Bleeding Edge Web

@edgeATX

EdgeATX.org

July 2024

News From the Bleeding Edge

— Brian Moeskau (@bmoeskau)

Speed Vector Indexing

— Ted Patrick (@__ted__)

RAG in Bedrock

— Zeb Evans (clientpoint.com)

Turbo Charge Your Stack with AI

— Ryan Vice (vicesoftware.com)

Housekeeping

Join us on Slack
Speakers and sponsors always wanted
- edgeatx.org / speak.html
- edgeatx.org / sponsorship.html

Thanks to Our Host!

Thanks to Our Food Sponsor!

Libraries & Frameworks

es-toolkit 1.0

Released May 31st

A state-of-the-art, high-performance JS utility library with a small bundle size and strong type annotations.

Basically an upgraded / modern lodash
Built in Typescript with 100% test coverage

Other notable releases

June 29 Fabric.js 6.0
July 5 Tinybase 5.0
July 8 Vitest 2.0
July 16 Meteor 3.0 *
July 17 Node.js 22.5.1 **

* BEW hosted a Meteor v0.6 talk back in Sept 2013!

** v22.5.0 added Sqlite (yay), but also "broke almost all applications" and NPM (oops!)

*** Related, the Node team also found that their CI is horribly broken...

Baseline News

https://web.dev/baseline

July browser releases

Stable version releases:

July 9 Firefox 128
July 23 Chrome 127

@property

Extends CSS by providing meaning and context to CSS variables.

Default custom properties are simple strings:


        :root {
          --myColor: hotpink;
        }

@property

Use @property to provide a detailed style definition:


        @property --myColor {
          syntax: '<color>';
          inherits: false;
          initial-value: hotpink;
        }

Provides type info
Control over style inheritance
Ability to define a default / fallback value

font-size-adjust

Control lowercase letter size relative to uppercase letters.

Verdana vs Times at font-size: 40px:

This is Verdana.
This is Times.

font-size-adjust

Control lowercase letter size relative to uppercase letters.

Times with font-size-adjust: 0.54:

This is Verdana.
This is Times.

Security & Privacy

Polyfill.io Supply Chain Attack

Reported June 25th

A shady Chinese company bought the domain + repo

cdn.polyfill.io started injecting malware
Same with bootcdn.net and several other CDNs
Google, Cloudflare and others blocked it quickly
Cloudflare has a polyfill.io mirror (but you don't need it)

Privacy Sandbox

Google announced Privacy Sandbox 4+ years ago.

That was to include phasing out third-party cookies.

They just announced a "new path" forward:

Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time. We're discussing this new path with regulators, and will engage with the industry as we roll this out.

Private Browsing 2.0

Apple OTOH is cracking down further in Safari 17.

New private browsing defaults:

Link tracking and fingerprinting protection
Blocking known / cloaked network trackers
Disabled extensions with history access

Plus, additional safeguards in ALL browsing modes

Industry News

Ladybird Browser Initiative

Announced July 1st

A brand-new browser from scratch, backed by a non-profit.

Open source, web standards-first
No user monetization, "ever"
Backed by Andreas Kling and Chris Wanstrath

Targeting "early adopter" alpha in... 2026

CrowdStrike Outage

Occurred July 18th

Faulty config sent to ~1% of all Windows machines

Led to a BSOD + reboot loop
Cause: "a bug in the content-validation system"
Took down airlines, banks, TV stations, hospitals
Estimated $5.4B in global damage
Delta still hasn't recovered as of today!

Just For Fun

Sliderland

A minimalist coding playground (using sliders)

Demos

Batman-comic.css

Easily create comics with Batman and Robin.


        <article class="batman-comic">
          <section>
            <div class="batman"></div>
          </section>
        </article>

Demo

Thanks!

Brian Moeskau