Comment by Tommy Hodgins on "What have you learnt in the last six months?"

JavaScript

Built my first CLI tool with Node: eqcss-parse (compile EQCSS syntax to JavaScript objects)
Wrote my first plugins using ES6: CSSplus (using the newer JavaScript syntax)

Since the start of 2017 I've gone from having 1 package on NPM to 3, and pushing updates more frequently :D I have participated in JS1K already, and I'm hoping I can find some teammates for building a JS13K entry this summer!

CSS

Have been reading the CSS specs every day
Discovered how to write better CSS polyfills using the CSSOM
Published 5 CSS plugins so far:
- aspect-ratio property for CSS
- cursor position and screen related variables
- scroll position and related variables for elements
- a “selector resolver”
- exposing various element properties as CSS variables

Since the start of 2017 I've gone from having 2 CSS Reprocessors on Github, to having 7, and I have a plugin template that makes it so I can draft up a new idea in ~30 minutes now and test it out, like this recent 'Tabby' brainstorm about setting tabindex="" from CSS.

As for Codepen (and my yearly goals): we're 150 days into 2017 and I've created 136 pens so far this year, so I'm falling behind my ‘1 pen/day’ goal, but not so far behind that I couldn't catch up ;)

XPath

learned how to write XPath selectors
discovered ways to select elements with XPath easier than JS or CSS
built an XPath helper function to return XPath results as an array of nodes (similar to querySelectorAll)

Prior to 2017 I didn't know any XPath at all, so learning about the various functions it has and how those can be used to navigate the DOM is all new to me :D

uhh, just last week, I had to learn how to write some XPath selectors. They are a pain and I hate XML :D

You can use XPath in HTML as well! I'm interested in using XPath selectors to reach things that are really awkward to reach using JavaScript with something like document.querySelectorAll() and CSS selectors, not so much using them to transform the content of XML documents as it sounds like you're talking about :)

XPath is pretty cool though, it can find things based on proximity (closest), as well as go up the DOM tree (select parent nodes as easily as child nodes). These are things CSS is designed not to do :D

I love your xpathquery function, why not add xpathqueryall and then be completely like querySelector and querySelectorAll?

Hi Chaim Lando, the little helper function I wrote always returns an array of nodes matching the XPath selector, so you can think of it more like document.querySelectorAll all the time, even if only one node is being returned :D

Yesterday I wrote an experimental plugin that lets you write XPath selectors inside CSS, and the plugin uses something like this helper function inside to find elements to apply the CSS rule to:

XPath is a ton of fun, I have no idea why more people aren't using it with HTML

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