Plus we celebrate Lea Verou's work, add 'copy code' buttons to our pages, and drool over GitHub's font updates. |
Style Observer: A Library to Observe CSS Property Changes — Lea Verou is a developer who’s easy to admire because whenever she sets out to solve a problem, the results are always fully formed with no cut corners. So it goes with this ‘exhaustively tested’ JS library for observing changes to CSS properties which deftly handles lots of browser quirks. See the project homepage for more. (TIL there’s a .style TLD!) Lea Verou |
💡 Lea has many other projects to check out, including Color.js which similarly nails the whole process of handling and manipulating colors in JS and the browser. |
Why to Move On to 'ESM-Only' — The march to using ES modules has been going on for years, but if you’re still holding out, there’s probably a good reason why? However, while you can maintain packages supporting both ESM and CommonJS, Anthony thinks it’s time to go ‘ESM only’ and explains why. Anthony Fu |
💡 On that topic, Sarah Gooding writes about require(esm) being backported and stable on Node.js 20 which makes the transition even easier to justify. |
IN BRIEF: 🤔 Developer industry analyst Kate Holterhoff asks "Is npm enough?" and questions why there are so many attempts to replace or extend npm in the JS package registry space. 📱 The React Native team has a roundup of what happened at the most recent contributor summit. Must read for React Native devs. The Popover API is now considered a 'baseline' browser feature with broad support across all major browsers. 🤖 Reader Ishan Anand has been working on implementing GPT2 (a precursor to OpenAI's current offerings) entirely in the browser to power some interesting browser-based spreadsheet data processing experiments. |
RELEASES: Node.js v23.8.0 (Current) and Node.js v22.14.0 (LTS) Node.js v20.18.3 (LTS) – The backporting of import attributes and JSON modules is now stable. pnpm 10.3 – The fast, efficiency-focused package manager adds a strict-dep-builds option to exit with a non-zero exit code if any dependencies have unreviewed build scripts. Pixi.js 8.8 – Fast, flexible 2D WebGL renderer. Astro 5.3, Prettier 3.5, Electron 34.2 |
Kaluma 1.2 – Tiny JavaScript runtime for the RP2040 (Raspberry Pi Pico). bcrypt.js 3.0 – Optimized bcrypt in pure JS. Even in the browser. Jasmine 5.6 – Testing framework for browsers & Node. 🤖 Midscene.js 0.11 – Let AI be your browser operator. |
🔠 And a little typography bonus | |