91 - WDRL – Web Development Reading List

Hey,

I’m back from the beyondtellerrand conference which again was a great event here is my list this week. Before you dive into this week’s news I invite you to join my new occasional newsletter about privacy called “Infrequent Privacy”. And now, on to web development news:

With Firefox 38 released there are now a couple of notable things in there: The default edition will have support for EME and the Adobe Content Decryption Module while there is also a non-DRM version available. This version will also be the next ESR release. Other changes include (finally) tab-based browser settings, autocomplete=off is no longer supported for username/password fields, enabling password managers to do their job, the Broadcast Channel API, srcset and <picture> support(!) with the limitation that sources don’t change on a viewport resize.
The Bittorrent messenger Bleep has launched its desktop and mobile apps to the public with the option to stay completely anonymous. It has voice calls, built-in end-to-end encryption, is multi-device capable and does not have any metadata that can be tracked except your account name.
Microsoft Edge will have media capture technology via the web ORTC API.
io.js will join forces with node.js again and they will merge the project again now.

With so many typefaces to choose from today it’s getting hard to find the right ones for your project. How to pick the nicest font for your site.
And here is why you should prefer prototypes over mockups if possible.

Aaron Gustafson on the true cost of progressive enhancement. Often developers and teams don’t use the approach and retrofit of graceful degrade their product afterwards and moan about it requiring much effort and it being nasty. But studies often show that using a progressive enhancement approach right from the beginning is much more efficient and doesn’t cost much money.
Peter Paul Koch makes a bold point that tools don’t solve our problems but became a problem, relating it to performance, our initial needs and the result we end with.

A detailed performance audit and improvement-list for websites using hero images by Steve Souders.
How to build an automatic cache-busting function in your node workflow using the AST.
So it turns out that clever people can hack into a NFC enabled Android phone by only being nearby the phone.
With Facebook’s new “Instant Articles”, discussions about performance arose quickly. Tim Kadlec wrote up his thoughts on it with some very valid points. But while you see Facebook’s presentation of the tool you also should know that they of course choose comparisons that work for their product, not necessarily reflecting a performance optimized website.

Ben Frain’s take on declaring states in HTML/CSS within his ECSS (Enduring CSS) approach. He uses what you should add anyways: WAI-ARIA roles.
Use clip-path to create responsive shapes in CSS.

Being kind to your colleagues can be hard sometimes but it does matter much and you should work hard to maintain kindness.
Ethics in our today’s world are often neglected. And start-ups are heavily involved in breaking ethics. That’s a story how Uber works from a driver’s perspective. But don’t you dare think it’s only Uber—it’s just one company of many out there handling that way. It’s even more sad that many companies can suppress such stories better and you never know about their lobbying and internal pressure.
The Bay Area is the biggest tech hub in the world but faces a much worse homelessness problem than most of us realize. It’s frightening to see that while reading the latest annual bilances by all these big tech startups that do mostly nothing about it. But there might be solutions that could improve the situation.

The agreement.
Do you remember the world cup last year in Brazil? They built 12 high-cost stadiums for it and promised to generate revenue with it. The result? The most popular one is used as a bus parking lot now. It’s that kind of things that make me sad about today’s society. We’re celebrating events like these and obviously deny the side-effects of it.
Your political vote is important and it’s definitely contributing to how a country is shaping its society, government and history. And sometimes this is not in a good way. Aral Balkan shares why Laura Kalbag, Jo Porter and himself will leave the UK now due to the latest elections.
Google confirmed that Hangouts can be wiretapped by government organisations.
WikiLeaks released material on the governmental Bundestag inquiry on potential spy cooperation between NSA and BND (German intelligence service) revealing many details (you might not want to know sadly).
Oh, and the NSA actually has a skynet program tracking suspicious (for whatever indication they are) all the time everywhere automatically and takes action itself.

WDRL 91 from 15.5.2015