End of April, folks! It’s time for a regular drop of the most exciting resources I found around the Web in the past month. Some accessibility resources for frontend devs out there, a great list of tips for git ninjas, an introduction to CSS Container Queries, an exciting move in the JS runtimes world, new exciting proposals to ECMAScript, and more. Enjoy!

How screen readers read special characters: an update#

This article is handy for checking how screen readers handle particular symbols. It’s also a helpful indicator when we must provide additional information for assistive technology users. A golden rule of thumb also applies here: keep it simple.

So You Think You Know Git - FOSDEM 2024#

Scott Chacon’s talk from FOSDEM 2024 about Git Tips and Tricks has tons of great stuff about things we don’t use every day. Part two of this talk, with some extras, is also available.

An Interactive Guide to CSS Container Queries#

I love Ahmad’s interactive guides. This one, in particular, is full of good examples and explanations. Despite the length of this post, it is a joy to read and play around with the crazy number of hand-crafted demos.

Bun 1.1#

Slightly overwhelmed by the long list of recently released JavaScript runtimes, I only paid a little attention to things besides browsers, Node.js and Deno. This release of Bun changes my mind about this runtime. This release makes it accessible to all new groups of users - Windows support has just landed. Also, some of the performance optimisations are just unbelievable. SQLite support built-in, yes, please. New testing capabilities are a welcome addition, especially in-place mocking, which is impossible when using other testing frameworks and runtimes. Solid release!

The WebAIM Million#

The updated accessibility report of the top 1000000 web pages just dropped. Every year, this is an insightful read. The global push toward a more accessible user experience finally makes its mark in the results. Even though we are nowhere near saying that the Web is a friendly place for everyone, we are slowly improving.

A TC39 Proposal for Signals#

Robert Eisenberg, Daniel Ehrenberg, Ben Lesh, and Dominic Gannaway partnered to add native signals to the ECMAScript specification. This article explains the proposal in a human-readable way. When this lands, it will be a game-changer! Framework creators and app developers who need any level of interactivity need it.

AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?#

Molly White is well known for her constructive criticism of the web3 sector. It took her a while to summarise a new emerging trend in the tech scene and write a piece about AI (generative artificial intelligence and large language models, to be precise). It is a well-thought-out criticism. I am on the sceptical side myself, and Molly helped me reshape some of my opinions.

Help us invent CSS Grid Level 3, aka “Masonry” layout#

This post explains the classic masonry layout well. Similar to how the community helped shape the specification for CSS Nesting, Jen Simmons calls us to agree on the future development of the native implementation of Pinterest-like layouts. Let’s get involved.

Node.js 22 is now available!#

A new LTS candidate just landed. The most notable changes are the experimental-require-module flag, which allows developers to require() the ESM module, and the updated V8 with many new features like Array.fromAsync, Set methods, and iterator helpers. Finally, the watch mode is no longer experimental. I published a quick explainer of Node.js watch mode some time ago.

React 19 Beta#

The long-anticipated release of React 19 beta finally landed. It comes with many exciting features and DX improvements: actions, an extension to form functionality, a new use hook, simplified context functionality, support for doc metadata, server components (of course), and a lot more. Theo recorded a nice summary of all the new goodies.

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