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December 20th, 2023 × #webdev#javascript#predictions

What happened in JS, CSS And Web Dev in 2023? 2023 Predictions Results!

Wes and Scott review their 2023 web development predictions from the previous year, assessing what trends and technologies ended up being hits or misses.

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Topic 0 00:00

Transcript

Announcer

Monday. Monday. Monday. Open wide dev fans. Get ready to stuff your face with JavaScript, CSS, node modules, barbecue tips, get workflows, breakdancing, soft skill, web development, the hastiest, the craziest, the tastiest web development treats. Coming in hot. Here is Wes, Barracuda, Boss, and Scott, El Toro Loco, Tolinski.

Wes Bos

Welcome to Syntax. It's almost the end of the year.

Wes Bos

Hopefully, you're getting ready for Christmas. And thinking about the New Year, Every year, we do our predictions for what's gonna come the next year, but we also go back and look at, What do we project at the start of the year and how did we do? So today we're gonna go through all the 2023 predictions, things we thought would pop, Things we thought would flop and how well we did. There's usually some hilarious ones on here where, Man, we thought that would be so much bigger than it was and definitely didn't didn't, pop out. I gotta say, Wes,

Scott Tolinski

After doing the prework for this one, we were popping way more than we were flopping. Oh, gosh. We we were popping it, like almost the entire episode, so I'm excited to talk to this.

Wes Bos

Right.

Scott Tolinski

What else is popping, Scott? What else is popping? Well, not our our error log on Sentry. Why? Well, because we use Sentry to launch our website, and we fix those bugs.

Scott Tolinski

Right? Because Mostly. When you well, mostly. Yeah. There's, like, a couple in there.

Scott Tolinski

But it's looking pretty good, honestly.

Scott Tolinski

Oh, yeah. All the Significant ones are being taken care of. Because when you launch with a tool like Sentry, you can actually see the bugs.

Scott Tolinski

You can solve them, and then you can go on to do more important stuff like, celebrate all of the predictions that you got right for 2023.

Scott Tolinski

So, if you want to use Sentry, head on over to Sentry dot I o. You can use the coupon code at tasty treat, all lowercase, all one word. Honestly, it's an incredible tool. Check it out, and, thank you, for Century for presenting this podcast. Alright. So let's start it off with our first Prediction

Server side rendering becoming more popular

Wes Bos

was SSR server side rendered JS sites will become more the norm.

Wes Bos

And I think that I think that has been very true. I think, like, the the React server components got off to a bit of a rocky start, But it feels like people are starting to come around to them and sort of understand how it's working. And even if you're not into React Server Components, the like the meta framework revival, which is using SvelteKit, Next. Js, Remix, Solid State, any of those frameworks out there. Seems like everybody's sort of on board for this type of thing.

Wes Bos

And along with that, a whole lot less of, GraphQL doing everything in the in the client, doing as much on the server as possible seems a bit simpler.

Scott Tolinski

And it seems like every other day, somebody's talking about how p or JavaScript is becoming PHP, and that goes along with just Just doing more on the server, having things available for server side rendering. And it's not only, like, become more of a thing. It's also gotten way easier Overall, I think every single meta framework out there makes SSR pretty trivial these days, as you mentioned, the fact that these meta frameworks are existing.

Scott Tolinski

But, like, I I think about, you know, the amount of things you have to do to get Sveltekit up and running server side is, like, not at all. You also have Astro, juff You know, GloedUp to become less of a static site and more of a, server side framework in addition. So, like, Now you can write any front end framework you want, and you can use Astra to do it with server side rendering and all that good stuff. Also, Remix, another one right there. So, like, just about everything is server side rendered these days. And there's also a new host of tools coming out that are Really, like, client side less and server side more. Like, h t m x is more like, what can we do on the server side specifically And then not have to mess with client side JavaScript as much. We also said TypeScript inferred

Topic 2 04:17

TypeScript inference becoming widely used

Wes Bos

becomes hot, and I think we I think we nailed this one.

Wes Bos

So the Syndax website itself, like, did we there's maybe, like, 6 our 7 custom types that we wrote in the entire thing, and everything else is inferred, meaning that it's either generated for us and simply by just using the framework itself. By querying data from the database, all the types ripple through from the query into the data result. If you filter or change that data or add some properties onto it.

Wes Bos

Those types are inferred, and then you send it off to the client side. Client side infers all that data, stuff. And it is very, very nice, especially when you're working with data where we don't just have a show type every single time, right? Sometimes we have a show just put the number in the URL. Sometimes we have a show with the guests and the transcript, and it's much bigger than that. And having being able to for that to be inferred is super handy.

Scott Tolinski

Next one here we have is types in JS, which was definitely referring to the proposal type annotations.

Scott Tolinski

Now I don't know where this thing lies, but the GitHub repo has not really been updated.

Topic 3 05:29

No major progress on JS type annotations proposal

Scott Tolinski

The read me was updated 2 months ago slightly, with some meeting notes from March of, 2023.

Scott Tolinski

So really early on in the year, nothing as of late. Just nothing really being modified in this for over a year in terms of, like, the actual implementation here.

Scott Tolinski

So I don't know where this thing lies. It seems like maybe not a ton of progress, but then again, some of this stuff can always feel like It's not moving even if it is. So hey.

Scott Tolinski

You know, this might be a flop in terms of this, but I don't think we stuff. Said that we were getting this this year or even in another year from now. But I think we wanted to maybe see some

Topic 4 06:17

Decorator proposal moved to stage 3

Wes Bos

Progress considering it's still at, like, stage 1, and it it feels kinda in the same spot. I think it I think it is being worked on. So if you look at the notes From March. Yep.

Wes Bos

Basically, there's a t c 39 meeting where they go back and forth and talk about talk about how this might work. And the the meeting notes end off with, I think you have several explicit supports and no one is objecting. I think you have a stage one. So we have a stage one. Yeah. I I get yeah. I think stuff.

Scott Tolinski

And it is listed as stage 1. So

Wes Bos

I think now what has to happen is they have to they have to write the spec, you know, Like, the GitHub repo is just an idea, and they're just proposing it in TC 39.

Wes Bos

And it's past the Like, they pitched it to t c 39 and saying, you know what? Good. Let's let's move it past stage 0, or it's just an idea. Now let's move it to stage 1. And I think the actual creation of the spec like this is going to be massive. Like, how long did it take us to get to be mass to get promises in JavaScript? It took us many, many years, and that's because they want to make sure that they absolutely nail it. So it'd be fun to get somebody involved in this. Yeah. We should talk to them about, like, where where it's at. You know? So a lot of the stuff is all the meetings are open, like every single word that they've said. But it's not like there's no website that's clear as to where is this thing at right now? Jeff. But Mhmm. I bet I bet we'll see some some more stuff for it. So it hasn't been haven't hasn't been squashed. And everyone I talk to thinks,

Topic 5 07:13

Standard JS runtimes maturing with new options

Scott Tolinski

Yeah. We should have that. Yeah. I agree, and I I feel the same way.

Scott Tolinski

Next one we have here is Dino gets hotter.

Scott Tolinski

You know, I would say that maybe it didn't get super hotter, but it did get hotter. It got it got more use.

Scott Tolinski

I think Dino grew up a little bit. There's, like, the hosting platform. I think it's a good option. I think there's a lot of cool stuff, but I I don't know if I hear a lot.

Scott Tolinski

I hear more from, like, the bun the bun folks than I do from the Deno folks, and it could a 100% just be my bubble. I'm very, very, Cognizant of that.

Scott Tolinski

But, yeah, I think Dino grew up. And Dino as a hosting platform, there's a lot of really great things if If you're going to be firing up the Deno app, they got, didn't they get package dot JSON support this year? Yeah. Yeah. They have

Topic 6 08:43

Deno gained some traction and improvements

Wes Bos

Very good node support now, which is is fantastic. I think I think we're a little off on this, prediction saying Deno gets hotter, and I think it should have been standard server JavaScript or standard JavaScript run times get hotter because What did we see in the last year? We saw, like, Cloudflare Workers continues to push on Winter CG.

Wes Bos

We see BUN one point zero got released.

Wes Bos

We saw another new runtime called Winter JS pop up. Mhmm.

Wes Bos

We had the, Jake from Fastify.

Topic 7 09:23

New JS runtimes gaining interest

Scott Tolinski

Fastly.

Scott Tolinski

Fastly.

Wes Bos

And it's amazing like we're seeing like and we've seen several APIs being pushed for standardization across the board.

Wes Bos

Seeing remixed being able to deploy to all of these different targets. We finally figured out.

Wes Bos

Did I even tell you that? We finally figured out what TikTok is doing with JavaScript.

Wes Bos

Did I tell you that?

Scott Tolinski

Where did you get that information?

Wes Bos

So One of the folks at Cloudflare listened to the Cloudflare episode, and he dug into it. And he found a blog post in Chinese from somebody who works at ByteDance, which is TikTok's parent company.

Wes Bos

And So I read the whole thing. I translated it, and there's a bunch of stuff on GitHub.

Wes Bos

It's all in Chinese. That's why I didn't find it.

Wes Bos

And we I tagged him on Twitter. I said, like, what are you, like, what are you doing? He said, we are working on a highly, like, a very dense JavaScript runtime.

Wes Bos

And then I said, what do you do with that? And he says hosting and hosting and I think processing are the 2 big ones. So I don't know if I can ask them any more questions, but I'm very curious if, like, TikTok itself or the fact that if TikTok's popularity spikes and they need to spin up a whole bunch of JavaScript, they wrote their own JavaScript runtime to do load balancing or something like that. So it seems like they are making their own JavaScript runtime Very similar to how Cloudflare did because they need their own infrastructure, to handle the types of work and the types of loads that they get.

Topic 8 10:30

TikTok building custom JS runtime

Scott Tolinski

What we did have as the very next one, JS runtime's maturer.

Scott Tolinski

So could I think that could fit into that. JS runtime's mature. Yeah. I do think that is, you know, we did say bun one point o. So there we go. Hey. We got that 1. Yeah. Nailed it. Nailed it. So I'm gonna I'm gonna give us a a, a pop for this because, Yeah. There are more JS runtimes, and I do think the idea and the concept of with winter CG and all these things bringing up, I think The fact that there's all these options now, it has matured as landscape.

Topic 9 11:20

WebAssembly gaining adoption

Wes Bos

Next one we had here is we will see a new TypeScript type checker written in Rust.

Wes Bos

I don't know if we hit that one or not. We definitely still are only able to check types With the TSC, you can strip types with any number of different libraries out there very quickly. But there was an effort to actually rewrite the entire type checker in Rust so it'd be much faster.

Topic 10 12:18

Page transition API implemented widely

Scott Tolinski

The Major progress on this.

Scott Tolinski

You know, there's not a lot of recent commits.

Scott Tolinski

There's some, like, version bumps and things like that here and there.

Scott Tolinski

Is an open issue from last month that says, what's the status of this project? And it has gone unanswered. So, You know, that's never a good sign if somebody says, hey. What's the status of this project? And it it over a month later, there's still no answer to that. Yeah. Like, oh, yes. Oh, it's very inactive development, any of that stuff.

Scott Tolinski

I I don't wanna say this project's dead or anything, but I don't know if this project is, You know, really flying or anything here. I don't see any branches that I missed or missing.

Wes Bos

Is this the same one? Vercel hired the guy that that

Scott Tolinski

was doing this. So maybe that's what's happened. Maybe it's being moved into a different place.

Wes Bos

I'm not sure. Basically, I know this is incredibly, incredibly complex.

Topic 11 13:21

Rust rewrite of TypeScript checker stalled

Wes Bos

Like, imagine How complex it is just looking at custom types in TypeScript, where they like loop and infer and extend.

Wes Bos

You know, like Just being able to understand some of these complex TypeScript types, let alone write the compiler in Rust Is I can't imagine that that being very, very easy. And, also, I think that's probably a reason why

Scott Tolinski

Microsoft has not done it yet as well. Yeah. It just doesn't look like there has been any major work done on this in the past year or so to say. Maybe 7 months ago was the last major update to this in any sort of regard. So, Yeah. Something to keep an eye on for sure, but who knows where it's at right now? Next one we have is new JS APIs, which we've talked about. New immutable array types we've talked about. Enums, nothing happened there.

Scott Tolinski

Decorators, nothing really happening I mean, people use decorators. You can use them. The API has gotten more solidified.

Scott Tolinski

Temporal, still moving. Jeff. Big API still being implemented. Can't use it yet. Although the polyfills do exist, I personally use them.

Scott Tolinski

They work fine, but they can be a bit hefty in practice. Still, it's a cool API. Pipeline operators.

Scott Tolinski

This. Still, it's a cool API.

Scott Tolinski

Pipeline operators. Hey.

Scott Tolinski

Do you do you know, like, the the status of the pipeline operators in in JavaScript, it feels like that's like one of those ones where 2 competing ways of doing it. Yeah. And I don't I don't recall whatever the resolution was for that or if there even was 1. Because at one point, It was a significantly hot topic on Twitter of people arguing about the correct way to do this. Yeah. Pipeline

Topic 12 14:40

Pipeline operator proposal inactive

Wes Bos

is hasn't been touched since 2021, so nothing hasn't been moved forward just yet.

Wes Bos

Again, I'm not sure if it's being chewed on or thought about, but Certainly would love it. But you said you said decorators, didn't see anything. But, like, in this year, TypeScript 5 release support for JavaScript decorators. JavaScript decorators. Sure. Yeah, TypeScript decorators were a different thing.

Topic 13 15:12

Decorator proposal implemented in TypeScript

Wes Bos

But now TypeScript 5.0 comes out with, like, proper

Scott Tolinski

JavaScript spec decorators. But that is just TypeScript. You know, it's not JavaScript. No. It is. It is. I'm what I'm saying is that, like, it's not the the t c 39 movement on that. You know what I mean? It's that the t c 39 proposal has now gotten to a place where it solidified enough that TypeScript felt comfortable.

Wes Bos

Oh, I see what you mean.

Wes Bos

Yeah. But the actual decorator proposal, everybody thought that was kind of dicey because TypeScript implemented decorators before there was any spec, and then it was the wrong spec. So now they're implementing the hopeful spec, And I sure hope that it doesn't change again. Hey. It's in stage 3, man. It's gotta get there. Obviously, the folks a typescript say, like, this is not going to change. Let's put it into the language.

Wes Bos

And we did a whole show on Deckorators, too. So check that one out. We had another one here writing winter CG spec becomes popular.

Wes Bos

I would say we nailed that one. Winter CG has only grown in the amount of people participating in that. So we've talked enough about that on this show. I think worker ready, standards based JavaScript is the future, especially with things like Node. JS Landing Web streams. You don't have to use the weird node version of streams.

Topic 14 17:02

JS runtimes converging on standards

Wes Bos

Standardizations are starting to come more and more into both node as well as all the other run times.

Scott Tolinski

Yeah.

Scott Tolinski

Next one here, edge rendering become more common.

Topic 15 17:13

Edge rendering getting more attention

Scott Tolinski

And I feel like that's gotten to be the case, or at least it's gotten easier to do, just edge rendering with framework adapters and things like that. So, yeah. I would say that I mean, I have no data on So for me to just say, oh, yeah. It's become more common. It's easy to say that, but I don't know if that's actually the case. It just feels like it's at least more talked about now than it was before. Yeah. I feel

Wes Bos

like you said, the adapters are making everything a lot easier, and you might not even know that you're using Like he is a middleware on Purcell or NextJS.

Wes Bos

It's running on the edge, baby. You might not even know because the tooling makes it so much easier. The only reason you're going to know that it's not working is because you're trying to do something or use a package that isn't supported in that runtime. Totally.

Wes Bos

I have more predictions about the edge stuff, but I'll save that for our prediction show. I'm excited for the prediction show.

Wes Bos

A new JavaScript framework.

Topic 16 18:10

New JS frameworks continue appearing

Scott Tolinski

Did did we get a new JavaScript framework? We did. What's funny about this is that, we wrote a note Into the show notes, it says, this feels like a free space on bingo, which is very funny. We we did. In fact, I I'm Struggling to recall the name of it because it got dunked on for, like, a week, but there was a new JavaScript framework that had this landing page that was, like, ripping on other JavaScript frameworks, but not accurately.

Scott Tolinski

It seemed like it could have been written in AI. It took, like, 4 pages before you got in any quick start things. I actually I looked at the the page for it and felt like, I'm pretty sure this is satire, and it took me a long time to discover that it wasn't satire.

Scott Tolinski

But now I've removed it from my brain entirely because it was spending a lot of time dunking on other frameworks and its docs.

Scott Tolinski

And I just said, you know what? Not for me.

Wes Bos

Page transitions API. That one popped this year, right? Like we saw it. We've implemented in the new syntax website. We saw 6 or 7 different frameworks implement page transition API into the routers, which is really cool. Lots of really neat demos.

Scott Tolinski

So absolutely nailed that one. Yeah. And what's its current status in CSS 3? Let's see. View transitions API.

Topic 17 19:32

React beta docs finally launched

Scott Tolinski

It's currently in Chrome, And it's not into fire or Firefox just yet, but I have seen some conversation around, like, the fact that the animations aren't interruptible jump has become like a point. So maybe, like, maybe that is becoming a sticking point before these other these other browsers will implement it, but seem like a thing.

Scott Tolinski

Next 1, Rust becomes more popular.

Scott Tolinski

You know, it seems like it's it's moving in that the Trajectory in terms of more people are using it and learning it and figuring it out. It does still feel like a very niche thing comparatively.

Topic 18 20:06

Rust gaining some popularity

Scott Tolinski

But, you know, the Rust folks, People who write Rust are very up on it. They are very excited to use it. I, myself, I've been using Rust for a number of things, Mostly just experiments, and I gotta say, it is hard.

Scott Tolinski

It's so hard. I'm I'm like, I'm doing, like, a frame by frame encoding of raw video files in Rust by hand, and I'm having a blast doing it because it's such a a Far cry from the things I typically work on. Right? But in the same regard, I find myself getting Very frustrated at the type system sometimes or just the restrictive nature of the language. I I mean, I've been writing JavaScript my whole career. So it is a hard transition into Rust when you're doing anything more intense Or maybe you're working with bindings for macOS APIs or video or any of that stuff. Right? So Rust, I would say, has become more popular.

Topic 19 21:07

Other languages like Zig seeing growth too

Scott Tolinski

But in the same regard, there's a lot of languages I feel like that became more popular, like Zig. Right? And whoever heard of Zig before BUN was using Zig?

Wes Bos

One thing, and this kind of hits on one of our tooling one is this is just announced yesterday.

Wes Bos

Prettier put out a 20 $1,000 bounty, to for somebody to write a Rust based compatible printer with Prettier.

Wes Bos

And the folks from Biome. Js, which was which was Rome, did it. So The prettier formatter, which is probably one of the most performance sensitive things that you need because you literally hit save.

Scott Tolinski

Stuff. Well,

Wes Bos

cool people run formatters on save. I know some people don't like that, but That's crazy. You want it to be as fast as possible because when you hit save, It should format your code as fast as possible, and it was written in JavaScript or is written in JavaScript, so Being rewritten in Rust is, like, certainly one of those things that is is necessary.

Scott Tolinski

If I Wes, If if I type something and I hit save and my Prettier does not work,

Topic 20 22:16

Prettier being rewritten in Rust

Wes Bos

I lose my gosh darn mind. Me too. I don't know how Anyone lives their life Ugh.

Wes Bos

Indenting manually.

Scott Tolinski

I cannot cannot function without my prettier working correctly. The sense of calm I get

Wes Bos

when you get all the squiggles and everything's indented weird and you got brackets everywhere and you hit save and just indents it all properly, formats it nicely.

Wes Bos

It just I I can't live my life without Prettier anymore. Because I just type, man. I just type.

Scott Tolinski

Jeff. And I don't wanna be beholden to any formatting.

Scott Tolinski

When I hit save, all this needs to fall into place for me. Let me just, Shout out Century on

Wes Bos

this one right here. So in the Prettier blog post, they mention all of the open source contributions from different companies. And one of the contributions, specifically Syntax, sends basically, Century has a whole bunch of money that they have set aside for open source contributions, and they do it based on the package JSONs in our projects. So syntax itself gets to crawl all the package JSONs, and Prettier is one that we use in every single project we have on our thing.

Topic 21 23:42

Open source funding continuing

Wes Bos

So part of that money gets to go to Prettier. And Century is on the list of companies We're donating $10,529 along with Frontend Masters, Salesforce, Indeed.

Wes Bos

Pretty cool to see open source

Scott Tolinski

working. Yeah. I love that.

Wes Bos

Wasm. More Wasm was one of our predictions for this year. And I certainly think that we saw quite a bit more pop up this year.

Topic 22 24:10

WebAssembly used more in 2022

Wes Bos

I specifically used Wasm in the News Syntax website To do FFmpeg.

Wes Bos

So FFmpeg is like a I think it's like a c library or something like that. And Mhmm. If you wanna run it on a server that doesn't have C, you can just run it via Wasm, which is really cool. We saw a lot of stuff with vastly how they compile your they compile the Firefox JavaScript engine with your own JavaScript, and then they compile it all to Wasm. And that's how they're able to get your edge functions to run so quickly.

Wes Bos

And then there's a bunch of stuff around Wazee.

Wes Bos

And there's some drama in the industry as well around WebAssembly, different specs and Running Wasm, like, locally, is it gonna be a replacement for Docker? So I think we nailed that one as well.

Scott Tolinski

Drama in our industry. Who would have thought? Drama. Yeah. Yeah. Next one, React beta docs will launch after a 5 year development cycle. That is correct.

Scott Tolinski

The React team managed to get their documentation React docs that actually reflect what React is now.

Topic 23 25:19

No major JavaScript tooling changes

Scott Tolinski

React docs that actually reflect what React is now. You think hooks and functions primary as the primary means of writing React. It yeah. Honestly, that one was a bit absurd. I I understand docs are hard, but, like, come on. Yeah. That took quite too long. You know, one React thing I did not see is, Like React is

Wes Bos

a like a Vercel project now, right? Like a good chunk of the engineers behind React Moved from Facebook, either to Vercel or to different companies. So obviously, Facebook still has has quite a few engineers and, into react itself. But it feels like React hasn't released a stable version in well over a year by the time of recording.

Wes Bos

But you know who has released versions of updated React? And that is features that is Vercel and Next.

Wes Bos

That's kind of interesting. I'm not. I think people are salty about that, but I'm here for it. I don't mind that at all. I think that Marcella is a very good caretaker the of React, and I'm excited to see

Topic 24 26:36

Some negativity towards React

Scott Tolinski

what they do with it. Yeah. I yeah. I I think reputation wise, You're comparing the 2 2 companies. That's a that's a, losing fight for Facebook. Right? You're doing Facebook is Facebook.

Wes Bos

We start to see CSS container queries in production.

Wes Bos

Nailed it. Yet what what a good year. Hey?

Scott Tolinski

Hey.

Wes Bos

Yeah. What a good year.

Scott Tolinski

Especially CSS wise. Wowzers. Yeah. CSS

Wes Bos

like, we didn't even predict half the stuff CSS Gave us. It's unbelievable. The container queries. Yeah. Container queries are in all of the browsers.

Wes Bos

So Depends on if you have to support older browsers or not. Let's pull up the Can I Use Real Quick for that? Yeah, it's in Every single browser.

Topic 25 27:22

CSS container queries fully rolled out

Wes Bos

The September 2022 was, like, the last holdout.

Wes Bos

It landed in Chrome and Safari at that same time. So as we recorded this last year, it was just starting to pop up. So now we've had a full year stuff.

Wes Bos

In every single browser.

Wes Bos

And, like, I don't think I don't think that there's anything holding you back from using container queries. What do you think? There I mean, there wasn't because we used them. And boy howdy,

Scott Tolinski

there's a lot of times where I'm excited to use them as the The thing that I've been wanting to use and I think to myself, this is the perfect use case, and I'm so happy that I can do this without having to, You know, whip up some JavaScript with them Mhmm. Resize observer or have to worry about any of that stuff. I could just use my container queries. And I gotta say, I stuff. Definitely a big fan of CSS container queries. People are using them in production.

Scott Tolinski

I think, again, the more and more, the more and more that People try them and get their their, you know, hands dirty with them the more you just see every site using them. So I was just looking at, can I use, and it says

Wes Bos

queries was in only a month ago added? That is not true. It was it's been in there for, like, well over a year. So, yeah, I think you can use container queries.

Topic 26 28:48

CanIUse data inaccuracies noted

Wes Bos

Yeah. In production, obviously, check your stats of how many people are visiting your website. Older iPads is probably the one that always gets you, but I think, I think most websites will be able to start rolling out inner queries Without any issue. Interestingly

Scott Tolinski

enough, Wes, I've been burnt by can I use, like, 3 or 4 times in the past month? We said something on this podcast, and Bramas had to correct us. And I was like, I got this from CanIUse. And, you know, I'm looking at CanIUse right now and it still says that.

Scott Tolinski

And so I don't know how they update their data. That seems like a hard thing for them to keep track of. So maybe, can I use isn't maybe the best place But to get a 100% confidence on this stuff? Rama said that the data used on MDN

Topic 27 29:26

CSS subgrid supported widely now

Wes Bos

And the data used on Kenna uses the same database, right? There's nowhere else.

Wes Bos

There's nowhere else to check it, but I think there's a display issue, At least right now. Yeah. Can I use needs a bit of an update? I can't take this brown and orange anymore.

Wes Bos

I couldn't take it to begin with. Yeah. And, like, need to default to not showing us

Scott Tolinski

Baidu Browser. You know? Yeah. Yeah. For real.

Scott Tolinski

In in in the same, the You know, lines of something that's been different on can I use was, you know, color contrast is a function on can I use? This is not part of our predictions.

Topic 28 30:08

Houdini progress slower than expected

Scott Tolinski

The But color contrast is a function, and I was looking this up recently to be like, alright. Color contrast is not available in any major browser not even behind a flag. Now granted, it looks like it's behind a flag in, in Safari right now.

Scott Tolinski

Friend of the show, Adam Argyle, sent me a message saying let me pull this up.

Scott Tolinski

That color contrast is behind a flag in Chrome, but its name has changed. And it's now contrast color, not color contrast.

Scott Tolinski

In contrast, color does not show up in can I use at all? So

Wes Bos

shrug emoji on that one. I just looked up Flexbox on can I use, and it's like, it's supported as of Chrome 1/19? No. It's been it's been in browsers for

Scott Tolinski

so many years. It's just not showing any of the older Android browsers for mobile.

Scott Tolinski

All of the Chrome Chrome for Android on all of them is set at 1 19. So Every feature. I'm gonna open the issue right now. Look at you. While you do that, I'm gonna talk about another one we said. We said CSS subgrid would would arrive here. And and sure enough, CSS subgrid Jeff. Is now in all major browsers, including Chrome, for Android. Who knows what specific version because can I use just shows us, What we were just saying, 119? Either way, subgrid is available in 9 79% of available browsers out there, which is pretty dang awesome, meaning that you should be able to be using subgrid. Even though I haven't personally used it just yet, We did say that was coming, and here it is. Big fan of subgrid and finally being able to have it. There's so many little issues that I've hit

Wes Bos

Simply wanting to control over it, especially when you're using in React world where you must return a single element from the item. So if you simply just have to wrap your return value in a div, That's annoying, right? So it's nice to be able to have subgrid for that type of thing. So you can subgrid allows you to Align children of a grid along with something that is not the direct descendant of the grid itself. Mhmm. Simply having a wonderful subgrid time. Yeah. The simply having a wonderful, so good time. I could continue singing

Scott Tolinski

my, Paul McCartney subgrid song, apparently.

Scott Tolinski

But I won't because this is getting this is a Christmas episode, y'all. This is December, 20th. This is the sleigh bells coming in. Yes.

Wes Bos

More AI, man.

Wes Bos

AI stuff exploded this year. When did chat gbt come out? Was that this year or last year? I think it was this year. No. It was like, I remember last year at Christmas showing my family the

Scott Tolinski

November 30, 2022.

Wes Bos

It just blew up. And then I showed my family MidJourney at Christmas last year, and they just Had their minds blown that you could just type in anything you wanted and like how much better it's got in the past year or so. Obviously been a massive year of Leaps and bounds for the AI stuff. We saw integrated like we kind of saw a couple of waves like we saw the initial wave, which is everybody Quickly tried to just add AI to their existing product.

Topic 29 33:20

AI and generative tools exploded in 2022

Wes Bos

Then we started to see more like AI specific products. Then we saw all of those companies Get shut down because, no, ChatGPT plugins got rid of it all. Yeah. Just released it. Yeah. Man, crazy year. Crazy year. And I don't think that we're even starting to see

Scott Tolinski

the start of it. Yeah. I think that's right.

Wes Bos

Tooling.

Wes Bos

Was I don't think it was necessarily a big year for tooling. I think because we all were just using, Not all, but a lot of us are just using feet.

Wes Bos

Rome officially closed its doors and was forked stuff. As Biome.

Wes Bos

So there's a big blog post about what happened with Rome. They had a bunch of funding and drama. None of it panned out, but it did get forked into Biome, which then Biome wrote the prettier formatting formatter in Rust, so something good came out of that. And then Biome forked,

Topic 30 34:26

Rome JS tooling project stalled after funding ran out

Scott Tolinski

Remix's logo.

Wes Bos

Oh, yeah. Yeah. That was funny.

Wes Bos

We did see, lightning CSS start to become a little bit popular.

Wes Bos

I know Tailwind is working on a new compiler that uses Lightning CSS instead of using post CSS.

Wes Bos

So that was probably the biggest thing in the tooling space, as which is an alternative to post CSS.

Topic 31 35:04

Lightning CSS gained some interest as PostCSS alternative

Scott Tolinski

Yeah. There's RS Pack 2 that became, more of a thing, a Rust based web bundler based on webpack. Oh, yeah. And,

Wes Bos

TurboPack was like a new bundler that Vercel is working on. Didn't see too much about that.

Wes Bos

It's being worked on by the author of Webpack, Vercel, which is kind of interesting. So We'll see if something comes out of out of out of that, but it seems like most tools, with the exception of Next. Js, have moved to using Vite. Yeah. And Vite got even a a new version recently, version 5. I think 4 and 5 came out this year, and It doesn't even matter because it still works the same way. It's just faster and better.

Scott Tolinski

That's yeah. It's so good. VITA is the best, and, Yeah. I I can't imagine using anything else these days just because it it's so simple. And I yeah. For me, stuff. I'm I'm all aboard the train. Definitely.

Wes Bos

We had people sour on.

Wes Bos

We had 2 predictions of people souring on react.

Wes Bos

Yeah. I think a little bit of a little bit of sentiment, especially around the server component stuff, but Mhmm. I I think that Or even Even the lack of updates from the the Facebook team Yeah. Just kinda understanding, like, what's going on here. But we did see quite a bit With Next. Js come out, so that made up for it a bit.

Wes Bos

I think the people who are critical of React Got louder. They're valid valid points, but also, Like, everybody's still using NextJS.

Wes Bos

I don't think that's going anywhere, so I wouldn't sweat that too much.

Topic 32 36:48

Vite bundler solidified as top choice

Wes Bos

And then I also thought ESLint.

Wes Bos

I don't think that that happened. ESLint is working on a new config, which is a huge sore spot. We had Nicholas Zakas on this year talk about possibly rewriting in Rust or parts of it being rewritten in Rust.

Wes Bos

And I'm still a big, fan of ESLint using every project, so

Scott Tolinski

I think I was wrong on that one. Hey. You know what? He can have a couple flops. We're we're allowed a couple flops.

ESLint remains popular and important

Scott Tolinski

We wrote one of our predictions was Houdini does nothing, and I don't necessarily think that's true because We got at property, which allows you to essentially have typed CSS variables. Whether or not people are using that is a different Paint API has shipped in Chrome, Edge, Opera, and Samsung. Hey. Those are all those are all, very similar browsers.

Scott Tolinski

Okay. Let's take a look. It's under construction in Firefox and in development in Safari. Those are the 2 that are the most important. So Paint API is under construction in Firefox, in development in Safari. Safari has shipped properties and values and has shipped typed object, the Objected model, the type object model.

Scott Tolinski

And the spec has been completed for the Paint API.

Scott Tolinski

Stuff.

Scott Tolinski

So, you know, Firefox is still major lag major lag time here.

Scott Tolinski

Just about everything is under construction except for the animation, the parser and font metrics all have no signal, as in, no work. But then again, the parser API and the font metrics have not had any work done to them on any browser. So it does seem like these things are moving. This is Houdini ready at .com.

Scott Tolinski

Seems to slowly but surely fill in with green. We'll see how much further this gets over the next year. The Firefox

Wes Bos

bug for implementing the Paint API, which is like the that's the first one that literally everybody else has implemented, has not been touched in 4 years.

Wes Bos

There's not been a comment on it in 6 years.

Wes Bos

So

Scott Tolinski

this silence

Wes Bos

is huge.

Wes Bos

I think implementing this is incredible and very complex task.

Wes Bos

And I don't know if people if they see the benefit or they don't have the engineering for it, but if this does pick up, that might be the the sword in Firefox Yeah. We'll see.

Wes Bos

Yeah. That's that's too bad. But, yeah, the rest of it it's funny because I Haven't really heard much about Houdini, but, like, starting to see app property pop up, which is pretty neat. So maybe Maybe it's not Houdini that we want at the end of the day, but it's the APIs we made along the way. We made along the way. Yes. Yes. It's perfect. That's so good. Yes. Well, that was it. I would say

Scott Tolinski

I would definitely say after that review, a lot of popping going on, Wes. 87.9%

Wes Bos

correct.

Scott Tolinski

My gosh.

Wes Bos

So this is this this is why you listen to Syntax, folks. Yeah. We're gonna be doing our predictions episode for the next year, And I wanna beat that. I'm not satisfied with that. I wanna get, like, 99%. Yeah. We we maybe we need some, like, wild guesses too. You know? Like, we can just I wanna keep it safe so that way I can be ready. Oh, no. I think we need we need a section that will not be graded on. Okay. But, like, cool. Like, absolutely wild guesses. You know, like, deal. And maybe even, like, companies as well. You know what's gonna happen to

Scott Tolinski

different companies. I love it, Wes. Let's get into the part of the show where we talk about sick picks. These are things that we pick that we like. Could be anything.

Scott Tolinski

Could be a podcast.

Scott Tolinski

Could be, push pin picture holders.

Scott Tolinski

Could be a label maker, or I think I even sick picked a type of oatmeal before. Actually, it's funny. You sick picked that that oatmeal?

Wes Bos

It's Kodiak. Right?

Scott Tolinski

Yeah. So,

Wes Bos

we went and bought we haven't been able to find the oatmeal in Canada yet, but We went and bought the pancake mix. Oh, yeah. You never. Oh, yeah. It's fantastic. No, I hadn't had it before, and they stopped selling it at our Costco. I don't know like, used to be able to buy a huge bag of it, and we can only find it at Walmart now. But it's awesome. Like, it's not that stuff. It doesn't taste as good as regular pancakes, but, full of protein. Yeah. It's full of protein. Like, we give to our kids right before school, Fills them up with protein, and been a big fan of them. They cook up nicely, nice and fluffy.

Scott Tolinski

Taste like a sludge, most protein pancakes are. I've been a fan of the Kodiak Cakes, and the pancake or the oatmeal's very good as well. I'm going to sick pick a video game for the Nintendo Switch. Super Mario Brothers Wonder is a lot of fun. It's a side scrolling Mario game for the Switch, if you haven't heard of it, which I'd assume if you have a Switch, you've probably heard of this. But I just wanna put my endorsement into the ring because, man, this is the perfect type of game for families to play. You know, we we've been kinda cautious about getting our kids into any kind of video games that aren't, like, straight up educational stuff.

Scott Tolinski

But Yeah. What we've decided is that, like, On Sunday, after dinner for, like, 1 hour, we can sit on the couch and all 4 of us you know, my kids are 46.

Scott Tolinski

We can sit and play a Mario Brothers game all at the same time because there's 4 characters on the screen, and the 2 little kids' characters are Yoshis, and they can't die. So they get a little bit easier time with it. Right? They're not struggling.

Scott Tolinski

And we can all just journey through these worlds together, and they're doing it with us. It's at a fixed time for a specific time limit, and it's been a blast. So Super Mario Brothers wonder if you were considering it or you have a switch and you play games with your family. It's a great game for that. I'm going to sick pick something

Wes Bos

we sick picked A long time ago, I bought it from your sick pick. It's probably 3 years ago, the vacuum.

Wes Bos

Stuff. Yeah. These guys still rocking yours? Yes.

Wes Bos

Tindeco.

Wes Bos

I have no idea. Yeah. N e c o. Whatever it is.

Wes Bos

Basically, it's like a Dyson type stick vacuum.

Wes Bos

And I remember when you sick picked it. One of the reasons you sick picked it is because they sell Every single part on their website that you can buy carte blanche. Right.

Wes Bos

And that's big for being able to repair stuff, because sometimes you buy this stuff on Amazon and it's like, oh, good.

Wes Bos

Like, this one part broken. This company has gone defunct And they've rebranded as some other random company.

Wes Bos

But this vacuum company, we've been loving ours, And it's great to just they spill something, you grab it and quickly suck it right up.

Wes Bos

I found another one. We've been wanting to get one for the cottage, And I found 1 just down the street from me on Marketplace, and the lady had it listed for $40.

Wes Bos

And it's like a $3,350 vacuum.

Wes Bos

And she had her husband had, like, leaned it up against something and it fell and cracked a little piece of plastic on it.

Wes Bos

And so I went and bought it, and then I just glued the piece of plastic back together and brand new boom ready to rock 2 batteries, everything you need.

Wes Bos

But if I didn't realize I could just fix it with glue, I was like, I just looked on their website And they sell the part that was broken for, like, $25. And I was like, this is this is what you need to do. This poor lady, not poor lady, She just got rid of it because one little thing broke.

Wes Bos

You should not be doing that with your items.

Wes Bos

You should be trying to fix them, and They obviously make it super easy. Just order the part, swap it in. It's not a very expensive part like a lot of places do.

Wes Bos

So, vote of confidence for the Tynepco vacuums, s 11 or a 11

Scott Tolinski

are the are the ones that we have. I really like that they have, the hot swappable batteries to me is a big thing because when I'm when I'm cleaning, I don't want that battery to die on me, Especially if you can't plug it in and use it. So, yeah, hot swappable batteries in a vacuum cleaner is a a killer feature for me.

Scott Tolinski

Also, if you're out there and you have one of these stick vacuums, whether it is a Dyson or a Tenneco or any of these, clean your dang filters, folks. The They Oh, nobody knows that. Nobody knows that, and they run so much better.

Scott Tolinski

Like, it's a it's night and day.

Scott Tolinski

In fact, I was vacuuming out our rental car when we went to Hawaii, and the folks we were staying with had one of those vacuums. And I was like, you know what? I'm gonna clean their air filter, and it I I cleaned it, and that thing was brand new. It was just humming along there. So Yeah. Man, I I gotta say, if you have one of these, whatever, clean those air filters. They make a huge difference in the amount of suction. You pretty much have to clean it every time you empty the

Wes Bos

the thing. And people who have like, we have a plug in Dyson as well.

Wes Bos

And maybe once every 2 years stuff. I clean the thing out and the thing runs awesome because it's plugged into the wall and it's sucking grid power.

Wes Bos

But the batteries are so fussy with the filters being clogged. And that's the other thing. This lady was like, my husband just bought me a new one. And then I opened the filter and it came with an extra filter. And I swear she never changed the filter. It was cake. And, like, no wonder you probably were happy to get rid of this thing. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Did you know that there's a filter in there? Yeah.

Wes Bos

And you can buy, Like, replacement filter. There's, like, there's 2 filters on this thing.

Wes Bos

You can buy Two filters and a cleaning attachment for the filter. And you could. It comes with the clean attachment. Yeah. So you don't have to get it dusty anywhere. You don't feel like shake it over top of the garbage can. But you can also just buy a pack of 10 filters and then just throw them in the wash or you probably put them in your dishwasher if you really want stuff. If you if you don't feel like cleaning it that much, so it's easy. The aftermarket for this vacuum is also very good. So I love when there's, like, standard parts for something. Word. Cool. Well, that's all I got. That's it. Yep. Thanks for tuning in. Catch you later.

Wes Bos

A Ace.

Scott Tolinski

Head on over to syntax.fm for a full archive of all of our shows, And don't forget to subscribe in your podcast player or drop a review if you like this show.

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