Hey,
the end of the year is near and I already see several round-up posts. I often wonder why they think the year is over already—there are still some weeks ahead and I expect a lot more things to happen in this time. But an interesting round-up indeed is thewebindex.org which is the world’s first measure of the World Wide Web’s contribution to social, economic and political progress in countries across the world. And it shows great numbers so let’s hope the impact is real and can improve the life of each individuum on our globe.
Web-related it’s fun to read the story how the web evolved in the past 9 years, only by going through the articles of the 24ways calendar which is in its 10th edition this year already. And while it started with articles on how to create striped tables with JavaScript and avoiding hacks for IE we now face mostly completely different problems like complexity of CSS, tooling, over-tooling. Read about the ways we’ve changed.
News
- The IE team shared a lot of good news this week: First they announced that
srcsetis in development now (oh and not to forget,<main>-support) and while this doesn’t includepicturesupport directly it’s the base for it and likely it will follow as well. Secondly, the announced the redesign of the old (new) developer tools. F12 will now look more streamlined and similar to all the others while keeping their own Windows styling. - Firefox 34 has
.matches()if an element would be selected by a selector string,font-kerning,font-synthesisand more. - GitHub added syntax highlighting in diff mode which is really useful.
- BitTorrent just announced an early first alpha version of their new torrent based browser.
Work life
- Serena Ngai shares how at Shopify they handle their remote process and what you need to care about not being on site.
Concepts & Design
- Jeremy Keith explains why progressive enhancement is not a technique but a way of thinking and how to properly approach it.
Generic / Tools
- A good answer of the accessibility implications and progressive enhancement of using a JavaScript framework like AngularJS or React.
- This project by xpheres is an attempt of an intelligent / analytical translator. This means the translator tries to get the relation of words, takes grammar and syntax into account and then suggests a translation.
- The issues of our Grunt or Gulp toolchain explained by Keith Cirkel.
- But you definitely should have a solid deployment structure. Rachel Andrew shares some possibilities and procedures.
Web Performance
- The problem with our ‘first-world’ design and development approach. This article shares some insight and issues that one experience in nowadays web when not having a 3G+ connection. To be honest, this happens all the time if you’re not in a larger city or on the move.
- Web Performance is not only about numbers, as Tim Kadlec already has explained very well. But Tammy Everts takes it a bit further and explains why website performance is about neuroscience.
- An interesting article on the PerfPlanet advent calendar is Why Images are King and need special attention in your organization regarding its optimization.
- As HTTP/2 is coming quickly you want to be prepared with your front-end stack. Here’s what you need to know.
- Do you know about the
prefetchattribute? Well, Chrome even recognizes it when injected dynamically and here’s how Google search uses it.
JavaScript
- Boom. Jake Archibald published a big new thing: The Offline Cookbook. Oh yeah, it’s free and on his website.
- In Chrome 39 you can control the Web Animation Playback state. You can see a few simple examples how to use it in this article.
- While the URL is pretty cool, this little JavaScript library called gator.js might also come in handy if you’re dealing with a lot of events and don’t want to use jQuery.
- Ever needed to integrate more than one Google Maps on one page? Then this lazyload plugin is the choice to go.
Go beyond…
- Laura Kalbag reflects her year on the pastry box and tells about the hard decisions for what audience to write, which topics to target and how uncomfortable it is to discuss about politics or religion. Very good read about ethics, self-defense and politeness.
- There’s absolutely “no good reason why working on open standards should be any less convenient and friendly than working on open source”—Robin Berjon
- I think sometimes everyone of us is struggling with the human being and society with so many issues we’re constantly reading in newspapers. But please keep in mind this phrase and remember when you struggle again: “The world isn’t getting worse. Your awareness of the world is getting larger. That’s good, if you do something about the problems you see.”—Christian Gloddy
And that’s it again for this week. If you liked the content, please consider support by using Flattr or gratipay me or share this resource with other people. Learn more about the costs of the project here. It’s available via E-Mail, RSS and online.
Thanks and all the best,
Anselm