Hey,
I’ve been playing around with CSS Grids today quite a lot again and must say that, despite I still don’t know everything, it’s amazing. If you have grid lists on a website, it’s so easy to let it do the right thing, and to alter columns with media queries. I can’t really imaging how it was when Flexbox was not yet available in browsers to adapt grids to various device sizes. Flexbox made a lot of things much easier but dealing with gaps between items, for example, or specifying different sizes is still quite an effort without the super handy grid-gap, grid-template properties, the repeat() function and the fr-unit. All these little helpers now offer us a convenient way to write lean code. And since this week, Microsoft Edge supports the Grid module as well in its stable version.
News
- Chrome 62 landed this week and brings important updates to the Network Information API to reflect the actualy connection type even when tethering, support for OpenType Variable Fonts, and Media Capture from DOM elements. Notably, Chrome 62 on iOS got support for the Payment Request API which is interesting because the iOS WebKit doesn’t support this yet (in stable channel). It seems that they used a custom extension to add support for this and it might get interesting in what else could be supported via this way.
- This week’s Safari Technology Preview 42 brings
font-displayloading behaviors, and<link rel=preconnect>support. - With the new Windows 10 fall update, Edge 16 is pushed to customers and brings us full CSS Grid support,
object-fitandobject-position, the Payment Request API, Service Worker preview behind flags, and Motion Controllers in WebVR.
UI/UX
- Adobe announced the first stable version of XD, their screen design tool at this year’s MAX conference. Besides a lot of smaller improvements, the tools now has sharing support, and will support third-party tools like Zeplin and Sympli as first-class integrations. Apart from that, Adobe provided major updates for nearly all of their software products during the event.
- A big announcement was made by InVision this week: They’re going to bring a new tool called “Studio” to the market in January and now invite beta testers to preview the new screen design tool.
Security
- This weeek, the “KRACK”-attack went through media. It’s effectively breaking WPA2 encryption on most WiFi hardware. But vendors aren’t sleeping, some already updated their systems and offer software updates for the devices which you should patch as soon as possible. One thing to note here is that websites that use HSTS preloading aren’t affected by the issue, which reminds us that we should consider adding this header to our websites.
Privacy
- We know targeted ads can be a bit frightening sometimes when they show up and are incredibly accurate. With mobile ads, it’s even worse: Andy Greenberg wrote up a study that shows that it takes only USD1000 to track someone’s location using mobile ads.
JavaScript
- GitHub open sourced their own client-side accessibility error scanner. It’s basically a JavaScript module that you import into your codebase and that then reports back basic issues such as images without alt-attribute, links without labels or similar accessibility errors.
Anselm