Ho ho ho,
it's Advent season and this is already the 20th(!) issue of WDRL.
Hopefully you're not stressed by Christmas already and have some spare time. I recommend to test your knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript by playing this Front-End Development Quiz. Takes you about 15 minutes but is pretty helpful to know what skills you may improve.
News
- Google Chrome supports Custom Elements in its next stable build
Tools
- Chrome people, install this extension to hide W3Schools from search results. Why?
z-indexrewriter.- Prune automatically tests code of GitHub Pull Requests and shows you the diff when an error occurs.
HTML
- Building for the Device agnostic Web.
- Anne van Kesteren wishes the browser to be the main part of an OS. This needs us to think more about device features, offline usage, and APIs.
- Coding Towards Accessibility. And don't forget, it's a myth that accessibility is only about blind people.
- HTML5 Browser Storage: the Past, Present and Future.
Performance Matters
- Choose your CDN name carefully to save bytes. 4Chan saves 46 terabytes per month due to that small fact.
- Microsoft shares the IE11 Prefetching and Preloading methods in this blog post. It shows how you and the browser can serve faster websites.
CSS
- VJing in a modern browser using CSS Animations, requestAnimationFrame, and the Audio API.
- While developing a Responsive Design optimizing it for all the smaller than Desktop devices, never forget about the larger screens.
- Animating
display: blockanddisplay: none. It's hacky, you should avoid that but let's you understand why it won't work with CSS. - Create textured text.
- Wohoa! This little script let's you target nearly all browser where you encounter a bug. Just set user agent classes.
JavaScript
- Here is a piece how you can improve your JavaScript knowledge easily.
- Measuring execution times with
console.time(). - enquire.js is a lightweight Media Query handler for JavaScript.
- Always wanted a search, sort, filter thing for your lists and tables? There's now list.js to your service.
Things on the Server that affect the Front-End
- Don’t mess with the Web. Practice Safe Script by Alex Sexton.
- On 24ways this article is about URL Rewriting for the Fearful. It explains the basics and advanced cool things you can rewrite using a server configuration file.
- Related to that, here is a
.htaccesssnippet page. - And finally, Peter Müller currently develops a CSP auto generator. If you can, contribute to it.
- Homebrew now supports Brewfiles.
- Google shared some numbers about how SPDY2 and HTTP/2 affect website performance.
Be inspired by…
- Jeremy Keith who transcripted his talk "The Power Of Simplicity" from the border:none conference.
- Dudley Storey who wants to thank all the underrated developers who created things that we use every day for our websites but often forget about (like Apache).
- John. He has important things to say—it's about the other web we lost.
Finally, you can now nominate people, tools and projects for the 2014 netwards: thenetawards.com – great to see new categories this year.
If you like this issue and are able to support this list, please consider leaving a gratipay.
Cheers!
Anselm