Hey,
it’s the last day before the weekend today. And if you work hard to get stuff done, try to get yourself a free weekend. Overworking, be it on weekdays or weekends, is harmful for you when it’s a regular thing so try to eliminate it by mentoring people in your company about productivity and work hours balance. And maybe you can also convince your boss to read this letter during working hours—it’s him/her profiting from your updated knowledge. Cheers!
News
- Firefox Developer Edition 41 has view source in a tab now (was a window before), screenshots of selected nodes in the inspector, copy and save as HAR.
- User Agent String sniffing is getting harder again. Firefox for Android will report back as at least Android 4.4 or higher, also if it’s running on older Android versions. That is because it can run on older systems with a modern technology stack.
- Windows 10 will be out end of the month and with it, Microsoft Edge will ship. But while we keep on praising the new cool browser that indeed does many things much better than IE, accessibility will be broken and it is advised that if you rely on assitive technologies to keep on using IE. Or switch to Firefox ;)
Concepts & Design
- Joashua Johnson is on the hunt for the web’s lost soul debating if responsive design is to blame or why all sites look all the same. Smashing Mag’s very own Vitaly Friedman says webdesign is not dead, generic solutions are.
- Find development tools’ and services’ logos as SVG here.
- A detailed break-down of a credit card form and how different approaches to fields and validation work out.
- Sarah Drasner shows Practical techniques on designing animation.
Generic / Tools
- Are you working on bigger projects in a team? Then you should review your CSS. Here’s a proposal on what to cover in a CSS code review and what to test against.
- WebKit’s developer console has been upgraded and now gives much more constructive feedback on what’s wrong.
Web Performance / Security
- Guy Podjarny lists Ten Reasons to use HTTPS in the article to convince you securing your site.
- Have a fixed background that causes your webpage to scroll janky? You may want to use
will-changeon it to improve. - The DNT (Do Not Track) header is so far unsuccessful. I think we can all agree on that. But what this GitHub issue by the Financial Times reveals is more interesting. People saying ‘I don't think supporting it offers anyone any value’ is a surprise to me. I do both, use and send the DNT-header on several projects and in my browser and like it. What do you think?
HTML / SVG
- Sara Soueidan explains how to do proper art direction and responsive imagery with embedded SVG using
<object>. - We all know participation in webstandards is not easy but Mathew Marquis is probably one of the persons who knows best what it means for a normal developer. When he started doing webstandards work, he experienced massive trouble. Now he wants to change the way and make things easier.
- This is where BBC News developers share how they approach a big multi-language responsive website. Covers a lot small details that are important to a successful project.
JavaScript
- Finally we have a lean and plain JavaScript, Scss version of Google’s Material Design called Material Design Lite.
- Learn why it’s never about the Lines of Code but about modules containing complexity. It’s better to think the Lego blocks way and build many small modules that together create a great application.
- Google published a new virtual DOM JavaScript library. By reducing memory usage and increasing performance they created the 2.6kb Incremental DOM library for you.
CSS / Sass
- These days we often see onepager sites that link to an achor and scroll down to it on click. That’s usually done in JavaScript but now there is a W3C Scroll Snap Point specification that allows you to set this behavior just in CSS. Works in stable Firefox and partly in IE10.
- We have seen a couple of posts already in the last few weeks talking about component integration methods and independence of styles in CSS. The SMACSS author Jonathan Snook shares why it can be hard to do Component Independence in CSS. I share his point but it’s still the goal to do it that way and make clever use of the cascade.
Work life
- Even if you are not considering changing your job now it can be a good advice to apply and do a job interview to be used to it. From my own experience I can only say, get to know basic knowledge like the mentioned CSS or JavaScript basics in the article.
Go beyond…
- Things will not change unless you change them for you. A very well written piece on how the web evolved revealing many inconsistencies we have today.
- On Port 80 retells the story of the monetarization of services and the influence of the user by taking the Reddit /r/IAmA example.
- The brilliant part of why Slack is so successful. A good thought and I really trust there’s much truth in it but I doubt it’s a good advice to follow this approach as I find it ethically questionable to play with social pressure on people to get paid.
- So this week the Hacking Team has been hacked which is a big deal. They promoted to build spyware software for governments and it prove correct. Along with it came out that they worked for many countries that are under a EU/US embargo, that they also had pretty weird private recommendations regarding politic/military actions and, finally, that their internal security was not taken too seriously (just have a look at the password access file).
- Everything is yours. Everything is not yours.