Hey,
this week was definitely full of big news and great articles. While I started the year attending the beyondtellerrand conference and a11y club in Munich and got to learn a lot about design, performance, art, and many other things we also discussed the topic around Mozilla’s HTTPS announcement (see News section) and talked about doing purposeful work, and how to be better at balancing life and work—a topic that I talk a lot about but recently have people asking me questions about it and see an increased interest by other people. But now let’s go straight to the news:
News
- This week also brings us news from Google’s web search team: Starting July 2018, the well known Pagespeed tool will become a ranking factor for mobile searches. This marks a point in history as it basically means that finally a lot more webstandards and best practices are enforced by this change and leads to better web performance and better adoption of web standards and also accessibility features.
- The announcement with the highest impact (probably this year) comes from Mozilla: Starting immediately, Firefox will require HTTPS for all new features built into the browser from now on. So this means not only privacy or security relevant information such as Geolocation API require HTTPS to work but for example the next CSS property or a new JavaScript feature will only be usable if a site is served via HTTPS. Google Chrome made a similar announcement last year, but the team hasn’t clarified when they will do this. The impact, as you can imagine is quite big, and while it might lead to an even faster adoption of HTTPS, there’s also a risk that new features are not adopted by developers as fast anymore. As an effect of this change, we might temporarily see even more “optimized for Chrome” messages on websites until this browser follows the same strategy. One thing at least is for sure: This week marks a quite important point in the history of the web—no matter what the feedback will be, it’ll definitely be interesting and change the way we build all our websites.
Security
- J.C. Jones and Tim Taubert explain how we can use the Web Authentification API to implement hardware token-based 2-factor authentification and use it in browsers that support this API already.
Web Performance
- The folks from WebKit announced Speedometer 2.0 this week: Their benchmark tool for modern web app responsiveness, revamped and improved to match today’s standards.
CSS
- Peter Mouland explains a series of real world problems we can solve with CSS Grid and Flexbox easily these days.
display: contentsis a rather new CSS display property value and Manuel Rego Casasnovas has written a summary of how we can make use of the new feature and when it’s a great idea to do so.- Keith J Grant shares how we can use the new
<dialog>element introduced in HTML5.2 in our code to show modals on websites.
Work & Life
- Dan Mall tells us some insights on how he learned to scope work. This is a very useful skill whether you’re a freelancer or employee in order to make an estimation of costs and time and afterwards being able to match it so I can only recommend to read this article.
Go beyond…
- It’s 12 years from now on when, according to the newest plans of the European Union, we will not have a need to produce new plastic materials anymore but will be able to recycle and reuse existing packaging. This bold plan follows China’s directive to disallow the import of foreign recyclable material which was a profitable business and solved the plastic issue for the EU and other countries for quite some time. Now it’s time to find solutions on our own, recycle in the same country and not loading the problem off to other countries. I’m happy about this plans and can only hope that we can match the timeframe and make the world a still enjoyable place to live in the future.
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