Hey,
I’m very excited to go to my first conference of the year next week and already curious what I’ll take away this time. This week I stumbled over a variety of articles that subject the user experience of a website and gained a lot of new ideas on how we all can build nicer, better working products by applying very simple approaches.
News
- This week, the W3C announced that HTML 5.2 is done now and removes the web’s plugin system from the spec, changes the definition of the
<main>element, allowsstyleelements to be set insidebody, and a couple of other things. - In order to reduce typosquatting of packages, the npm registry not does not allow any similar namings for your package anymore if there’s an existing package already. In effect, this is an active push and encouragement to make people use their user scope for publishing packages.
UI/UX
- Anna Monus explains how we can use variable fonts on the web and shares some neat examples how useful they can be.
- Phil Nash shares why permissions on the web suck. Bringing the issues of how they’re (mis)used by sites and missing information together, he elaborates what would be necessary to make notifications a great idea on the web.
- Matthias Ott on the topic of creating great web workflows with prototyping instead of going with the illusion of control by using tools that don’t reflect how the web and websites work in reality.
- I wrote an article sharing my thoughts on the often overused and misinterpreted term “Ethical Design” and explain why the underlying premise is going to be a quite important thing this year.
Security
- David Gilbertson shares a (not so) true story which is pretty alarming if you think about the possibility that this could be real. He shares how to obtain credit card numbers, passwords and other personal data from any site out there by providing an open source package that seems useful to other people.
- I quite like the way the folks from WebKit write blog posts to explain certain changes to the browser engine. This time, they share what Spectre and Meltdown mean for WebKit, why the browser is affected by them and what they change in order to try to mitigate the risk of an attack.
JavaScript
- Bill Sourour shares his late appreciation of something he was told quite some time ago. Sometimes it’s better to code things upfront, at design time and not at runtime. Under the premises of building scalable solutions we often tend to build things as flexible as they can be, resulting in a lot of runtime calculations. However, the alphabet for example won’t change so there’s no point in not hardcoding the array for it but instead looping through it at runtime.
- Scrollama is a modern and lightweight JavaScript library for scrollytelling using IntersectionObserver in favor of scroll events.
CSS
- Patrick Brosset demystifies CSS alignment, especially for Flexbox and Grid and provides a nice look-up alignment cheat sheet for CSS.
Go beyond…
- The folks from Information Architects explain why we’re most vulnerable for distraction when we should really focus and what we can do about it.
If you wonder what happened to your recurring donation you set up, I need to inform you that the provider has ended the service to the end of 2017 and I yet have no replacement. I’d love if you use the one time donation PayPal button for now until I have come up with a new solution that suits everyone.
Anselm