Hey,
this is already the 80th edition of this Newsletter since it started. And just yesterday the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) approved ground breaking strong rules for net neutrality. This is a huge step in the right direction and while you might think that doesn’t affect you as you’re not in the U.S. I must tell you that this isn’t the truth. It will target you as soon as you’re hitting a U.S. based server which nowadays is pretty common, especially as Amazon’s Web Services dominate the market. So let me say thank you to all who protested, who engaged for net neutrality and to people like Aaron Swartz who graciously spend a lot of time fighting for the web.
If you haven’t already seen the documentation about Aaron Swartz I can only recommend to watch it now. And maybe, as you’ll aready be in the mood for this, you might want to watch Citizenfour afterwards. Both are great movies that show how important it is to keep freedom, equality and the openness and privacy of the internet. Sadly they also show how easy this all can be underminded by governmental institutions.
News
- Firefox 36 has been released stable this week and includes full support for HTTP/2,
object-fit,object-positionand thewill-changeproperty. - Pointer Events are now a W3C Recommendation. This news called many devs out there to comment: Jacob Rossi shares how to tackle the isssues of Pointer Events and recommends them as the standard instead of Touch Events. Scott Gonzales by the jQuery Foundation shares the implementation status and risk of fragmentation, and Tim Kadlec outlines how much power Apple has on the Web. And even Ars Technica has a report on the topic now.
- Mozilla researched and discovered a way to run code before it can be parsed: The Emterpreter. That’d be very cool to have.
- Starting v38 of Firefox it is required to use PFS to provide a WebRTC connection.
- IE is starting development on
srcsetwhich is very cool as they’re the last party that supports at least partly responsive images. And with srcset in mind, I can only guess but it’s well validated, that IE team will afterwards also focus on implementing the<picture>element.
Generic / Tools
- Let’s chat is a self-hosted chat for small teams which has all major features you want to have (like mentions, rooms, image embeds, uploads, history and an API) but is open source and runs on your own server. On top of that it looks pretty nice and a bit like Slack.
- Tim Kadlec on the basic requirements and the little choices when buying a car and how building websites or web application often happens backwards.
Web Performance
- CloudFlare now offers better mobile performance by optimizing their ciphers on the TLS connections (used for HTTPS) for mobile usage.
- Jason Grigsby explains how he does Responsive Images Audits for projects.
HTML / SVG
- The Web in Motion is the new Smashing Magazine book that has chapters by the best web developers who are into web animations that I know of at the moment.
- How to build a responsive email newsletter that also works in Gmail. Yes you wouldn’t guess but Gmail is often the worst client which needs some special rules. By Julie Ng.
JavaScript
- With favico.js you can add interactivity to your favicon.
- This Opera Dev article shows you how to use the Web Notification API and send out messages to strangers. Don’t implement this example but it shows how easy this API is to use.
- An interesting example how Web APIs aren’t always simple and sufficient is the Text Track API which allows you to add VTT to videos. Unfortunately this isn’t possible dynamically via the API. However, Ian Devlin found a way to dynamically add text tracks to HTML5 video.
- A better way to cut the mustard and only give some JavaScript to modern browsers via feature detection.
- Chrome says goodbye to
undefined is not a functionand replaces it with a more helpful console message from now on.
CSS / Sass
- We already read controversial statements on if CSS variables are a bad or good thing but for colors we already have a variable that you’re probably not aware of: You can extend the color cascade with
currentColorand learn when to use it and when it might not be a good idea. - Firefox has an introduction to custom
@counter-stylewhich is actually supported from Firefox 33+ and with very basic support in Chrome.
Work life
- Why measuring the quality of your life by time you spend on something is false.
- There are a lot articles out there telling you which tools will help you with distributed remote meetings. But Christian Heilmann now shared his very own experiences and says what really works and what’ll be still challenging when doing remote meetings.
Go beyond…
- “I’ve cut, split, and stacked firefwood to stay warm in winter. It’s not that my Nest doesn’t know how to keep me warm. But, while I love what modern technology has done for my life, I also more fully appreciate that technology when I know what life is like without it.”
- Ralph Affleck is 84 and after his retirement he didn’t stop working but started building his own sawmill. This interview is very inspiring on what’s possible even when you’re old.
- I know it’s a bit off topic but this piece by Aral Balkan shows basically why the European Union still wants TTIP and CETA while the vast majority of popultaion in there declines it. Well, here’s a book that shares how banks and companies really grow and make money today.
- Why your comfort zone is overrated and why it’s totally okay for everyone to be uncomfortable for a while.
- The difference between a person in person or a person online.