WDRL 209 from 15.12.2017

Hey,

Today I read an article about the current young work-generation that was eye-opening. It’s hard to grasp words like “Millenials” and there’s much talk about specific issues they face but it’s not easy for many of us to understand the fundamental issues, regardless whether you’re older or younger than me (I qualify under the Millenial generation). But the quite long but entertaining and super informative article by Michael Hobbes revealed a lot to me. Not only that I can now understand and even relate to quite some of these facts outlined there but also why it’s so hard to understand how different age-groups form society and migth not see what they’re doing to other people’s lives by making a decision for their own lives.

We can relate to that in many aspects. When building web projects, we make a decision as developer, as entrepreneur, as marketing strategist, as support staff. We often base our decision on what is best for us, not thinking about how this decision affects other people. By not building accessible websites we excluse millions of users, by implementing better analytics events and libraries to understand users better, we give data of our users to third-parties, putting the lives of some of them at risk. It sometimes seems impossible to make a decision that is right, and we feel so overwhelmed by the fact that we can’t do the right thing that we dismiss all the reasonable, all the well formed decisions and focus solely on what’s best for ourselves. We can be smarter—and while we probably won’t be able to do everything right—we can still do small steps better and reasonably think about what we can do instead of getting overwhelmed. It’s not easy, but maybe can be something we want to incorporate for our next year’s resolution?

News

• This week, a big announcement regarding the WHATWG has been made: The organizations behind the four major integrated browser engines — Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla — have developed an Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Policy and governance structure for the WHATWG. This will hopefully result in a more living standard that provides a more useful resource.

Generic

• If you only used one npm package out there, chances are high that you’re relying on Sindre Sorhus’ work. With over 1100 packages that he actively maintains, and many more popular open source JavaScript libraries, his work the foundation for many libraries, frameworks, tools and projects out there. He works full-time for these projects and now you can give back to him by supporting him with some money.

UI/UX

• With Spectral, there’s a new screen-first serif typeface available under an open source license.

Tooling

• Francesco Schwarz built a new tool to visualize your CSS’ specificity and it’s very helpful to analyze some misconceptions in your structure or can identify modules that should be refactored.

Security

• 4iQ, an identity safeguarding company, has found a leaked database containing 1.4 billion clear text credentials in the Dark Web. It’s probably the biggest available, known resource yet and shows the importance of using unique passwords for each service and for services to protect their users from using leaked passwords.
• HSTS is a method to tell a browser to only connect to certain hostnames via the secure HTTPS protocol. However, the method how this is implemented into browsers currently, is pretty much broken, as researches prominently show in their article and Black Hat presentation. As browsers maintain a single source of truth containing these prefetch rules and this list getting bigger and bigger and the disc usage on computers for browsers is and should be limited, the system can be hacked quite easily.

Accessibility

• This is Marcy Sutton taking on the value of writing automated tests for accessibility and why having such doesn’t mean we mustn’t do manual accessibility work anymore but can concentrate on the complex tasks while easy fixes are reported and done by the automated tests.

CSS

• Jonathan Snook explains how we can build a calendar layout with CSS Grid.
• With the upcoming CSS Selectors Level 4 specification, we will get an :is pseudo selector similar to :matches but without increasing the specificity—a so far common issue with modern useful pseudo selector filters.

Work & Life

• Dan Kim shares why he thinks it’s time for recurring meetings to end in order to work together in ahuman way that doesn’t waste time but focuses on important things that need to be discussed. A plea to think reasonable about recurring meetings and the impact they create for attendees.

Go beyond…

• The people from the great Do Lectures series have shared 100 books of 2017 they recommend us to read. And while I won’t be able to read all the hundred books, there are some great tips in the list which qualify as a nice end-of-year read.
• In the past months I’ve read more and more articles from people who work or have worked for social media companies and now talk about how such services are contributing massively to rip apart our society. This is another one showing the problem of misinformation, AI-influenced aggregated “timelines” that only make things worse instead of unifying society and helping people. While there is much value in social media, there’s a constantly rising underlying issue in most big services: In strive for more revenue and new features, these services try to match interests to people and fail horribly because they match the interests quite good instead of providing eye-opening, neutral and objective content to users that would make them reflect their views and interests.

Anselm