Weekly Links - Nov. 18th, 2018
More Functional CSS
I’ve been rebuilding my site into Gatsby with Tailwind, and I’ve really been quite enjoying it so far. The limitations it imposes force you to limit the amount of CSS you have to write, so I’ve been intrigued to see more articles pop up about it. This article from CSS-Tricks explores whether you could combine Functional CSS with a more traditional CSS approach. While I found the article interesting, I had one minor quibble:
Secondly, a lot of CSS property/value pairs are written in relation to one another. Say, for example,
position: relativeandposition: absolute. In our stylesheets, I want to be able to see these dependencies and I believe it’s harder to do that with functional CSS. CSS often depends on other bits of CSS and it’s important to see those connections with comments or groupings of properties/values.
I actually find this to be an advantage for Functional CSS. I like that I have the classes absolute&relative in my HTML, where it’s very clear where they are in relationship to each other.
I still need more experience with it, so we’ll see how it works as I finish up my site.
Pipelines in JavaScript
If you know me, you know I’ve been working on bringing the Pipeline Operator to JavaScript. We’re currently working on implementing the operator in the Babel parser, so things have stalled out while that work is underway. Despite that, enthusiasm in the community remains high, but with several proposals in competition, it can be difficult to keep an eye on what’s going on. That’s why I was really excited to see LogRocket write about the proposal and nail all the details. Definitely check that out if you’re wondering what the latest is.
Wow, Facebook
The other big news out of the past week is Facebook’s execs have something pretty messed up, hiring a firm who smeared its critics with both anti-Semitic conspiracy theories as well as charges of anti-Semitism. Obviously, the moment that was published, they cut ties with said firm, but the damage is already done. Not only have they been embroiled in controversy for a few years now, they have completely bungled every response to their problems. The irony of Facebook, the best platform for conspiracy theories, spreading its own conspiracy theories is too much.