56 - WDRL – Web Development Reading List

Hey,

Friday night, most tasks done. Issue 56 it is and finishes another work week when you’re reading this. So enjoy the articles of the week:

IE now offers a WebDriver tool so you can run automated actions against your pages. Pretty cool!
And Firefox just published a beta extension to let you debug your site with Firefox DevTools in Chrome and Safari. This is so awesome!

Thoughts on specialising in the web industry and how recruiters should adapt their job requirements to it.

A practical lesson how to select typefaces for your body text. Tim Brown shares what’s important and which fonts you might want to avoid.
Design better usable donation forms.

Get your public IP fast and right from your CLI with ipify.
And check if a website is up or down from within your CLI with is-up.
npm-dedupe tries to merge your dependencies and avoid duplicate, nested dependencies. Can be pretty useful so save space and don’t end up with gazillion of duplicate files on your machine due to sub-dependencies in your projects.

Why a versioning system is not only essential to keep backups but also helpful to try out something new in your project without destroying the old structure.

How to compress a PNG like a JPEG using SVG masks. A pretty clever technique you can consider next time you need to deal with a photographic, alphatransparent image.
An entire website all about Performance Tooling. From Bookmarklets over Grunt plugins to CLI-tools or services, you’ll find many tools that monitor or enhance performance here.
Interesting insights into how useful your performance monitoring might be and how much it can tell you about your actual performance.
No, don't serve your WOFF1.0 fonts compressed through your server. It doesn’t make sense.
The Smashing Magazine shares their approach on improving their website performance drastically.

The Financial Times Developers Lab started working on a Polyfill service that is just as easy as it should be and avoids duplicated polyfills in your component-driven projects.
Turn your timesheets or timelines into a visual chart using timesheet.js.
If you want to get around the viewport unit issues in IE9 and iOS, the Viewport Units Buggyfill is probably the thing you want to have. The latest version has massive improvements to IE9 behavior.
It seems that the last word is not spoken on touch events vs. pointer events. Here’s a comparison of both by Microsoft.

Create transparent borders using background-clip.
Style your elements using custom attributes. Attribute Modules makes it happen. Cool stuff for specific use-cases but I wouldn't recommend using it regularly instead of classes.

“I need help”. You can’t do everything all alone. And it’s not a shame to get help.

To support this project, Flattr or gratipay me or share this resource with other people. It’s available via E-Mail, RSS and online.

Thanks and all the best,
Anselm

WDRL 56 from 12.9.2014