96 - WDRL – Web Development Reading List

Hey,

it’s summer and hot weather in Europe and I quite enjoy this. Though we have all work to do we should take some free minutes and enjoy sun outside this weekend. Finally, I’m happy to say that GratiPay payments are working again but you can also donate via PayPal (via the online version).

News

Graphic showing the growth of the TOP 1million websites using SSL by default. Result: It’s still incredibly low adoption.

- HTTPS/TLS is still a hot topic. And while we try to demand for websites serving HTTPS-only by default, only 0.1% on the entire internet and [only 5.7% of the Quantcast Top 10k](http://trends.builtwith.com/ssl/SSL-by-Default) serve TLS by default. And probably there is a reason for that—it’s still very expensive to buy a good certificate and it’s even harder to set up a certificate on normal hosting spaces. That is what I can tell you from my own experience. - [Firefox 39 is out](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/06/trainspotting-firefox-39/) with smoother animation and scrolling, skin tone support (Unicode 8), removed SSLv3 support, fetch API support, ``. - The [W3C CSS Working Group](http://www.glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?post%2F2015%2F06%2F26%2FCSS-Working-Group-s-future) will get a new co-chairman as Daniel Glazman is taking down his role after 7.5 years.

Concepts & Design

Here is a good primer on how to properly create alignments and balance of different shapes.
The in-app Safari of iOS9 will bring some more changes and they’re pretty interesting when you look how it can improve the UX.

Generic / Tools

Are you a CLI user and often need to force kill some processes? Here’s fkill-cli to handle it. Cross-platform.

Web Performance

Facebook studied on how efficient browser caching works today.
Tim Kadlec shares some thoughts and reminders that it is important to write your code and create your applications with unpredictability in mind. Because apart from your server you can’t predict anything on the web.

HTML / SVG

A great little reminder on how important it is to make your website reachable for everyone by using progressive enhancement techniques.
Jeremy Keith on the lowest possible baseline for progressive enhancement and maintenance burdens taking a practical example.

JavaScript

Detect animation- and transitionend with JavaScript. Little helpers you can use by Osvaldas Valutis.

CSS / Sass

As Media Queries become more powerful we still have to consider a lot of circumstances that the user faces when using a website. And that’s when User Queries make sense. Orde Saunders on what they are and could look like.
Create accessible footnotes with CSS.
Mat Marquis explains the trouble we often face with Media Queries and why we urgently need a better solution to adapt components / elements to its parents’ container.
Emil Björklund wrote a good primer on how to use the CSS Grid System to create great visual layouts in the web easily. Although it’s not well supported yet, I bet this technology will change how we write layouts in future.
And Stefan Baumgartner is straighten out PostCSS, explaining misunderstandings, misconceptions and other Myths (pun intended).

Privacy / Security

Graphic showing the cloud computing network of the NSA to intercept and record almost any internet traffic.

- Oh yes, this is the dream of many analysts: A cloud platform to collect and automatically process user data. Except, [this article shows you (also visually) how the NSA collects data](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/01/nsas-google-worlds-private-communications/) all over the world. - [Stuggle to understand why HSTS for HTTPS is so important](http://www.troyhunt.com/2015/06/understanding-http-strict-transport.html)? Troy Hunt explains the issue and the solution for it with a practical example—MITM (Man-in-the-middle) a banking website for his own testing purpose with and without HSTS enabled. - An approach to understand [why we give our private data to corporations](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/28/why-we-give-our-data-to-corporate-spies-surveillance) even we know that other people spy on it. - [Humans are tech’s next big thing—and that could be risky](http://www.wired.com/2015/06/apple-news-twitter-facebook/). Lots of insights on why companies like Google and Facebook do research in human experiments and collect data for it. - Startups are cool, right? And naturally we give away our personal details to so many of them that we don’t even know anymore. But [what happens with your data when a company is sold](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/29/technology/when-a-company-goes-up-for-sale-in-many-cases-so-does-your-personal-data.html?_r=0)? In many cases, your data is for sale, too.

Work/Life

The Atlantic has a great essay on what would be if the world was without work. But the paradox of work is that many people hate their jobs, but they are considerably more miserable doing nothing. A good read on the challenges of work, a human’s work and robots replacing humans.
About paying for productivity apps and why money is less important than time.

Go beyond…

We need to talk about startups… shows the issues of today’s startup bubble and why in some cases the author believes that it’s even worse than 1999.
Rachel Andrew shares how to keep track of your costs and software licenses and how to avoid common issues.

WDRL 96 from 3.7.2015