Friday Issue Nr. 127 | 10/01/2025

Happy New Year! It has been a calm start to the year, as clearly, fewer posts appeared in my timeline. There are still a few interesting reads, mainly in the CSS/Design world. There was exciting hover usage, a good post on text trim and text balance, and my personal favourite - perfection is the enemy. Happy reading!

JavaScript News

Epic Programming Principles

This is a mix of principles and philosophy sprinkled with life examples. It's a really good read with your morning coffee.

https://www.epicweb.dev/principles

SWR

React Hooks for Remote Data Fetching

https://www.npmjs.com/package/swr

Full documentation https://swr.vercel.app/

HTMX is a new jQuery?

I don't know, but for me, HTMX feels like messed-up HTML. However, I know that there is loads of love for it. Certainly, it is interesting, and the idea that they don't change much and keep it stable is also great. In any case, this is an interesting post.

https://htmx.org/essays/future/

Remix updated tutorial

https://reactrouter.com/tutorials/address-book

HTML & CSS News

CSS Text-box-trim

This is more like a design post. However, that text box is so confusing. This post explains well all those empty spaces above the text.

https://piccalil.li/blog/why-im-excited-about-text-box-trim-as-a-designer/

Using DevTools to Validate Web Performance Improvements

Interesting use of the Overrides option in devtools.

https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2024/using-devtools-to-validate-web-performance-improvements/

Sorry not sorry

An elegant way to use :hover > : not(hover)

This will trigger a hover effect on all but not the one currently in focus.

https://nerdy.dev/hover-not-hover-sorry-not-sorry

Balancing Text in CSS

Solid deep-dive into text wrap, with props balanced and pretty.

https://ishadeed.com/article/balancing-text-css/

For me, it is such a great CSS addition that I simply use Josh Comeau's suggested reset.css, which already has this feature "built-in":

https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/custom-css-reset/

New Front-end Features for Designers in 2025

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2024/12/new-front-end-features-for-designers-in-2025/

Relatively New Things You Should Know about HTML Heading Into 2025

This includes Details, styleable Selects, Popover and Dialogs, Checkboxes as toggle switches, and more.

https://frontendmasters.com/blog/bone-up-html-2025/

Tailwind 4

I guess this is good news for the projects with Tailwind.

https://thathtml.blog/2024/12/tailwind-4-a-mea-culpa-moment/

Type scale generator

A handy tool to sort out fonts for your project in an easy way and export as CSS, SCSS, Tailwind or even as a JSON for WordPress.

https://landin.gs/tools/type-scale-generator/

Fun fact

With only two lines of CSS, you can change a light theme into a dark theme. Try it in your browser.

document.body.style.filter = 'invert(1)'
document.body.style.background = 'black'

Mixed News

Perfection is the enemy

Short and to the point high-level guiding principles on how to tackle accessibility.

https://github.com/Heydon/principles-of-web-accessibility

Things we learned about LLMs in 2024

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/llms-in-2024/

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