Hey,
after two weeks of vacation (I actually worked but not on the Computer but with wood) I’m back to work now and here’s what happened the last weeks in web development and what is discussed currently in our community. Enjoy it!
News
- Manuel Rego Casasnovas on recent changes on CSS Grid Layout in percentages and indefinite height in the Google Chrome browser.
- Anyone who isn’t an expert on the internet would be hard-pressed to explain how tracking on the internet actually works. That’s why Firefox now changes their default settings and enforces tracking blocking in their browser by default.
- PHP7.3 is coming soon and brings new Heredoc and Nowdoc syntax, trailing commas in function calls,
is_countable(),array_key_first(),array_key_last()and Argon2 password hash enhancements.
Generic
- As Alexa, Cortana, Siri, and even customer support chat bots become the norm, we have to start carefully considering not only how our content looks but how it could sound. We can—and should—use HTML and ARIA to make our content structured, sensible, and most importantly, meaningful.
Security
- Nightwatch Cybersecurity publicized a security vulnerability in Android that expose information about the user’s device to all applications running on the device. This seems to include the WiFi network name, BSSID, local IP addresses, DNS server information and the MAC address—all in all quite a lot of private information that allows people to track individual Android devices. Unfortunately, all Android OS versions (except Android P / 9 where a fix was provided) including forks seem to be affected with no plan to fix older versions.
Web Performance
- Ben Schwarz shares new approaches to native lazy load for the web that we could get soon.
Accessibility
JavaScript
- Babel 7 is out and is a big release. It’s faster, has more options and supports JSX Fragments, and TypeScript.
- Auto-resizing
<textarea>s is a very useful way to improve the user experience for people writing content on your service. I wrote a blog post how to auto-resize form elements with a short ECMAScript 6 class.
CSS
- Sara Soueidan on what made her switch from defining CSS colors as HEX or RGB to HSL and what the benefits are.
- With the web’s growth comes new features to better accommodate its new form factors and use cases. One feature I’m excited about is the
color-adjustproperty, proposed in CSS Color Module Level 4. It is an acknowledgement that the web will continue to show up on devices that have less-than-stellar displays.
Go beyond…
- An interesting discussion was raised this week by a very well-known Open Source contributor who tried to change the license of one of their projects in order to prevent companies who support the U.S. ICE institution from using their software. The change was quickly reverted after it was revealed that the change wasn’t legally valid / enforcable. However, the whole topic that comes up way more often lately shows that more and more people think about the impact of their work. They don’t want it to be used for bad, but for good. And while the idea of open, non-restricted source is desirable it’s only if people use it to support human rights and for improving lives. I’m curious about new solutions to ensure this, maybe we’ll see more terms of service for open source projects soon (which would then be legally binding but may prevent free open source projects from using the project).
Anselm