Hey,
Wow, time is really flying. I remember the 100th edition of my Web Development Reading List still very well. Since then, another hundred editions have appeared, and the Evergreen List has been introduced. At least most of my readers have enjoyed what I write and the number of subscribers is still growing constantly, with over 17k subscribers to the newsletter. So now it’s time to thank you for being part of the 200th edition, for all your support, your donations, your spreading-the-word, your feedback. I’m humbled by the response and acceptance of this project and feel honored that you value it so much!
This week brings us interesting content: Big news is that Facebook has ended their weird licensing for React and is now available under full MIT license. If you’re doing user authentification with PHP, you might be interested in PHP7.2 coming later that brings Argon2 support and there have been two interesting privacy-related discoveries on Tinder.
News
- React 16 is out now. It has a rewritten core, returns fragments and strings (so no more useless
span-elements), better error handling, custom DOM attributes, and has a 30% smaller footprint now. Even better, React 16 (and 15.6.2) is now available under a full MIT license, ending the endless debate about the previously used patent-clause copyright license.
Tooling
- Stefan Judis shares a quick way to take pretty window screenshots on macOS.
Security
- With PHP7.2 coming in November this year, the libsodium extension will be available in PHP. This means we finally will have a relatively easy way to use the Argon2 algorithm for hashing user passwords. Here’s how you can do that.
Privacy
- Judith Duportail askes the dating platform Tinder for her data and got back more than 800 pages filled with very personal details and a lot more than she’d remembered. Tinder, of course, is just an example here and you could easily take most of your apps on the phone and get the same or more personal data from their collections.
- Detectify cares about privacy. That’s why they now built a Chrome extension that let’s you stalk your Facebook friends if you use Tinder. The privacy leaks here allow users to identify another user’s location and more.
Web Performance
- Ebay shares how they approach font loading on their site, using system fonts, web fonts, and a combination of localStorage, FontFaceSet APIs and the Font Face Observer utility. Noticeably, they also point out the trade-offs which is cool because we can then choose our own path for our projects.
HTML & SVG
- Eduardo Bouças shares how we can use SVG’s
clip-pathto changes a logo’s color on scroll.
Accessibility
- Ian Devlin shares how at Trivago they handle accessibility. It’s especially interesting as they explain the internal challenges, how to increase awareness, and then what they did, do and try to achieve in the future.
CSS
- Mozilla built a CSS Grid playground that helps you understand and build CSS Grid layouts.
Work & Life
- Jonathan Golden shares what they learned at scaling Airbnb. A good company management, goal finding and work-optimizing article.
Anselm