Web Professionals Global hopes that 2024 is off to a great start for everyone reading this post. It is hard to believe January is almost concluded. WOW! That being said, it is time to catch up on various aspects of what we have been investigating recently. Although we don’t specifically address AI in this post, the featured image was generated with Adobe Firefly. Let us know what you are keen to learn more about.
Here are our areas of focus for January:
- accessibility (always an important topic),
- CSS,
- HTML web components
- JavaScript
Accessibility
We noted the UK government is making changes to the design system to meet WCAG 2.2. For those needing a bit of a refresher – Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 was published in October, 2023 by the W3C. Many components are affected by this change (ranging from back links and breadcrumbs to tags). There are also changes to patterns to ask users to supply information and patterns to help users do things.There are also page pattern changes. We encourage you to review the article to learn more. Yes, this is the UK, but we are expecting these enhancements will ripple worldwide relatively soon.
CSS
Stephanie Stimac provides a great introduction to CSS media query for scripting support. With the release of Chrome 120 (November, 2023), this support is now available. “Simply, this media query allows you to test whether scripting language are available and tailor page content and styles depending on support.” Progressive enhancement has come a long way since we first started thinking about such concepts.
HTML Web Components
Zach Leatherman provides great insights via his Attempted Taxonomy of Web Components article. “These components layer on interactivity and add behaviors in true progressive enhancement fashion. This is the bread and butter use case of web components.” Of course, he expands significantly in the article and even discusses JavaScript web components. We encourage readers to check this article out. It is well worth reading.
For those who are not that familiar with HTML web components, perhaps the Web Components in Earnest article will help put things into better perspective.
JavaScript
During some recent internal discussions, I was reminded that we have not touched much on JavaScript and frameworks in a while. Of course, this discussion came up as part of our ongoing web design and development competitions. Hard to believe that we have been doing these competitions on the national stage for over 2 decades (and almost 2.5 decades in Illinois). Which got me to thinking – rather than discuss what is happening with ES and JavaScript, perhaps we should ask our readers for their opinions about the current state of JavaScript. Therefore, what are your thoughts about Vite? For readers unfamiliar, here is the why Vite development guide. How are you using this in your projects today? We look forward to your comments. Perhaps we will focus on additional projects in the coming months. A lot depends on the number of comments we receive *wink wink – now is the time to comment.*
Yes, there are many other articles we could have posted. However, we thought this mix would be a good introduction to what is happening with web technologies as we begin 2024. As always, we appreciate and look forward to your comments.
