Thomas 🔭🕹️
3 things new web developers should know:
- You don’t need a JavaScript framework at all to make many kinds of perfectly functional web apps
- Chrome’s rendering engine is a fork of Safari’s rendering engine
- You don’t need to load web fonts from a service-use one of the many free converters to create a woff2 from any ttf or otf file
Repost and feel free to add/comment with what you think new web developers should know.
Thomas 🔭🕹️
To expand on the web fonts thing, serving yourself gives you:
- fine control over caching behavior
- ability to optimize file sizes better if you spend time removing glyphs you don’t need
- no leaking of private information to third parties (do you really want Google or Adobe seeing all your visitors/customers IPs?)
- self-contained development environments that always work even without a network connection
- ability to do automatic tests without any data leakage to the internet
Thomas 🔭🕹️
@jrozanski good ones!
Jarek Rozanski ?
1. Most linux distors has woff2 compress tool. Convert them fonts.
2. Minimize your images. Check tinify.com for a superb tool (no affiliation).
3. Google bot will index yor JS render page but will still score higher if it is readable without JS (see pre-render)
Lewis Dorigo
@thomasfuchs the web is accessible by default: it’s all just text.
It’s choices and devisions that developers make that make the web inaccessible.
We have a responsibility to make accessible decisions. #WebDev #Web
Thomas 🔭🕹️
@dorigo Yes, this.
Incidentally using browser technologies as much as possible and not using frameworks when avoidable makes this a lot easier because the overall complexity of the markup, styling and code will be massively reduced.
Thomas 🔭🕹️
@jonasdowney true but there’s also a lot of free stuff that’s not on the generic font services
Jonas Downey
@thomasfuchs also, it’s so fun to buy esoteric fonts from independent foundries and create something unique!
(although admittedly this is an expensive option)
piofthings
@thomasfuchs i thought chrome was a fork of Mozilla’s engine, which Safari (also?) contributes to, no?
Thomas 🔭🕹️
@piofthings No, it’s not.
Thomas 🔭🕹️
@philsherry @piofthings Correct, except for some more esoteric stuff like text-based engines and some niche-use graphical engines.
Phil Sherry
@piofthings @thomasfuchs Gecko is its own thing. I think it’s the only one that *isn’t* a fork of WebKit at this point?
Thomas 🔭🕹️
@rysiek @jrozanski Yep! If you do use a CDN (which can be good for many reasons, among them loading larger assets faster because of geographical distribution as well as less attack surface on your application web server) keep it to a single CDN that’s under your control.
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦
@jrozanski @thomasfuchs oh oh I want to do one too!
1. Self-hosting should not be limited to just fonts; on most sites it makes sense to self-host most if not all resources, including JS libraries and CSS theme files.
Using several third-party CDNs can seriously *damage* resilience of your site. If *any* of them goes down (and they do, quite regularly!), that might render your site unusable.
The more different CDNs you use, the higher likelihood your site goes down with one of them.
Thomas 🔭🕹️
@derek for DIY you can always https://github.com/google/woff2 -- will convert ttf and otf from and to woff2
Derek P. Collins
@thomasfuchs Is there a font converter that you recommend?
Thomas 🔭🕹️
@derek (If you're on a Mac and have homebrew, a simple `brew install woff2` will set you up)
Derek P. Collins
@thomasfuchs Nice! Thank you!
somehybrid
@thomasfuchs when should you use a js framework?
Taggart: ~# :idle:
@thomasfuchs Okay but you know what those frameworks get you?
A reasonable degree of safety from self-introduced security issues. I test web apps for a living and I'm here to tell you that you should not homebrew your entire frontend without a good deal of training, including in secure coding. I find way more vulnerabilities in bespoke apps than I do in ones using frameworks.
Thomas 🔭🕹️
@mttaggart Please don't spread FUD. You can write insure apps with or without frameworks.
ChatGPT just had a huge security issue _because_ they used some open source front-end library (at least that's what they said about the problem).
The problem is, you need to know what you're doing, either way.
Andrew
@thomasfuchs you can do a lot of web functionality with just html and css, like animated buttons, responsive design, or even showing elements using a checkbox
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