Hey,
it's (Black) Friday and it's already time again for another Reading List. I hope all of you who celebrated Thanksgiving had a great and enjoyable time yesterday.
News
- Chrome Canary loads Webfonts drastically faster now.
- Twitter enabled forward secrecy for all traffic – nice move!
- Creative Commons 4.0 licenses are out and they're better than ever.
- The new Smashing Magazine Book 4 has been published. I had a chance to read it already and can only say: Buy it!
- Aral Balkan announced IndiePhone today, part of his indie web campaign.
Tools
- Jordan Moore shares A Concept for a better web design tool
- Deploying Private Repos Automatically with GitHub is not hard.
- Taskwarrior let's you manage your tasks in your command line.
- pa11y.org is a tool for automated accessibility testing.
- A great Overview of Synchronized cross-device testing by Addy Osmani.
Web Performance
- A practical guide to web resource caching
- The Top 5 Performance improvements list by Guy Podjarny.
- Steve Souders on "Performance and Custom Elements"
HTML
- Responsive Images are it again: Kornel Lesinski has put an alternative, improved
<picture>specification into the race. This is a likely to be implemented proposal. - WCAG is discussing changes to
for what we considered for
element and its accessibility. - While we're at accessibility: Karl Groves tested alternative texts on img elements. The results are (unfortunately) not as one would expect.
CSS
- With Chrome 32 you will be able to use CSS
object-fit. Still, a lot of browsers are not supported. Here is a plain JS object-fit-polyfill that enables the method down to IE8. Also, I wrote a little post on that. - Understand how Sass @extend works.
- Enable 60fps scrolling with pointer events. It's kind of hacky but shows that Pointer Events are just great!
- Modernizr has now a
:targetselector test.
JavaScript
- Do you know and use the
strictmode? If not read the explanation here. - If you don't want to have AMD code in your production code anymore, you can clean it with this tool.
- Life of JavaScript is the source for all types of awesome resources available for JavaScript. This includes books, presentations, videos, feeds, sites, libraries, frameworks and tools.
- RegExplained by Lea Verou is a great tool to live-visualize regular expression patterns.
- eq.js enables you to use element queries.
- waitress.js is a lean JS library (it's actually not really more a function) that makes waiting on a collection of async calls less painful.
- If you use Brackets as code editor you might be interested in Theseus, a pretty darn cool JavaScript debugger.
Be inspired by…
- Colin Nederkoorn who transitioned its company from a normal bureau to a remote office and wrote about it. Surely this is not the right way for everybody but maybe it inspires you.
- Leo Babauta who gives you an advice how to Find Focus again.
- Jordan Moore (Yes, 2nd link to him in this list!) who shares his design principles which all of you designers should follow.
- Oli Studholme who gives you advice how to get your dream job.
If you like this issue and are able to support this list, please consider leaving a gratipay.
Cheers!
Anselm