Hey,
I usually don’t start with quotes but I got this message this morning and are very happy to share it with you:
Happy 2-year anniversary, @WDRLinfo! Thank you, @helloanselm for that awesome weekly newsletter! Everybody should subscribe! —@dickelippe
Two years ago, the very first issue of WDRL was sent to the inbox of my first 119 subscribers. Since then, much has changed: WDRL has now a group of 5004 subscribers as I’m sending this and is growing steadily. But more importantly, it’s been 94 more issues since then, many people wrote many great articles, I learned much about writing, about donations, about what my readers love. And that’s where I want to thank you all for subscribing and supporting me! Now, let’s go on to the web development part:
News
- The Atom editor is now v1.0 and is the first big stable release but the authors say that it’s only the start.
- The
min-font-sizeandmax-font-sizeproperties have been added to the W3C Fonts specification now. - Last week I shared some news to you that Apple’s new
mask-iconsyntax is already breaking the web. Now a solution is in sight and it seems that Apple is adopting a better syntax. - The Fairphone 2 has been announced and in contrast to the first version it will be a bit more expensive but also way better, and, the best thing, it will be modular so you can exchange single parts of it (i.e. the camera when a better one is available) making it much more sustainable. I really like this innovative, fair approach of building electronic devices and hope that more manufacturers pick up this concept.
Concepts & Design
- Still love Photoshop or miss a design space for designing apps in it? The Photoshop Design Space aims to create a interface inside the app that allows you to create streamlined, focused interfaces and workflows. It’s built with HTML and looks very nice at a first glance.
- Why a dropdown should be your “UI of last resort” and not your only UI option. Luke Wroblewski shares some analysis on the ease of using dropdowns.
- Mathematical Web Typography writes up how to calculate and normalize typographic values for the web.
- To get an impression on how important and different mobile is when we look outside of western countries, you should have a look at this presentation by Ben Evans.
Generic / Tools
- GitFlow considered harmful. I usually avoid posting articles with such headlines but this one has a lot of truth in it and if you work with git in a team you should read it.
- The 500px Analytics Lead shares the experience of building better analytics for a large-scale web application.
Web Performance
- With more and more complex JavaScript applications and recent development of the ECMAScript standard, for many people it is more and more desirable to have a faster low-level language running in the browser. A task force by the big browser vendors now has announced Web Assembly. If you don’t understand what it is and why it has been invented, here is a better summary for it. It’s not to replace JavaScript, it is not a compiler for JavaScript but an AST stored in binary format, resulting in smaller app bundles in comparison to JavaScript. Luckily, it seems we’re going to be able to still read the source in text format through the browser’s debuggers. And use cases could be audio or video processors or other realtime apps that are currently a bit awkward to port to the web (although not entirely impossible) while keeping JavaScript an understandable language. Still not enough? This short FAQ by Axel Rauschmayer does help you.
- It is interesting to see that while more and more websites and web services are popping up, 30% of all webservers are sitting comatose. And that is bad, not only for the businesses but also for our environment.
- It seems that iOS9 supports HTTP/2 system-wide and not only in Safari, as reported earlier.
- Damon Bauer shows you how you can enable a local filmstrip in Chrome DevTools. Although that is pretty cool you should always prefer a WebPageTest with real network throttling conditions over this method.
- Building better web pages with the Better By Proxy principle that Tim Kadlec is showing in his Mobilism talk (you can also watch it).
Security
- Speaking of security, we’re reaching a whole new level of encryption with post-quantum encryption. An interesting reading about what changed over the past few years.
- 17 years ago a group of hackers delivered a warning on how insecure our computers and the internet are. Today we’re still suffering from this ignored warning. Another story where I question myself if we’re asking the right questions and if we’re trying to solve the right problems.
- Using Tor isn’t always safe and there are some MITM attacks and sniffing exit nodes that try to use your data, finds a researcher. So if you use Tor without HTTPS be very careful and don’t enter any data.
HTML / SVG
- Ian Feather gives answers in his Practical Questions around Web Components with a few honest words.
JavaScript
- bodymovin is an AfterEffects plugin that lets you export your animations to SVG and JavaScript (or Canvas and JavaScript). Pretty cool but if you test it, test it on a copy of your project and read about the issues with it on the github README. See this example for what a result can look like.
- Three simple but effective techniques for writing more semantic and maintainable JavaScript applications.
- Service Workers is now an official W3C Working Draft.
CSS / Sass
- Ben Frain elaborates on drawbacks and limitations with Flexbox on Android Stock browsers.
- Harry Roberts writes about the details in contextual styling when working with generic modules and components.
- And Chris Coyier shares how to achieve a neat shifting wrapping using Flexbox.
- Finally, Huro Giraudel introduces you to SCSSLint, a linter for your Scss files ensuring your code doesn’t smell too much.
Work life
- “How are we supposed to get any work done when everything keeps changing?”
- Aaron Harris, partner of Y Combinator, says that “We need to rethink employee compensation”.
- If you own your daily schedule, why not taking a work day morning off and do your hobby? It’s great to distract yourself from work and cuts the week in the middle, giving you back some power for work.
Go beyond…
- According to these reports and recent surveys, in Iceland it’s the pirate party that is leading the polls now with ~34% after decades of right-leaning parties leading the country.
- Not only a good story and explanation but also a great interactive presentation on “What’s really warming the world?”.
- No, tech is not building a sharing economy. We’re in a servitude bubble and hide it under a better name.
- This is how the oh-so-smart startup next door is really working on its success: Lobbying is a big thing and key to success for Uber, Google is cooperating with government secretly, Facebook is re-creating your activities and day by measuring time activity, and again Google is listening on your mic and says you should trust them, it’s always watching your home if you let them in and processes the data in the cloud. Now, if any of you doubts they live from your data and will make advantage of it, that should be enough conviction.
- Some thoughts about how fracking affects the environment. And again, something about lobbying and drastic methods to silent people.