Hey again,
I don’t know where you live but here in Germany spring is clearly making a sign and I’m sitting in the sun at 20 degrees finishing your weekly roundup. The last week was all under the sign of anniversaries. With git turning 10 years old and A Dao of Web Design turning 15, we can look back for a short moment and reflect how git helped us building website and what changed from building websites 15 years ago and today when we build fully responsive, adaptive interfaces and web applications right in the browser with tools we would never have imagined having back then. And while we’re at it: It’s GitHub’s birthday today and in the 7 years that they exist, they helped the open source community and individuals so much that I just want to thank them.
Now before leaving you with the articles of the week, here’s a reminder that only 9 days are left to nominate your beloved projects and people for the netawards. Keep in mind that it’s one of the few awards where you can propose anyone regardless if anyone else knows him/her, so take the chance and thank the people you admire. And now, have a great weekend and enjoy it:
News
- 15 years ago, John Allsopp published his article “A Dao of Web Design” on A List Apart and this kicked off what is now called responsive web design. To revise, A List Apart has gathered some opinions by other developers on the same regard and shared them in their article highly recommended “15 Years of Dao”.
- 10 years ago, Linus Torvalds accidentally created Git. To thank him, Atlassian devoted a 10 years of Git micropage which serves you the most basic facts on git and the ecosystem around it.
- Firefox 37 brings opportunistic encryption helping to create at least a little more security to HTTP based connections.
Concepts
- A big challenge is to design user interfaces for the Internet of Things. It’s challenging because the devices often don’t even have displays, are used infrequently and are not really powerful. Yet the interface has to work immediately for everyone when it is used by the owner.
- Designing for simplicity by Mark McDonnell from the BBC News is a great read on how to create a large-scale project by optimizing for simplicity. It’s covering interesting points on naming things, growing things and even the server stack and why it’s important to decouple your infrastructure and slice it into smallest possible chunks.
- Brad Frost got a message from a relative who uses an eInk reader to surf the web. What she experiences is sometimes horrible and I think we should put more effort and focus on not excluding users with not so common devices (or maybe we do not even know that many people use the Silk browser of the eInk Kindle already to surf the web?).
- A guy working for Gizmodo paid a UX expert to get drunk (I told you about the project some weeks ago) and test the site. Here’s the story, result, and report.
Tools
- An overview of tools to use for living style guides.
- HTML Janitor is a markup sanitizer that limits allowed tags in your markup following a given subset. While this sound really edge-case it can be useful for large teams to enforce code conventions.
- If you’re using git you probably know that it’s far from ideal for large files. That’s why GitHub now published an open source git extension for large files (Git LFS).
Security
- Well, turns out that people don’t care about spying in general but don’t want their private photos to be seen by the government or spy agencies. It also turns out in an interview with Edward Snowden that exactly that is possible and being done by the NSA. And we learn that it’s only a matter of the right perspective to reach people so they care.
- Have you ever wondered what’s needed to make an anonymous call? Well, pretty much is needed and it’s highly unpractical to do.
Web Performance
- Ben Frain shares opinions by browser representatives on CSS Performance and tells you why selector performance can be an issue, but a bloated and highly nested DOM structure is mostly the root of the cause here.
- Here’s a great collection of articles on design insights about perceived performance. Lots of helpful links in there.
- Talking about web performance the usual article always writes about techniques to optimize CSS or JavaScript. But we’re often neglecting the performance of our HTML which often makes a huge difference in how a site performs and loads.
HTML / SVG
- Heydon Pickering on UX accessibility with
aria-label. Despite WAI-ARIA’s reputation to be complex and hard to use there are some simple basics that are super easy to apply.
JavaScript
CSS / Sass
- A quite fine approach of building responsive tables just with some CSS rules and no JavaScript involved. An approach I’ve been using similarly for quite some time now on simple tables.
Work life
- While it always sounds amazing at a first glance what you hear from Silicon Valley this post shows some of the not so shiny sides of working there: The mental toll of Silicon Valley’s quest for glory and learn why so many people there are in therapy.
Go beyond…
- Many of us are struggling with the permanence of data streams on the internet. It’s worse when we carry a smartphone with us. On being a data addict and what to do about it.
- Our on-demand world, where we order food to our homes, isn’t about sharing at all but about being served. It’s an economy of shut-ins.
- And while the internet promised and end to isolation it doesn’t but creates isolation again and redefines being together in its own way of saying ‘being connected with others through third parties is enough to not be isolated’, which ultimately is proven wrong.
And with that I’ll close for this week. In case you like what I write each week, please support me via gratipay, Flattr 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