Hey,
it’s Friday again and another edition of the WDRL is here. If you have some spare time, please contribute your ideas to this year’s netawards nominations: Add your favorite projects and people of the year to the list. They will thank you and appreciate your effort.
Did you wake up early today, quickly brewing a coffee, then start working while sipping it and already feel exhausted again? Then you might want to change this habit. It’s a better start into the day when you can actually enjoy your first cup of coffee or tea and take it with ease. And usually that leads to more productivity than when your brain is blocked by stress.
Now make it an easy Friday and enjoy reading some of the best articles in web development this week:
News
- Big news: Opera Mini servers got an upgrade and now support the
remunit, the flexbox module, a better HTML parser and complete ES5 support. - Adobe engineers started contributing to Microsoft’s WebPlatform, starting with gradient midpoints, and blending modes.
- You can now try out the new Modernizr v3 custom builder online.
- Firefox is building WebRTC Multistream and renegotiation into v38.
- React Native has been released and is available on GitHub now.
- Blink now decided to implement Pointer Events after they first declined for various reasons. The change was triggered by the huge amount of developers voting for Pointer Events and by the specification authors who offered to take care of remaining issues.
- Blink will also soon ship with a new, faster and better CSS parser.
Concepts & Design
- We like gray a lot and often we like it to be subtle. But we need not to forget about contrast.
- I wrote a piece on altering native scroll behavior and what’s so bad about it despite it’s a cool effect and widely used in webdesign today.
- The best icon is a text label.
Generic / Tools
- A handy git tool that works best as a git hook and automatically converts your
TODOstatements in code into GitHub issues. - Phear.io renders dynamic webpages using PhantomJS: fetch a page, render it and return a pretty JSON object. Useful for automated testing.
- DevTools are gearing up fast and get improvements so fast that it’s hard to stay up-to-date. Fortunately, Addy Osmani from Google shared the latest changes in Chrome’s developer tools.
Web Performance & Security
- Some statistics on cookie usage and how important cookie protection nowadays is for users.
HTML / SVG
- The state of video codecs in 2015 reveals that still most videos are encoded in H.264 but HEVC/H.265 and VP9 are beginning to make noise and support for these codecs is slowly progressing.
JavaScript
- It seems there is a lot of confusion on the
fetch()API. Jake Archibald tries to wipe it out and clear things up a bit in his article That’s so fetch!. - A new API for finding ranges of text or DOM nodes in a document is in discussion now and looks pretty interesting.
- You can now trigger smooth scroll behavior through a JavaScript API and it works in Firefox (36 / stable) and Chrome (only with experimental flag set).
- The jQuery Plugin ShowHidePassword has been released in version 2 and now is compatible to AMD and CommonJS and simpler to use along with better accessibility.
CSS / Sass
- Github introduced their internal CSS toolkit called Primer. Especially the documentation reveals a lot of little details and code guidelines.
- Ballistic is a utility library for Sass with functions for working with lists and numbers.
- Patrick H. Lauke shares his concerns on CSS Media Features and its potential for incorrect assumptions.
- Zell Liew shares his new mixin approach to easier media queries with Sass. Interesting and well done use of Sass maps.
Work life
- Time is reliable so being busy is just lazy.
- This is a story about the probably oldest business in the world and how it contrasts to today’s entrepreneurship-thinking and why we should rather be thinking in a longtrepreneurial way.
Go beyond…
- Life-long learning is a fact of modern life, and especially for those looking to go further. Whether it’s martial arts, a second language, or a new career skill, you’ve got to constantly and effectively acquire new knowledge and skills. Learn more about Accelerated learning.
- Kate Kiefer Lee on sustainability at running, being faster than you can handle and getting better when you improve slowly.
And with that I’ll close for this week. In case you like what I write each week, please support me via Flattr, gratipay or share this resource with other people. You can learn more about the costs of the project here. It’s available via E-Mail, RSS and online.
Thanks and all the best,
Anselm