Links
Stop Lazy Loading Product and Hero Images
I see a recurring performance problem on many ecommerce sites—the most important images on the page are being lazy loaded when they shouldn't be. You’re better off not implementing lazy loading at all than implementing it incorrectly.
Nuclear Anchored Sidenotes
With those things in place, you get experimental support for CSS anchor positioning, which lets you absolutely position an element in relation to any other element, anywhere in the DOM, essentially regardless of their markup relationship to each other, as long as they conform to a short set of constraints related to their containing blocks.
Type safe CSS design systems with @property
CSS types are a worthy investment into type safety in your front-end work. We're still awaiting cross browser interop, but we'll get there. Here's a preview of what CSS type safety can do, and what I'll be explaining.
How layout position impacts three big web performance levers
We help Shopify merchants improve their web performance and see three common problems related to layout position: Lazy loading images above the fold; Asynchronous loading of CSS needed for elements above the fold; Not prioritizing the fetch of the the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) image;
A guide to designing accessible, WCAG-conformant focus indicators
I wanted to share this guide to designing accessible focus indicators because focus styles are a recurring discussion I have with designers I work with on most projects, so I thought it would be useful to provide this guide as a helpful reference. This guide is aimed at both designers who want to learn about accessibility considerations for designing focus indicators, as well as developers who want to implement them.
Videos
Modern CSS Development: Tooling & Workflows
In this session, you'll learn how to use modern tooling to your advantage when working on CSS code. Quickly scaffold out your project, use code snippets in any context, setup powerful editor workflows, and more. You'll also learn about tools that can help with CSS performance and visual regression testing, so you can confidently change your code while trusting the process!
Sponsor
Sponsored by Cloud Four
Thanks to Cloud Four for sponsoring this week’s newsletter! They solve complex responsive web design and development challenges for ecommerce, healthcare, fashion, B2B, SaaS, and nonprofit organizations.
If you’d like to help with the costs of running Friday Front-End, you can back our Patreon for as little as a dollar a month.