A big milestone, and a couple of major changes — support for IE < 9 has been removed, slicing 12% off the file size, and you can now do custom builds to save more file size by removing modules you don’t need.
I was skeptical that the custom build thing would be worth much — that is, that you’d have to exclude the useful parts of the library to really save anything. However, looking at a (fairly large) project I’m working on right now, I could drop deprecated, event-alias, wrap and sizzle without touching a line of code, and a few other modules are only used once or twice and could be sacrificed in the name of speed.
Update: Greg Allen has created a web-based tool for generating custom builds, if all the Node and Grunt stuff sounds like hard work.
Tab Atkins bring us down to earth with this post detailing why element queries would be so challenging to implement.
Personally, I think the ideas about ways to avoid the looping problem won’t really satisfy developers — what we really want is a min-container-width media query and nothing less will do. I’d be interested to hear how implementers feel about the looping problem — could it be managed with robust error handling (e.g. detect whether an element query will cause a loop, and if so then ignore the CSS within it) or is there just too much risk of crashing the browser?
I guess it’s just too much work to walk out the front door five steps, pick up the newspaper that was delivered while you slept, and then bring it back to your kitchen table each morning to read the news of the world. Now you want it to appear instantly on your computer screen. OK, Mr. Fancypants Bigshot.
I’m usually bored by tech journalism, or whatever you want to call it, but John Siracusa’s recent surge of writing on Hypercritical has been quite entertaining.
A good round-up by David Storey of what it looks like IE11 will be including. Very promising.
Thanks to John Resig, I finally understand what Asm.js is and why I’ll almost certainly never use it.
Jeff Atwood explains why, having decided to move away from the Microsoft stack for his latest project, he ended up settling on Ruby. A particular point I liked:
Ruby isn’t cool any more. Yeah, you heard me. It’s not cool to write Ruby code any more. All the cool people moved on to slinging Scala and Node.js years ago. Our project isn’t cool, it’s just a bunch of boring old Ruby code. Personally, I’m thrilled that Ruby is now mature enough that the community no longer needs to bother with the pretense of being the coolest kid on the block. That means the rest of us who just like to Get Shit Done can roll up our sleeves and focus on the mission of building stuff with our peers rather than frantically running around trying to suss out the next shiny thing.
Interesting point of view from Scott Kellum about how using preprocessors like Sass and Less can hurt your ability to share and teach from your code.
I haven’t (yet) converted to using any of the CSS preprocessors, and it does irk me sometimes when I come across an article about a useful CSS technique, but the examples are in Sass so it takes me some extra time to figure out what I would write in pure CSS. Of course, I’m also guilty of this myself when I write about JavaScript techniques and the examples are in jQuery.
Steve Souders has been through data from his HTTP Archive project to find out how many sites use the Google CDN to load the core jQuery library and how that might influence your decision on whether to use the Google CDN or self-host.
As usual with Steve’s blog, the discussion in the comments is also very informative and insightful.
Nice explanation of min-content, a CSS width value I wasn’t aware of but that looks really useful.
It’s sort of the opposite of width:auto — instead of growing as wide as it can within its container, it shrinks as narrow as it can around the width of its contents.
Stu Cox takes a look at the new Level 4 Media Queries for detecting input devices, and finds that the sophistication of today’s and tomorrow’s touch-enabled devices might just render them useless.