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In 2020, Max Stoiber wrote the 🌶️ spicy Margin considered harmful. On one hand, it seems silly. The margin property of CSS is just a way to push other elements away. It’s very common and doesn’t feel particularly problematic. On the other hand… maybe it is? At least at the design system component level, because those components don’t know the context in which they will be used. Max wrote:

Margin breaks component encapsulation. A well-built component should not affect anything outside itself.

Adam Argyle wrote slightly earlier that he predicted the usage of margin to naturally decline:

Prediction: margins in stylesheets will decline as gap in stylesheets climb

Well it’s four years later now! Has any of this played out? Well it’s super hard to know. Anecdotally, it feels like gap is much more heavily used and my own usage is certainly up. There is public data on usage of CSS features, and, amazingly, margin usage does appear to be slowly going down.

Have you ever heard someone lament about how Safari on iOS is so far behind? Or is missing features? Or heard people talk about how unfair it feels that Apple doesn’t allow third-party browser (engines)? They say that in part because it literally feels unfair, but also because other browsers do actually support the specific features they want, so why are they being kept away from it?

Just what are those missing features? Shalanah Dawson put together a site, iOS404, that lists 63 of them in detail. (Plus has a really cool design.) That’s a lot, but I’m not sure it’s the whole picture of what irks people about iOS Safari. If you hone in on just Progressive Web App (PWA) support, there is quite a few gaps specific to those alone.

Have you heard the story of the 500 mile email? It’s a facinating story about someone on a college campus who could only send an email around 500 geographical miles. It sounds absurd, but it ended up being true!

Harley Hicks has started a brand new site/newsletter named after this famous debugging story in order to share more stories like that. The one about the Wi-Fi only working in the rain is similarly satisfying.

I enjoyed watching Honeypot’s recent Node.js Documentary. Props to Honeypot for taking the time and resources to do these historical dives into some of our industries most major technologies. I like seeing the human side of these things. I feel like if too much more time passed, documentaries like these would get a lot harder to pull off and may never happen at all. Not to assign bloated importance to my own industry, but web technology affects a massive slice of the population of Earth, so major changes in how it works are a big deal.

They’ve also done Ruby on Rails, React, Vue, Ember, GraphQL, and others. All stuff you can learn on Frontend Masters, weird 😛.

The JavaScript architectural pattern of “signals” has really had a moment in the last year. There are lots of frameworks that have adopted it as the predominant way to declare and respond to variables that change across componentry.

Web standards bodies, at their best, notice things like this and step in to help bring them to the web platform where everyone will benefit. For JavaScript, that’s TC39, and there is a brand new proposal for signals by Rob Eisenberg and Daniel Ehrenberg. Cool!

You never know where these “Stage 0” proposals are going to go though. There is massive evidence that people like types in JavaScript, but the proposal to standardize that is two years old now and hasn’t gone anywhere.