Hey,
Hello again! With this edition, the Web Development Reading List will not be published on Smashing Magazine anymore. Don’t worry, I’ll continue publishing this resource and am grateful for everyone who supports my ongoing work. From now on, I’ll publish a monthly summary on Smashing Magazine containing the most important links of a past month.
This week I found a lot of great articles for you. While we still deal with simple security issues in our software, researchers can now inject malware into DNA that infects computers when the sequence is parsed. But thanks to great people in our industry we’re now also able to do deep learning with JavaScript, have immutable arrays and objects in just 33 lines or cache POST requests for offline users. Happy reading!
News
- Edward Thomson shares why you should upgrade your git installation to 2.14.1 to fix vulnerabilities.
- Microsoft will change their Edge rendering engine by making the rendering engine independent of and asynchronous to the main thread.
- This week, Opera announced the end of Opera Max, their data-saving browser product. The service will still stay active for a while but probably not for too long.
UI/UX
- The Facebook design team now shares a Sketch template full of design elements found in macOS. And if you look for iOS resources, their iOS Resources will help you out.
Tooling
- Puppeteer is a Node.js library providing an API to control headless Chrome. It can also be configured to use full (non-headless) Chrome.
Security
- Researchers seem to have real fun in our current times. Biohackers have now found a way to encode malware into a strand of DNA, so that once the gene sequencer analyzing the DNA will get infected.
- Pavel Durov shares why at Telegram, they don’t use end-to-end encryption by default and why they want to handle the case different to what most messengers do. It’s an interesting point of view that gives more context on why Telegram differs from Signal and Whatsapp and why there’s probably a reason for it.
Web Performance
- Andreya Grzegorzewski shares how we can use the Cache API to do offline POST requests in Progressive Web Apps. This super cool trick allows us to queue POST requests, such as a form submission/data upload, cache it and once the user is back online, send it to the server.
HTML & SVG
- If you want to use
<details>/<summary>elements together withremfont-sizevalues on your site, be aware that there’s a bug in Safari that renders parts of a website useless with that CSS combination. After debugging it and tracking it down, I finally wrote the case up so there’s a reference now.
Accessibility
- Eva Ferreira shares ten guidelines to improve your web accessibility, starting with reliance on colors, proper markup and other tips.
JavaScript
- deeplearn.js is a a hardware-accelerated machine intelligence library for the web. You can build and train neural networks in your browser with it, or play color sequences, or detect objects in images.
- flatpickr is a dependency-free lightweight and powerful datetime picker.
- Peter Kröner shares how he achieved immutable arrays and objects in JavaScript in only 33 lines (German article, automatically translated) without any library with ECMAScript Proxies.
CSS
- This nice Codepen experiment by Giana shows that you can create beautiful directionally aware hover effects with only CSS.
Work & Life
- Christian Heilmann on why he wants to take a break and change his work life to focus on coaching others and real production instead of showing attendance at too many conferences. This article is about going on vacation without taking any computer, and why Christian wants to focus on teaching other developers as in the old times again.
Go beyond…
- Darius Foroux on why you should spend less time in your head and exercise pragmatism. On mastering your mind and realizing that most of our thoughts cannot make it into practice.
- Bernadette Jiwa on why meaning is a competitive advantage in which she tells us the story of an older generation to show how fortunate we are that we can pursue our passion in our work, and why we’re still often not able to appreciate this fact.
Anselm