Hey,
welcome back! I’m back from my vacation in south France where I shut off my mind from all the work load of the past months and recovered. It was great but now follows the result of three weeks no link list—in fact I needed to split up content and shift it to next weeks list already to make it shorter. A lot of exciting things happened and here is the essence of it:
News
- I’m happy that the US Senate has blocked the extension of the USA Patriot Act, limiting the NSA mass storage of phone records drastically.
- Apple showed of their new product lines this week and what’s new in Safari 9: some weird proprietary things, CSS
backdrop-filter, responsive design mode in DevTools, inspector redesign, more ES6 support, and lots of unprefixed CSS properties. - And this is what iOS9 will provide to protect your privacy. Wow!
- Opera 30 has been released with MSE support for h.264 (as usual we can discuss if this is a feature), upgrading insecure requests, JS copy and cut functionality, Permissions API, and more cool stuff.
- MS Edge now has responsive images support with basic
srcsetsupport. There’s still some stuff to add here but it’s great to see them implementing that stuff. - Why Web Components are still struggling four years after they work and standardization has been started. I particularly like the comments on the article that add great value to the discussion.
Concepts
- We shouldn’t try to compete web with native. It just doesn’t make sense and it will never emulate native perfectly. Instead, we should use the web’s strength and core features more.
- Chris Wilson makes a good point on how important and capable the web already is by facing facts that homescreen web apps are already in use and many people prefer reading news in the browser or even use facebook only as web-app (including me).
Design
Tools
- A helpful glob tester to test your rules against minimatch.
- sigh looks indeed very interesting and is an asset pipeline and build system for the web, and accepts gulp plugins. Well, I hope at some point in the future we will agree on only a small couple of build chain systems but I feel we’re slowly making progress to achieve that.
- Iconjar is a collection maker app for your icons. Long due finally there is an (only OS X so far) app for that.
- Need some sharing icons on a website? Here’s a neat little tool for that.
- Remy Sharp shares some insights in to his DevTools development workflow and what tricks he uses in DevTools to debug applications.
Git / CLI
- You can undo almost anything with git and this is the guide to it.
- This short guide reminds you how to improve your git workflow and actually make use of git’s features by using them properly.
- How to move from bash to zsh.
Web Performance
- Ian Devlin shares learnings of implementing the AppCache on his site. It’s, as pointed out already by many other people, hard.
- It’s great to see that PHP7 will likely get a performance improvement of at least 100 percent to close the gaps between PHP and HHVM.
- The debate goes on but whilst here are some tips and explanations for you why React and Angular can be really slow, how to improve Angular performance with simple tricks and more explanation why it hardly matters what you use.
HTML / SVG
- How to make your website work fine with Opera Mini. Because, did you know that no CSS gradients are applied so you should have a solid fallback color? Or that the user IP is falsy, and JavaScript will be much slower?
- Wonder if you can apply a gradient to a border? Yes, with SVG you can add gradients to strokes and fills.
- Creating an SVG Icon Workflow with Gulp as a build tool.
- Fix variable width SVG icons when used with the symbol method in IE9-11.
Accessibility
- Wonder if your website is accessible? Use this cheat sheet to check.
- It seems that iOS VoiceOver ignores an
imgelement if it references an SVG-file unless you addrole="img"to it. So, add this in case you’re using SVG images that way. - aXe is an automated accessibility tester for your workflow that integrates with your testing framework or browser of choice.
- tota11y visualizes how your site perfoms with assistive technologies and is a small JavaScript snippet you can includ in your site for development.
JavaScript
- This slidedeck by Jack Franklin about The state of JavaScript is a great slideset to go through. If you think you’re lost with all the frameworks, libraries, build tools and falling behind on it, this resource is great for you.
- Please update your picturefill in each site you are using it as it otherwise will break in WebKit and Microsoft Edge.
CSS / Sass
- What the
initialvalue really means. - Here’s the great making-of of the incredibly beautiful in pieces site. It covers the SVG, HTML, CSS and JavaScript part which is cool to learn how to build interactive stuff today.
- Cole Peters asks if we should ditch the CSS preprocessor and write real CSS again. This is really reflective, objective and constructive.
Work life
- Get back your passion for web design or how to deal with “burn-out”.
- Josh Clark says “Instead of maximizing time on site, I’d like to reduce it. Give people the information they need, and let them get back to their lives.” and I wholeheartedly agree.
Go beyond…
- Failure is not the key to success, confidence is.
- Mike Ellis owns three pianos and writes about finding flow in a different set of keys and how he keeps mental noise at a minimum, avoiding notifications.
- Before trying to win a tweet, think about the consequences. Chris Heilmann shares how one tweet nearly ruined his whole talk, affecting hundreds of people.