Hey,
the week after a conference you organize is still exhausting. While you recover from the event, you already need to work regularly again, work on all the things that happen after an event: Cutting and editing videos, requesting and paying all invoices, replying to emails, sending newsletters and more. Yet, so much happened in front-end land as well that I found a lot of interesting things for you again this week:
News
- It seems like we’re soon getting new JavaScript DOM selectors:
query()andqueryAll()will replace the olderquerySelector/All()and will return array-like elements instead of a nodelist. - Microsoft revealed the new name of their browser code-named Spartan: It will be named Microsoft Edge. Here’s the GitHub account for it.
- Opera 29 has been released. That means (also for Chromium 42) it’s shipping ES6 classes, the fetch API, faster JavaScript performance, Web Audio API updates and text wrap on Opera for Android (currently the only one doing this but it’s super cool).
- Firefox is thinking about deprecating non-secure HTTP by removing access to technologies that are recommended to use with secure connections (like WebRTC, Geolocation, etc).
Concepts & Design
- Justin Barber with his masterpiece “The dark matter of screens”. If the world is built around relationships, and devices are built around us, then their foremost role is to enrich and simplify our lives, our relationships.
- What you can learn from game designers. They start with the story and it makes a huge difference. In fact, many websites would be better if they’d been designed with a content-first approach.
- Imran Parvez on Designing Settings with some positive and negative examples.
- While Material design is definitely cool, there’s no need to just copy Google’s design. Instead, here’s how you can build your own approach of an material design application interface.
Generic / Tools
- Git 2.4 is out and adds atomic pushes, push to deploy improvements, inverted grep for
log.
Web Performance
- Peter Hedenskog and Tobias Lidskog from sitespeed.io today released a new Open Source Web Performance Dashboard. Impressive work, thanks!
HTML / SVG
- Newsletters are hard. And it’s hard to know about the CSS and coding support in the various clients and services. So here’s a PDF by Freshmail on this topic for free.
JavaScript
- jQuery’s globalization library globalize is now version 1.0 stable.
- ramjet can transform any element in your DOM into another, no matter where they sit in the document tree.
CSS / Sass
- Harry Roberts elaborates on having logic in CSS. And while he’s only referring to selector chains in his examples there are also the @media or @supports rule which incorporate logic.
- What to take in mind when building a website and have people who visit it on a Kinde eInk device.
Work life
- It’s harder than ever to create space away from work. The unwritten expectation in this connected world seems to be that you are available wherever you are. Vacations open up an even trickier set of tensions: the pressure of deadlines, not wanting to let your teammates down, or a general fear of not being… at work. Why you should take a vacation
- Do you admire digital nomads and always follow these dream stories, wishing you could do the same? Well, not everything in being a digital nomad is great and should also know the downsides and drawbacks of it. And by far this article is not the only one. It turns out now as it’s getting popular that there are dark sides of all this travelling, remote working, 4 day week-dreams.
The internet, our (open) space
- If no one owns the internet, everyone can own the internet, showing the importance of building a more independent internet.
- Google’s role as monopolist of the internet. Or why it’s important to question the few big internet giants now.
- Peter Gasston shares his thoughts on The Future of the Open Web as it’s under thread now with the few big players like Google and Facebook working against the openness.
Go beyond…
- Susan Robertson on accepting our lack of control.
- I follow Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors, for a long time already. And that’s mostly for one reason: He has great thoughts for the future and gives inspiration, even when the topic is very sad (like how bad we deal with our environment currently). Yesterday, Tesla announced their home battery charger with this press release. It contains interesting facts about how much fuel we burn and how to make this a little better. And hey, they’re trying to make this new device as green as possible.
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</form>Thank you and until next week,
Anselm