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📨 #120: use RFC, Sandpack, Progressive enhancement, Streaming, Storybook, React-Native, Codeflow, Fontaine, Unplugin, Node.js 19, TypeRunner...

· 8 min read
Sébastien Lorber
Sébastien Lorber
Newsletter Editor - Docusaurus maintainer

Hi everyone!

The newsletter is late: a new React RFC gave me a lot of reading 😄 The article by Kent C. Dodds is quite long as well but worth it. We've got 2 articles highlighting Sandpack in 2 weeks, it's probably worth looking into!

It's moving well on the React-Native core side too, with new open discussions. We could even think that after the migration to the new architecture and the stabilization of public APIs, there could be a 1.0 release? It doesn't matter much in practice, but some apparently care deeply about having a major version.

There are also quite a few interesting new things in the frontend ecosystem. I'm particularly interested in Codeflow, Fontaine and Unplugin which may be of direct interest to Docusaurus.

Speaking of Docusaurus, I was invited to talk about it in the Changelog JS Party podcast.

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As always, thanks for supporting us on your favorite platform:

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    This RFC gives rise to interesting debates. We wonder what the integration with data-fetching libraries will look like. The use of generators seems to be suitable for this case, but they are difficult to use in practice. We are waiting for a new RFC that will introduce a cache API.

    The Web’s Next Transition

    Kent C. Dodds offers a nice retrospective of the 3 main web architectures, very well illustrated and documented. He highlights the latest architecture, the trend of the moment: Progressively Enhanced Single-Page-Application. Remix is an implementation of this, with well thought abstractions that encourage to emulate the native behavior of the browser. I don't really agree that a server is absolutely necessary. Docusaurus is also a PESPA implementation that works well without JavaScript.

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    Josh Comeau praises Sandpack, the CodeSandbox toolkit he uses to create interactive code playgrounds. It looks easy to use and very flexible!

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      🔀 Other​

      StackBlitz Codeflow

      The StackBlitz WebContainers technology allows to run Node.js in the browser via WebAssembly. You can run VS Code, Next.js or Docusaurus directly in your browser, and not via a remote Docker container. Codeflow adds the whole layer of integration with GitHub that makes it easy to open, review or edit a pull-request by running it locally in a secure way: extremely useful for open-source projects.

      They also launched Web Publisher, a simplified editing view for Markdown files (editor, preview, save button). Very handy for contributing to documentation on Git, even for less technical users. There is a real preview of the content, and not the degraded experience of the GitHub Markdown preview. This is an important need for Docusaurus users.

      Fontaine - Automatic font fallback based on font metrics

      Permits to avoid layout shifts when loading a custom font. Makes the fallback font the same size as the final font, so that the transition is smooth and does not impact the size of the text containers. Great idea!

      🤭 Fun​

      Meme - When an ESLint rule is a warning instead of an error. - oh no - anyway (nobody cares)


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