Hey,
welcome to another edition of my newsletter. Please note that for the next two weeks I’ll be on vacation and not writing a list but before that, I found quite a couple of very good articles and resources worth reading this week.
Eric Meyer has published an article this week, elaborating the problems of the effort to make the web HTTPS only—where he reveals that developing countries suffer a lot from this development as they often have bad internet connections and due to the encryption, they now experience more website errors than previously. Ben Werdmüller jumped in and published his article “Stop building for San Francisco” in which he points out one of the biggest problems we have as developers: We use priviledged hardware and infrastructure. We build experiences using the latest iPhones, Macbooks with Gigabit or fast 4G connections but never consider that most people we’re building for use far less equipped devices and infrastructures. And while it’s a great idea to make the web more secure, we should always keep in mind who this might impact, who will not be able to access your site anymore.
News
- TypeScript 3.0 was released, including a couple of convenient language features and fixes.
- Client Hints are an amazing feature and have been implemented since quite a while already in Chrome. With Chrome 67, the functionality of Client Hints for responsive images changed to improve privacy and Colin Bendell explains the differences along with very useful information why Client Hints are so useful for performance.
- Developers have been asking a lot about Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) and how to debug websites with it enabled, especially since it is enabled by default in Safari. Now the WebKit team shares the ITP Debug Mode which gives you a lot more flexibility and tools to track down issues with this mode.
- Very soon, in October, most browsers will distrust Symantec TLS certificates entirely, and thus, block accessing websites that still use such certificates. Please update your certificate if you haven’t yet.
Generic
- If you have an Open Source project or are building a new one, you have to decide which license it should use. Now there’s a new option, the Just World License. It’s for developers that agree in general with the principles of open source software, but are uncomfortable with their software being used as part of efforts to destroy lives, our environment and our future.
- Eric Meyer has published an article this week, elaborating the problems of the effort to make the web HTTPS only—where he reveals that developing countries suffer a lot from this development as they often have bad internet connections and due to the encryption, they now experience more website errors than previously. Ben Werdmüller jumped in and published his article “Stop building for San Francisco” in which he points out one of the biggest problems we have as developers: We use priviledged hardware and infrastructure. We build experiences using the latest iPhones, Macbooks with Gigabit or fast 4G connections but never consider that most people we’re building for use far less equipped devices and infrastructures. And while it’s a great idea to make the web more secure, we should always keep in mind who this might impact, who will not be able to access your site anymore.
Tooling
- Prashant Palikhe wrote a long story about the art of debugging with Chrome’s Developer Tools, which I can highly recommend as it’s a very complete reference to getting to know the developer tools of a browser. If you use another browser, that’s not a big problem as most tools are quite similar.
Security
- And another new Observer is around now: The ReportingObserver API lets you know when your site uses a deprecated API or runs into a browser intervention and is available in Chrome 69 so far. You could easily use this to send such errors that previously were only available in the Console to your backend or error handling service.
Accessibility
- Dave Rupert shares A11Y Nutrition Cards, a project that attempts to digest and simplify the accessibility expectations when it comes to component authoring.
- Skip links are quite common accessibility features. Hampus Sethfors now wrote an article on why many of the links are still broken and how to fix them properly.
JavaScript
- Addy Osmani researched the cost of JavaScript in 2018 and wrote a summary article, sharing evidence that every byte of JavaScript is still the most expensive resource we can send to mobile phones because it can delay interactivity in large ways. This is increasingly becoming a problem with not so capable phones that are widely used outside the tech industry.
CSS
- Max Böck explored a few techniques using CSS Grid to build the layouts of tomorrow with relatively simple code.
Work & Life
- Paris Marx on why lifestyle entrepreneurs ignore communities at home and abroad and digital nomads are not the future, according to him. He shares why location independence is only possible because of communication infrastructures built with public funds and why it’s not fair to abuse it.
Go beyond…
- Jeremy Nagel lets us all think about the impact we do when we publish open source code: As developers we tend to think that this is an amazing move but then we make our source code available to bad players in the world as well — to coal miners, to pollution-contributing companies, to those who use humans to get rich while mistreating them, to those who rip you off indirectly, to people who make money and don’t give you anything back by using your free, open source code. It’s not that you can’t do anything about it but to do so, you have to be aware of these issues and apply a better license or add a dedicated statement to your code. Want an example? Philip Morris International’s website uses jQuery and Bootstrap, a company that contributes to people getting cancer. Do you want to be attributed this way with your software?
Anselm