Hey,
another week passed by and a lot happened. New releases have arrived, including git and PhantomJS, entirely new tools have been built and other people have written some very useful resources again about accessibility, CSS compatibility, font fallbacks on Windows, and again others give you some advice on how to create a better work atmosphere or simply show you some different style of living. Here we go:
News
- PhantomJS 2 is finally out. That means you can now update and use it for your testing. It has been awaited for months now and will fix a lot of layout issues and other problems of 1.x. It also means it doesn’t support CoffeeScript anymore out of the box.
- HTML5Boilerplate has released v5.0 and as always the Changelog document is very helpful to find the latest news on little details that have changed over time.
- Git 2.3 is out and has some changes you should be aware of.
git pushfor example now doesn’t push anymore if there isn’t an upstream branch set named as the local one to avoid wrong pushes. And you can configure your repo for push to deploy now instead of pulling the changes on the server as brefore. - Do you remember Inkscape? Hell, there’s a new version of Inkscape out now.
Generic
- Setting an example is very important for everyone who shares code publicly online. Because way too often we get the excuse “It’s only meant to be an example” and later on many people who copy and paste the code also copy the issues.
- Mozilla implemented a P2P direct connection between phones and computers using WiFi without an internet connection. This is particularly interesting because it means they did it in a (yet proprietary, prefixed) web-based way for Firefox OS. If it’s successful it may give us this feature as webstandard.
Tools
- Tardily there is now a tool called IE8 Linter which will trow a warning for possible pitfalls and suggests Internet Explorer 8 fixes in you code. Can be of use.
- FrontEnd.md is a command line tool which generates documentation for your existing frontend code in seconds.
- Hey,
node-firefoxis here.
Accessibility
- We need to reframe how we talk about accessibility. Because it’s not about enable people with disabilities to use the web but it means that people can use the web. An essential and truthful article.
JavaScript
- There’s now a proposal by Microsoft for a Selection API.
is.jsdoes exactly what the name says: It checks values and does this very good.- Here’s a mobile ES5 compatibility chart.
CSS / Sass
- Preprocessors are here to stay. But lately there’s a lot talking about dark patterns and bloated code as a result of them. Let’s put post processors on top that take care of it. But in the end only by knowing your craft you’ll get a fine result.
- Codrops, one of the most inspiring creative web resources has now its own CSS reference, maintained mainly by the awesome Sara Soueidan. My only worry about it is if it’ll be able to stay up to date but the detailed explanation of each property is one of the best I’ve seen so far.
- How do you order your fallback fonts? Probably you’d go
'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, 'Segoe UI', Arial, sans-serif;and this should load Segoe UI in case Helvetica isn’t existent. But (probably) because too many people didn’t add a fallback, Microsoft aliased Helvetica to Arial. This results in Arial to be loaded then. Jonathan Snook describes this in more detail. And here’s the Windows reference. - Read how Etsy transferred their entire codebase from plain CSS to Scss. It’s interesting to read their concerns, preparations, challenges and issues while converting. And it also told them how important it is to ensure code quality.
Work life
- What if your team was working remote?
- How to work in a team living in different time zones.
- Simpleasmilk shares their history of four years working entirely remote.
- “Slow the fuck down”—projects often fail because of the lack of time.
Inspiration
- “We delete our wins so easily. No wonder we don't see possibilities for the future.”
- Read some word about the dilemma of communication between us human beings.
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