Ciao!
Christmas is coming nearer and nearer but this doesn't stop us from learning, right? In fact, this is the time where most cool tutorials are written—it's advent calendar time.
News
- Use the new
@at-rootin Sass 3.3 to write nested but don't produce nested selectors. Cool for BEM / OOCSS selector naming style. - Firefox: VP9 Video Decoder has been implemented.
- Firefox: Support for OS X Web Notifications has been implemented.
- The MDN (Mozilla Developer Network) has been redesigned and improved.
- The Noun Project now has an API for their icons. But it's invite only right now and will need to be paid monthly.
- Chrome Apps are now available for Mac OS X users, too.
Tools
- Browser Sync is a Grunt tool that synchronizes your webpage view on all your devices.
- Really useful for Mac users: A list of WebDev Quick Look PlugIns by Sindre Sorhus.
- Grunt is not weird and hard.
- If you use GruntJS you should read this article about a modular, shared Grunt Configuration.
- This article has some useful Command Line One-Liners for you.
- What if you could use Chrome DevTools with Firefox?, asks Kenneth Auchenberg and provides a cool demo of his newly founded project remotedebug.org.
- An introduction of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment.
- Back up your Git repositories from a remote server. A simple shell script by Tobias Tom.
Design
- Why a View Mode Approach to Responsive Web Design makes actually much sense.
- Guy Podjarny checked the real world-wide adption of Responsive Webdesign and shares some interesting results. Nearly half of all websites use a mobile-redirect, and even on desktop 27% redirect their users on first request.
HTML
Performance Matters
- Surely WebP, JPEG-XR both are cool new image formats that can save you a lot of bytes. But reading this article you can see the problem of them: Handling the conversion to these formats is super complex and with varying (lossy) quality settings it's super hard to automate conversion. I hope tools like Photoshop implement a better way unifying the experience soon.
- Many of you wish for a detection of connection speed. This thread sums up greatly why it's not useful for most use-cases like Responsive Images. By the way, reading Mailing List Archives is much nicer with MLReader.
- Steve Souders wrote a wishlist for web performance tools and improvements.
CSS
- iOS has this dirty zooming behavior in some cases when a user focuses a form element. It's now clear how you can prevent that without JavaScript: Set font-size to at least 16px.
- Bulletproof E-Mail Buttons.
- Bulletproof E-Mail Backgrounds.
- We love Icon Fonts.
JavaScript
- 24ways advent calender has a great article to introduce you to Animating Vectors with SVG.
- Cody Lindley provides his JavaScript Enlightment book for free.
- He also provides his DOM Enlightment book for free. Isn’t he awesome?
Be inspired by…
- Jeffrey Zeldman who encourages everyone here to keep blogging in the free world.
- Aral Balkan who created a parody of reformgovernmentsurveillance.com (which actually when you try to post on twitter results in this. Kinda funny, right? ) and with a decent humour explains you what's going on with Google, Apple, Facebook, and all the other social media companies.
Ciao!
Anselm