The Critical Request - Speaker Deck

The end of responsive images - Piccalilli

Hallelujah! Support for sizes="auto" is finally landing in Firefox and Safari! Praise be!

The Great CSS Expansion | Butler’s Log

Web development follows a familiar cycle. First we glue together a solution with whatever we have — JavaScript, image hacks, Flash, anything. Then the platform matures, and CSS or HTML eventually makes that same workaround native. Rounded corners, custom fonts, smooth scrolling, sticky positioning: all of these started as JavaScript-heavy hacks before CSS turned them into a single declaration.

We are in another one of those transition moments. A new wave of long-requested CSS features is finally landing, and many of them are explicitly designed to replace patterns that used to require JavaScript. Not as approximations — as first-class platform primitives that handle the edge cases, run in the right thread, and need zero dependencies.

Constraints and the Lost Art of Optimization — Den Odell

The entire intellectual and creative output of a team that reinvented personal computing fits in a space that, today, we wouldn’t think twice about wasting on a single font file.

Somewhere in the years that followed we’ve lost the creative solutions, the art of optimization, that being constrained in that way produces.

The best engineers I’ve worked with carry this instinct even when others might think it crazy. They impose their own constraints. They ask what this would look like if it had to be half the size, or run twice as fast, or use a tenth of the memory. Not because anyone demanded it, but because just by thinking there could be a better, more efficient solution, one often emerges.

NoLoJS: Reducing the JS Workload with HTML and CSS - Web Performance Calendar

You might not need (much) JavaScript for these common interface patterns.

While we all love the power and flexibility JS provides, we should also respect it, and our users, by limiting its use to only what it needs to do.

Yes! Client-side JavaScript should do what only client-side JavaScript can do.

I Built the Same App 10 Times: Evaluating Frameworks for Mobile Performance | Loren Stewart

A very, very deep dive into like-for-like comparison of JavaScript frameworks. The takeaway:

Nuxt demonstrates that established “big three” frameworks can achieve next-gen performance when properly configured. Vue’s architecture allows competitive mobile web performance while maintaining a mature ecosystem. React and Angular show no path to similar results.

And the real takeaway:

Mobile is the web. These measurements matter because mobile web is the primary internet for billions of people. If your app is accessible via URL, people will use it on phones with cellular connections. Optimizing for desktop and hoping mobile is good enough is backwards. The web is mobile. Build for that reality.