For the last few years my work-work has mostly focused on back end software (particularly around APIs). This meant that any front end work I was doing was for myself.

Being an long-in-the-tooth old dog, I tend to learn and trick, and roll it out again and again typically without taking the time to find whether I still need the trick. Case and point, I learnt about the JavaScript performance trick of ~~1.4 === 1 to floor a value (and the same float | 0) but really these days it's not "faster" than doing it the legible way (i.e. Math.floor(1.4)).

Given I've had a bit of time away from the backend, here's an unorganised list of things I've found I can use, and thusly remove extra code that I no longer need.

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The list

  1. CSS: text-underline-offset - the distance I can set the text-underline-offset: 12px
  2. CSS: gap - no more faffing with margins in flexbox.
  3. CSS: nested media queries on selectors (and nesting general):
h1 {
  font-size: 1rem;
  @media (min-width: 600px) {
    font-size: 2rem;
  }
}
  1. CSS: clamp(min, variable, max) - I used this extensively on FFConf 2025's css, the process of finding the right values is very much
  2. CSS: content: open-quote can localised quotes and the q tag does this by default, via this neat insight from Stefan Judis
  3. JS: catch without catching the variable, let's me get past the 'error' is defined but never used:
try {
  doTheDodgyStuff();
} catch {
  // nothing, it's fine
}
  1. JS: pointer events have improved (though still from experience they're not 100% perfect) but are to replace the old double click & touch handlers nonsense as seen in the W3C spec
  2. AVIF images are fully supported - I benefited from a train ride with Jake Archibald and in chatting I discovered AVIF are very well supported. This means easily getting 50% file size savings on JPEGs. I'm regularly running the avidenc command in directories:
ls *.jpg | xargs -P 8 -I {} avifenc -q 50 "{}" "{}".avif

So that's my little list.

Not even 10 things. I guess I've not learnt much yet, but even though I return to the server side of APIs in 2026, I'm sure I'll be kicking the tyres in the front again soon enough and adding to my measly list.