The Loop

React Server Components are coming soon to React

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React is hard at work developing Server Components (RSC) for general release, a move that is sure to be a major landmark in the Javascript ecosystem. In the meantime, a member of the React team has released a technical deep dive on how to create Server Components from scratch.

• This isn’t a guide on how to use RSC, but rather an example of the process of “inventing” RSC
• Anticipating the effects that a general release will have on React and the larger JS ecosystem, a thorough understanding of RSC will be crucial to making sure we stay up-to-date on React and able to offer the latest technologies to our clients
• It should be noted that this implementation is not the most optimized, as its author prioritized conceptual clarity over efficiency

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• Google Ads recently experienced an outage which left advertisers unable to access the platform for nearly two hours
• Users who tried to log in to manage their accounts encountered a 500 server status error, while the Google Ads status dashboard didn't show any issues during this period, leaving users without any estimated time for a fix
• This incident underlines the importance of always having a backup plan for you or your client’s advertising strategy: it's essential to diversify across different advertising platforms to minimize the impact of unexpected outages on any single platform
• If using Google Ads, monitor your accounts to ensure they are functioning as expected after the outage; check on any automated scripts or bidding strategies that might have been affected

• Simply put, to deliver the best possible user experience, a developer wants to serve high-quality images in the least amount of time possible; the tradeoff is that higher-quality images take more time to load
• To address this we can serve different image dimensions and qualities based on different viewport sizes
• There are two ways to achieve this: the <picture /> tag or the <img /> tag
• <picture /> uses any number of <source /> tags and one <img /> tag, allowing you to tell the browser exactly which image to load based on your specified conditions
• The only downside to <picture /> is that it takes a considerable amount of time and effort to refactor existing code that previously used the <img /> tag; in those cases, it might be better to continue using the <img /> tag but with an added srcset attribute
• The srcset attribute allows you to specify multiple image sources, but in this case the browser decides which is best to use, taking control out of the developer’s hands
• New projects can definitely benefit from the more flexible <picture /> tag, but for existing projects, adding a srcset attribute to <img /> tags already makes a significant improvement to image rendering

The popular web framework Astro has a big release out now, which includes several major updates:

• A new middleware API allows one to run code before or after a page is rendered and returned to the user; developers can use new hooks for authentication, redirects, header modification, and more
• “Hybrid” server side rendering allows you to mix interactive API endpoints and pages into a site while also keeping the overall project static and pre-rendered by default
• Custom client directives control how interactive UI components should load on your page, on a component-by-component basis
• A new config option (inlineStylesheets: “auto”) allows you to automatically inline small snippets of CSS into your HTML

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A new popover API is being introduced to web browsers in order to facilitate and streamline the use of popovers (think modals, menus, dialogs, etc.) in modern web applications.

• This API aims to remove the burden of setting up popover behavior and allows developers to focus on specific component logic
• Using the popover attribute on a given element will enable the following:
• Be aware that this API isn’t fully stable on all browsers; make sure to check its compatibility before trying to implement it in your own projects

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The Loop is written and edited by Hank Mason, John Kaufmann, Noah Gribbin, Victoria Lebel, Chris Breen, and Marie Stotz.

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