It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan. — Eleanor Roosevelt
Today we’re gonna talk about application bundlers — tools that simplify our lives as developers. At their core, bundlers pick your code from multiple files and put everything all together in one or more files in a logical order that are compiled and ready for use in a browser. Moreover, through different plugins and loaders, you can uglify the code, bundle up other kinds of assets (like CSS and images), use preprocessors, code-splitting, etc. They manage the development workflow.
There … Read article “Why Parcel Has Become My Go-To Bundler for Development”
Jeremy on the divide between the core languages of the web, and all the tooling that exists to produce code in those languages:
On the one hand, you’ve got the raw materials of the web: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This is what users will ultimately interact with.
On the other hand, you’ve got all the tools and technologies that help you produce the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: pre-processors, post-processors, transpilers, bundlers, and other build tools.
Jeremy likes the raw materials … Read article “Split”
I was asked to do a little session on this the other day. I’d say I’m underqualified to answer the question, as is any single person. If you really needed hard answers to this question, you’d probably look to aggregate data of survey results from lots of developers.
I am a little qualified though. Aside from running this site which requires me to think about front end development every day and exposes me to lots of conversations about front end … Read article “What is the Future of Front End Web Development?”
CSS has Custom Properties now. We’ve written about them a bunch lately. Browser support is good, but of course, old non-evergreen browsers like Internet Explorer don’t have them and never will. I can see the appeal of authoring with “future CSS”, and letting a preprocessor backport it to CSS that is compatible with older browsers. Babel for CSS! Why not?!
It makes me nervous though – because it’s only some use cases of Custom Properties that you can preprocess. … Read article “The Issue with Preprocessing CSS Custom Properties”
Roger Johansson:
I don’t feel the “problems” CSS preprocessors intend to solve are serious enough to warrant the cost, i.e. to me the solution is worse than the problem.
The volume of the chorus in favor of preprocessing (I sing tenor) is so loud, I suspect it’s drowning out a decent size group of people who prefer not to use them.
In a surprise twist ending though, Roger does say he likes some forms of CSS processing, but does it … Read article “Why I don’t use CSS preprocessors”
