Thursday, 23rd September 2021
Introducing Partytown 🎉: Run Third-Party Scripts From a Web Worker (via) This is just spectacularly clever. Partytown is a 6KB JavaScript library that helps you move gnarly poorly performing third-party scripts out of your main page and into a web worker, so they won’t destroy your page performance. The really clever bit is in how it provides sandboxed access to the page DOM: it uses a devious trick where a proxy object provides getters and setters which then make blocking API calls to a separate service worker, using the mostly-forgotten xhr.open(..., false) parameter that turns off the async default for an XMLHttpRequest call.
File not found: A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans (via) This is fascinating: as-of 2017 university instructors have been increasingly encountering students who have absolutely no idea how files and folders on a computer work. The new generation has a completely different mental model of how applications work, where everything is found using search and data mostly lives inside the application that you use to manipulate it.
Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.