Hey,
back again. Over a week on the road, traveling though U.K. and Germany for conferences (The Web Is in Cardiff and Beyond Tellerrand in Berlin) I am finally back home just with a new list of articles for you. Phew, over 50 tabs of articles, tools have been read, sorted out and put together forming this edition of the Web Development Reading List.
Also I want to thank all the people who decided to support me with their money. The existing ones, the new ones—it’s much appreciated and well honored! ♥
News
- The IE Team just announced a big thing to test Internet Explorer: RemoteIE—Test the latest IE on Windows, Mac OS X, iOS and Android. It basically saves you from installing a virtual Windows machine for each IE. Big step forwards! Read more in Rey Bango’s article.
- Mozilla announced a browser for web developers. It’s going to be a development browser including WebIDE and the full stack of DevTools that are available for Firefox, specially targeted for developer’s use.
- If you’re not too much convinced of using Bower for front-end dependency management, here’s an article how to use npm for front-end packaging also telling you on their plans how to evolve npm for that use case.
Concepts & Design
- The good ol’ progressive enhancement leads to the most important business question you should ask yourself if you’re building a website: Just what is it that you want to do?
- The gov.co.uk team did the very same and here’s their developer guide on progressive enhancement.
- Read on how the new Soundcloud mobile app has been built and what challenges the team faced.
Tools
- Quail is a new platform for accessibility testing in the browser and on the server.
- Mozilla created a Server Config Generator for dealing with HTTPS.
- The Brackets 1.0 editor and Extract for Brackets is out now.
- NoGoToFail is a network security testing tool designed to help developers and security researchers spot and fix weak TLS/SSL connections.
- You can use the Dimensions Chrome Extension to measure dimensions of and between elements very easily.
- Use DuckDuckGo to generate hashes, passwords and more.
- How to circumvent LoDash’s template security when replacing variable stuff with grunt-string-replace.
Web Performance
- Andy Davies shared his super interesting slidedeck from last week’s same named (ok, only the first part of it) conference: the web is… too slow.
HTML / SVG
- How do you use responsive images in practice? Eric Portis wrote it down for you on A List Apart.
- The issue with big JavaScript MVC Frameworks is they produce bad output. That is why Danny Tuppeny says: “You have ruined HTML” and has a valid point in this very well written article.
- Here we go: The RICG, former known as Responsive Images Community Group, now is being rebranded to Responsive Issues Community Group tackling more things after the responsive images thread is going the right path now. Likely, Element Queries will follow here now as a next step. Community work forever!
JavaScript
- Thanks to François Remy we now have a CSS Grid Polyfill for Level 1 of the module. It’s still in the early days but yet a cool thing.
- The fine Art of JavaScript Error Tracking.
- Autotab is pretty neat if you need to have separate form input fields but want to jump automatically to the next field after a valid value has been entered.
- Bitly shares how they use Browserify and npm in their JavaScript workflow.
- Last week I announced the FT Polyfill service. This week you’ll get a Get started guide how to use it.
Sass / CSS
- “Every line of CSS is a suggestion”—Jeremy Keith.
- Styling Cross-Browser Compatible Range Inputs with CSS.
- Bruce Lawson about the highly debatable CSS property
alt(only a draft yet).
Go beyond…
- How to Do What You Love, the Right Way.
- The truth on working while being on the road. At least, I can imagine this is very true for most people.
And that’s it again for this week. If you liked the content, please consider support by using Flattr or gratipay me or share this resource with other people. Learn more about the costs of the project here. It’s available via E-Mail, RSS and online.
Thanks and all the best,
Anselm