Recently I’ve been thinking quite a bit about third-party scripts and how much bloat they so often add to the average webpage — and, consequently, their impact on climate change via the additional carbon emissions generated, often for something the end user doesn’t really want or need. Third-party scripts can include ads, trackers, analytics, social media embeds, and probably some other stuff too. An analysis by Marmelab found that up to 70% of the carbon footprint of media websites could be attributed to ads and stats (source).
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Do you find yourself needing to switch between development environments frequently? That's often the case for me. I work on a web app for wind turbine operators, and I regularly need to test my front end code with different databases.
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Last year, Interop 2022, a collaborative cross-browser initiative, was hugely successful in getting 15 key features implemented interoperably. As developers, we can enjoy the fruits of this collaboration, with features like container queries, cascade layers and dynamic viewport units going from little or no browser support to almost full support in the space of a year.
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If you’ve been writing CSS for any length of time, the chances are you’ll have come across situations where you need to hide some text visually, but still have that text available to assistive technologies (such as screenreaders). Icon buttons and skip links are just two examples. (There are plenty more.) Simply using display: none hides text from assistive technologies, which is not useful to us in this scenario. So developers over the years have come up with clever ways to hide text visually, which usually manifest as a utility class that gets copied and pasted into every project, often called .visually-hidden or .sr-only — something like:
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