Hey,
I’ve been pretty busy this week and work got me full time. This reading list is a bit late but this gave me the time to incorporate even more interesting stuff so you will have something to read over the Sunday or the next week.
By chance, I stumbled over an important article on zdnet which made me listen up a few days ago. Mozilla as we know is dependent of Google’s funding but now they’re planning to integrate ads into their ‘New Tab’ page (and who knows where else) to fight on that dependency.
I think it is important that a company like Mozilla who is fighting for the open web and living this purpose is getting full support from the community.
It is time to start using an independent browser like Firefox and also donating to the company who helps you earn your money.
Oh and by the way, someone researched and found out that it’d cost as as low as $0.55 per month to finance Twitter. It’s time we start to pay for our independence.
But now to the web development links of the past week:
News
- Firefox DevTools in v29 got a major design cleanup with a bright color scheme and many new features like network monitor charts, copy as DataURI, CSS transform quick previews, autocompletion in style propery editor, and better debugger and console handling.
- Blink (means Chrome and Opera) will now ensure that a user is able to paste passwords into input form fields. Therefore you will be able to use external password storage tools on every website.
- Shadow DOM will not be available anymore in WebKit for the nearer future. To speed up their engine on mobile browsers they decided to drop the costly implementation of Shadow DOM now.
General useful things
- Find Guidelines contains a bunch of links to good brand assets and Design guidelines.
- How to build a one-page website with a useful navigation history, lazy loading and all necessary concepts to make the page a successor.
- You can download this beautiful Simplifica Font for free.
- Labcase is an Open Device Lab that comes near you.
Tools
- There is now a Grunt plugin to create SVG Sprites. And as far as I know, the plan is to provide a Grunt plugin for Iconizr.
- Grab an automated set of screenshots of a website with this Grunt plugin.
- Respect and Set up Git Conventions. Even tagging commits with a hashtag is useful sometimes.
- A Grunt task that reminds you of your ToDos in your code.
Web Performance
- Mozilla published a library that improves the offline experience of your users called localForage.
- Google Chrome is experimenting with concurrent JavaScript compilation to improve JS performance.
JavaScript
- MDN has a re-introduction to JavaScript JS Tutorial which clarifies many misunderstandings.
- Facebook experiments with manipulating the user’s console to prevent self-XSS attacks. Alf, a Facebook engineer shares how they do and why on Stackoverflow.
CSS
- Create a floated label pattern for formulars in CSS to enhance user experience.
- Simtip: A Sass library for tooltips without much overhead.
- Let’s dream: Customizing SVG images with CSS variables. A dream.
- It seems likely that finally we’re getting sort of a parent selector in CSS. This is currently in discussion for Selectors Level 4 and will probably be solved with a
X:has(Y)pseudo-class. Yay! - Learn from Lea Verou when and how to use CSS
@supportsfeature-queries in her creativebloq article.
Go beyond…
- “Worst of all, it makes you become someone who doesn’t take a stand for anything. Today is the day we stop giving a F@$%.”. Because knowing your values, putting yourself out there, and stand up for a thing is what one should do.
- There’s no ‘just’ black and white out there. The only way one can approach such a topic is pragmatic, says Laura Kalbag’s grandfather. A very useful article for our lives.
- “Most of us fall in and out of love with our work”. And sometimes, it means letting go of something we love that we’ve held on to for too long.
- Haters gonna hate. Better take a breath urges Jason Santa Maria in his The Pastry Box article to a better together.
And as usual: If you like my reading list, support me by voting for me, by gratipayping me or by simply sharing this resource to other developers who might be interested.
Cheers and have a nice Sunday!
Anselm