Issue #46

February 13, 2013

Dear friends,

today is, as probably most of you already heard, an amazingly important day for web. Namely, Opera announced that it will start using WebKit as its rendering engine and V8 as its JavaScript engine.

Some people argue that this is a bad thing, some that this is a good thing, but I won’t pick sides. I’ll just say that this is a huge thing. WebKit will profit while Firefox and Internet Explorer are left in a bad position. I think that we might see some kind of merge or cooperation between Mozilla and Microsoft in order to compete with WebKit.

In any case, exciting times are in front of us.

Headlines

DevTools: Visually Re-engineering CSS For Faster Paint Times

Addy Osmani

Addy Osmani explains in detail how to profile your CSS and what you can do to optimize paint times of your application.

In Defense Of Rem Units

Matthew Lettini

Rem units are easier to work with than em units but just as useful. Matthew Lettini explains their pros and cons.

CSS Regions Polyfill

Mihai Corlan & Razvan Caliman

Thanks to experimental polyfill by Mihai Corlan and Razvan Caliman CSS Regions have just came a step closer to real-world usage. The sooner we’re able to use them in our daily projects the better.

When to Avoid the Descendant Selector

Louis Lazaris

Louis Lazaris explains why should putting descendant selectors (too) high in the DOM be avoided.

Responsive grid systems; a solution?

Harry Roberts

Harry Roberts shows how he tackled the problem of grid systems in his Inuit.css framework. Quite interesting read.

How to Create Windows-8-like 3D animations with CSS3 and jQuery

Sara Soueidan

Sara Soueidan guides you through creating stunning CSS3 Windows-8-like animations.

Introduction to Animation in HTML

Kirupa Chinnathambi

Very good introduction into animations on the web. The article covers CSS transitions, WebGL and plain old JavaScript animations.

When to use Sass mixins, extends and variables

Rachel Nabors

Rachel Nabors shares a couple of short tips that you’ll find helpful, particularly,if you’re new to the whole Sass / preprocessor thingy.

Roole

Glen Huang

Roole is a brand new CSS preprocessor. It is implemented in JavaScript, it has vendor prefixing built-in and it utilizes braceless syntax. The question is if we really need another CSS preprocessor.