workplace culture.

Get Report

UpWork 2022 Labor Market Trends and Insights

What it is: Another one from UpWork! This time it’s looking at the overall labor market. And there’s a documented methodology this time, saying that numbers are based on survey results of 1,000 hiring professionals from a third-party as well as findings from a separate study from a separate firm that surveyed 6,000 working professionals.

What it found: Well, UpWork’s “Great Work Teardown” report found that there’s big growth in business relying on remote freelancers. This report confirms that 78% of hiring pros saying they’ve used remote freelancers and 52% saying they are using more of them today than they have in previous years.

Get this: 60% of managers at mid-sized companies report higher turnover since pre-pandemic levels, while only 25% of small companies report the same. And roughly 45% of all hiring managers say they plan to combat turnover by offering more learning programs, confirming LinkedIn’s workplace learning report.

And, hey, if you’re looking for a higher salary or more perks, this might be the time to to strike because around 50% of managers are considering higher salaries and bigger benefit packages to retain staff.

See Trends

Reblaze 2022 State of Web Security Survey

What it is: This survey is new to the collection! It asked 300 web security pros what they consider to be their biggest online threats and how they plan on defending against them.

What it found: The most common attacks were DDoS, with half of the survey’s participants saying they’ve dealt with them in the past year. Next up is SQL injections (38%) and ransomware (29%), where ransomware is considered the most severe threat. (The report also cites a U.S. Treasury finding that U.S. firms paid out $590 million in ransomware attacks in the first half of 2021 alone. Geez.)

Also neat: 90% of participants say they are using a public cloud, making cloud-based security more of a thing. (AWS tops the list at 67%. DigitalOcean (4%), the home for CSS-Tricks, is sandwiched between Oracle (7%) and IBM (3%) as an interesting aside.)

API security is tops as far as priority goes. With Postman’s State of the API report showing a year-over-year increase in API requests that goes from 855 million last year to 1.13 billion this year, it’s clear why that is.

See Results

(Linking directly to the PDF to save you the registration effort.)

Trend Micro 2022 Midyear Cybersecurity Report

What it is: Let’s keep talking cybersecurity. This report polls 6,297 IT security decision-makers from 29 countries about their thoughts on the cybersecurity risks they face.

What it found: A good chunk of folks (62%) say they have blindspots in their defense strategies and 43% belive that that their exposure to threats is out of control. That’s in line with the Reblaze survey above that reported 50% of folks saying they have no certainty as far as how many bots account for overall traffic. This report notes that 37% of participants cite cloud assets as the area they have the least insight into.

The report gets into a bunch of specific attacks that I had no idea were even a thing. It’s unnerving how attacks seem to get smarter and smarter each year while the businesses continue to increase their exposure to them. This report provides a lot of excellent detail on those threats, including a section devoted to cybersecurity efforts in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Get Report

1Password: The realities of parenting and growing up online

What it is: Let’s heap more on the cybersecurity research pile will this report from the folks behind the 1Password app. This one hits pretty close to home for me because it looks at parenting in the always-online era, which is something pinned to the back of my mind since I have two young daughters who love their screens.

1Password teamed up with Malwarebytes to produce this report, which is based on a survey of 1,000 parents and 1,000 children that were born between 1997-2009 that was prepared by another firm, Method Research. The data is fresh having been collected in August this year.

What it found: A bunch of stats I wish I could unsee. Like 74% of parents think they’re keeping their kids safe, while only 51% agree. And 74% of kids have ways to workaround being monitored by their parents (where 9% claim to have a secret device their parents don’t know about). Cyberbullying is the top concern for both parents (73%) and kids (66%).

Parents also need to be more responsible. 73% of kids wish their parents would ask for permission to post photos of them while only 34% of parents actually ask (and — eek! — 39% don’t believe they need to ask permission). The importance here is that 11% of kids say they’ve been stalked or bullied because of something posted by their parents, and 12% report being harmed in some way, whether its hacked accounts, stolen identities, or tarnished credit cores.

Download PDF

The Eclipse Foundation 2022 IoT & Edge Developer Survey

What it is: A survey of 910 global developers, committers, architects, and decision-makers that took place between April and June 2022 to spot trends in the Internet of Things (IoT) space. You know, like that smart fridge in your kitchen and voice-controlled curtains that shade your living room. That and more serious stuff like trends in artificial intelligence and edge computing.

What it found: Last year, I called Microsoft’s IoT findings “mostly nice trivia for cocktail chatter.” This report is a lot more granular and is probably most helpful for those working in the space, as there’s so much information on the stacks that developers use and overarching concerns about them. I mean, I don’t particularly care that “64-bit ARM architectures are gaining ground with gateway and edge node suppliers.” But I bet that’s super important to some of you reading this.

Download PDF

(Linking directly to the PDF to save you the registration effort.)

CampaignMonitor Ultimate Email Marketing Benchmarks for 2022

What it is: A study of benchmarks related to email marketing based on 100 billion emails delivered on CampaignMonitor’s platform in 2021. It looks at things like open and click rates, and breaks them down by industry to help folks get the most out of their email marketing campaigns and know how to gauge success.

What it found: It’s probably better for you to see their table of results by industry rather than having me regurgitate the results of all 19 industries they identified. But on a global level, a 21.5% open rate is quite average across all industries, as is a 2.3% click-through rate. It appears Monday produces the highest open rate (22% on average) while Sunday produces the lowest (20.3%), so not a whole lot of variance there. Same deal with click-through rates, where Tuesday is highest (2.4%) and Saturday and Sunday share the lowest rate (2.1%). Again, not a lot of difference but it could be helpful knowing this stuff if you’re trying to milk every last drop out of a campaign.

See Benchmarks

Wrapping up

We looked at 27 different reports on front-end and front-end-adjacent topics! That’s more than the 25 we covered last year and the fitting number of 20 we looked at in 2020.

If there’s one BIG takeaway from all these takeaways, it’s to remember this is all in good fun. Many of the studies lack the scientific methods we’d want to base decisions on, and the sample sizes are far too small to accurately reflect reality. But they sure are interesting, right?!

Some reports are annual, some are one-off, and others seemingly happen whenever the heck they wanna do it. So, if I missed any from previous years, it’s probably because they aren’t annual or just aren’t available as I’m writing this. As always, let me know if there’s a report I missed and I’ll try to work it in.

There are more reports on the way! In fact, you can take the 2022 State of JavaScript survey and the 2022 WordPress Annual Survey as this is being written. Have at ’em!

2022 Roundup of Web Research originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Help choose the syntax for CSS Nesting

Geoff Graham — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 16:04:54 +0000

CSS Nesting is making the rounds yet again. Remember earlier this year when Adam and Miriam put three syntax options up for a vote? Those results were tallied and it wasn’t even even close.

Now there’s another chance to speak into the future of nesting, this time over at the WebKit blog. The results from the Adam and Miriam’s survey sparked further discussion and two more ideas were added to the mix. This new survey lets you choose from all five options.

Jen Simmons has put together a thorough outline of those options, including a refresher on nesting, details on how we arrived at the five options, and tons of examples that show the options in various use cases. Let’s return the favor of all the hard work that’s being done here by taking this quick one-question survey.

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Help choose the syntax for CSS Nesting originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

WordPress Playground: Running WordPress in the Browser

Geoff Graham — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 16:52:45 +0000

Being able to quickly spin up a WordPress instance has been the strength of WordPress ever since its famous “five-minute install”. Upload a few files, configure a few settings, and you’re off.

The friction of uploading files has gotten a lot easier, thanks to plenty of “one-click” install options many hosts offer (including DigitalOcean and Cloudways).

Some companies have tried to abstract the process even more, using the multi-site features of WordPress to fire up disposable instances for testing and demos. WordPress Sandbox and WP Sandbox come to mind. Scaling can be an issue here, as instances run on the same install adding lag to the entire network. I worked on a headless WordPress project that did this in the background for users, and I recall the incredibly long wait it would take users to create a new account as the number of sites in the network piled up.

Enter WordPress Playground. It runs entirely in the browser which is mindblowing to me as a long-time WordPress user. If you’re having a hard time wrapping your head around how it all works like I did, that link to the overview spells it out nicely:

PHP runs as a WebAssembly binary

MySQL is replaced for SQLite via a WordPress plugin

Web server is implemented with the Service Worker API

Dang, that’s cool. The move to SQLite is especially interesting, as it could bring huge performance gains to many sites that might not need the full heft of WordPress — a “WordPress Lite” as Chris recently described it in a different context. In fact, that work is already happening in the experimental WordPress performance plugin.

The evolution to a light, frictionless WordPress is a fun space to watch. I imagine there’s a good chunk of existing WordPress sites that stand to benefit from a slimmed-down CMS. The demo offers a glimpse at what an onboarding experience for that sort of thing could look like.

Select a theme, choose your features, and go!

WordPress Playground: Running WordPress in the Browser originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

So, you’d like to animate the display property

Geoff Graham — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 15:41:06 +0000

The CSS Working Group gave that a thumbs-up a couple weeks ago. The super-duper conceptual proposal being that we can animate or transition from, say, display: block to display: none.

It’s a bit of a brain-twister to reason about because setting display: none on an element cancels animations. And adding it restarts animations. Per the spec:

Setting the display property to none will terminate any running animation applied to the element and its descendants. If an element has a display of none, updating display to a value other than none will start all animations applied to the element by the animation-name property, as well as all animations applied to descendants with display other than none.

That circular behavior is what makes the concept seemingly dead on arrival. But if @keyframes supported any display value other than none, then there’s no way for none to cancel or restart things. That gives non-none values priority, allowing none to do its thing only after the animation or transition has completed.

Miriam’s toot (this is what we’re really calling these, right?) explains how this might work:

We’re not exactly interpolating between, say, block and none, but allowing block to stay intact until the time things stop moving and it’s safe to apply none. These are keywords, so there are no explicit values between the two. As such, this remains a discrete animation. We’re toggling between two values once that animation is complete.

This is the Robert Flack’s example pulled straight from the discussion:

@keyframes slideaway { from { display: block; } to { transform: translateY(40px); opacity: 0;} } .hide { animation: slideaway 200ms; display: none; }

This is a helpful example because it shows how the first frame sets the element to display: block, which is given priority over the underlying display: none as a non-none value. That allows the animation to run and finish without none cancelling or resetting it in the process since it only resolves after the animation.

This is the example Miriam referenced on Mastodon:

.hide { transition: opacity 200ms, display 200ms; display: none; opacity: 0; }

We’re dealing with a transition this time. The underlying display value is set to none before anything happens, so it’s completely out of the document flow. Now, if we were to transition this on hover, maybe like this:

.hide:hover { display: block; opacity: 1; }

…then the element should theoretically fade in at 200ms. Again, we’re toggling between display values, but block is given priority so the transition isn’t cancelled up front and is actually applied after opacity finishes its transition.

At least that’s how my mind is reading into it. I’m glad there are super smart people thinking these things through because I imagine there’s a ton to sort out. Like, what happens if multiple animations are assigned to an element — will none reset or cancel any of those? I’m sure everything from infinite animations, reversed directions, and all sorts of other things will be addressed in time.

But what a super cool first step!

So, you’d like to animate the display property originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Some Links on AI-Related Stuff

Geoff Graham — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 21:34:06 +0000

Every so often, I find that the links I save to read later fall into natural groups or patterns that reveal common threads of interest. The past couple of weeks have produced a lot of thoughts about ChatGPT, an AI-powered interface that responds to requests in a chat-like exchange. Sorta like a “Hey Siri” request, but in a Discord channel.

ChatGPT is just one of several AI-flavored tech, including GitHub’s CoPilot (writing code) and Dall-E (generative images and art).

Is it the end of human development? A new and exciting way to produce art? Just cocktail party conversation fodder? There are lots of opinions…

A Conversation With ChatGPT (Matthias Ott) — Matthias has a conversation with ChatGPT about typography that delves into deeply theoretical thoughts on design process. My favorite is in response to whether designers should learn to code: “Ultimately, whether or not designers should learn to code is a decision that each individual designer must make for themselves, based on their own goals and circumstances. Some designers may benefit from learning to code, while others may be better served by focusing on design principles and concepts.”

They were supposed to replace the creative jobs last (Dave Rupert)— “As interesting a future this creates, I’m a member of an old caste of people that still believes massive gains don’t come without realized costs; or more explicitly, electricity isn’t the only cost. What if the cost we’re paying is our perception of reality itself? It’s increasingly likely that the next thing you read or watch is the product of a content extruder.”

I just used ChatGPT to help with a complicated equation. — A reddit user used ChatGPT to write a complex equation in Notion. There were a couple hiccups, but it worked in the end.

ChatGPT Creates a Working WordPress Plugin – On the First Try (WP Tavern) — Sarah Gooding reporting on a ChatGPT experiment where Johnathon Williams was able to spit out a fully-functional WordPress plugin with a simple chat command. This is the sort of thing that both terrifies me but also blows my mind-hole.

ChatGPT Is a Smart Computer’s Impression of a Know-It-All (Pixel Envy) — Nick Heer points to an article on The Atlantic about ChatGPT that opens with three paragraphs written by ChatGPT. It’s crazy that it comes off as naturally as it does, even if it smells slightly fishy at first.

Use of ChatGPT1 generated text for content on Stack Overflow is temporarily banned. (Stack Overflow) — A mild dose of #HotDrama as far as Stack Overflow users posting ChatGPT-produced code as answers.

Midjourney vs. human illustrators: has AI already won? (Evil Martians) — I love the experiment in this post because it’s a clear example that AI doesn’t *just* work. In its current state, at best, AI is a junior designer when put to the task of creating an image: “After two and a half hours of back and forth with the AI, I was completely exhausted and decided to just upscale the most promising result.” A bonus is that the post concludes with a list of situations where AI might realistically help the team with future work — and it ain’t an entire person’s job.

Quick Thoughts on AI (Collaborative Fund) — Ha! Crazy to see a chart comparing how fast ChatGPT reached one million users to other popular services. It took Facebook 10 months, but only five days for ChatGPT.

Dall-E, I want a photo of a developer sitting at a desk with his head exploding while having a chat conversation on a desktop computer with an artificial intelligence algorithm.

Not bad, not bad.

Some Links on AI-Related Stuff originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Unchain My Inaccessibly-Labelled Heart

Geoff Graham — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 14:08:20 +0000

Suzy Naschansky from the HTMHell Advent Calendar:

All About Dragons I like dragons. Blah blah blah blah blah. Read more

See that aria-labelledby attribute? It chains two IDs from the markup, one for the heading (#article1-heading) and one for the link (#article1-read-more). What happens there is a screenreader will replace the existing semantic label between the link tags and use the content from both elements and announce them together as a single string of text:

Read more All About Dragons

I’m always sheepish when realizing there’s something I think I should know but don’t. This is definitely one of those cases and I’m thankful as all heck that Suzy shared it.

I was actually in a situation just recently where I ~~could’ve~~ should’ve done this. I always try to avoid a bunch of “Read more” links on the same page but coming up with different flavors of the same thing is tough when you’re working with something like a loop of 15 posts (even though there are resources to help). And if we need to keep labels short for aesthetic reasons — design requirements and whatnot — it’s even more challenging. The aria-labelledby attribute gives me exactly what I want: consistent visual labels and more contextual announcements for assistive tech.

And this is only a thing when the text you want to use for the accessible label already exists on the page. Otherwise, you’d want to go with aria-label and with the caveat that it’s purely for interactive elements that are unable to label things accessibly with semantic HTML.

If you are working in a CMS like WordPress (which I am), you might need to do a little extra work. Like when I drop a Button block on the page, these are the options I have to work with:

Some nice options in there, but nothing to do with accessible labelling. If you’re wondering what’s buried in that Advanced panel:

Close, but no cigar.

Instead, you’ll need to edit the button in HTML mode:

But before doing that, you gotta add an ID to the heading you want to use. The Heading block has the same Advanced panel setting for adding an anchor, which’ll inject an ID on the element:

Then you can go edit the Button block in HTML mode and add the accessible-labels ID as well as an ID for the button itself. This is an example of the edited markup:

Read Report

Great! But WordPress just ain’t cool with that:

You can try to resolve the issue:

Le sigh. The Button block has to be converted to a Custom HTML block. Kinda defeats the whole visual editing thing that WordPress is so good at. I did a super quick search for a plugin that might add ARIA labelling options to certain blocks, but came up short. Seems like a ripe opportunity to make one or submit PRs for the blocks that could use those options.

Unchain My Inaccessibly-Labelled Heart originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Holiday Snowtacular 2022

Geoff Graham — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 23:03:49 +0000

We’ve got ourselves a real holiday treat! Join host Alex Trost from the Frontend Horse community for the Holiday Snowtacular 2022 this Friday, December 16.

There’s a lineup of 12 awesome speakers — including Chris Coyier, Cassidy Williams, Kevin Powell, and Angie Jones — each discussing various front-end and web dev topics. It’s like the 12 days of Christmas, but wrapped up in a four-hour session for web nerds like us.

It’s a real good cause, too. The event is free, but includes fundraising Doctors Without Borders with a goal of reaching $20,000. You can donate here any time and anything you give will be matched by the event’s sponors. So, come for the front-end fun and help a great cause in the process.

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Holiday Snowtacular 2022 originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Setting up a screen reader testing environment on your computer

Geoff Graham — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 20:56:58 +0000

Sara Soueidan with everything you need, from what screen reading options are out there all the way to setting up virtual machines for them, installing them, and configuring keyboard options. It’s truly a one-stop reference that pulls together disparate tips for getting the most out of your screen reading accessibility testing.

Thanks, Sara, for putting together this guide, and especially doing so while making no judgments or assumptions about what someone may or may not know about accessibility testing. The guide is just one part of Sara’s forthcoming Practical Accessibility course, which is available for pre-order.

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Setting up a screen reader testing environment on your computer originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

CSS is OK, I guess.

Geoff Graham — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 15:37:50 +0000

Nothing but ear-to-ear smiles as I was watching this video from @quayjn on YouTube. (No actual name in the byline, though I think it’s Brian Katz if my paper trail is correct).

The best is this Pen you can use to sing along…

CodePen Embed Fallback

The little song Una did for memorizing for JavaScript’s map(), filter(), and reduce()methods at the end of this article comes to mind for sure.

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CSS is OK, I guess. originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.