Reading List
This week’s reading list comes to you with a renewed vigour, and a zesty swagger in its stride, as several people sought me out at Google I/O to tell me how useful it is. Thanks for the feedback.
This is simply a list of stuff I’ve read this week, and posted links to over Twitter. However, I know that lots of real people don’t read Twitter all day, or it’s blocked at work, so this is an amalgamated list. Note that these links interested me, but I neither endorse them nor vouch for their accuracy.
Standards
- Opera 14 for Android 2.3+ released – spanking the Android stock browser and sending it to bed, with Chrome 26, @supports, webGL
- Building The New Financial Times Web App: A Case Study – loads of good stuff in here, including a look at performance of Flexbox layouts
- Client Hints – Google proposal to send a header with device resolution, viewport size, touch-enabled flag etc. Explanatory presentation
- The Web Manifest – Mozilla’s Mounir Lamouri on the Moz proposal to make AppCache better, and Google’s proposal Navigation Controller
- Mobile Accessibility Workshop by Henny Swan (BBC)
- Fetch – “The Fetch standard defines the overall architecture for obtaining resources given a URL and a set of parameters.”
- IE10, Metro, and Media Queries – by Adrian Roselli
- Getting touchy – an introduction to touch events – Patrick Lauke’s excellent talk at Sud Web / Avignon 17.05.2013
- Extend the Web Forward by Yehuda Katz
- Break the page – “an online periodical about the future and philosophy of the web”
- Web Performance APIs Rapidly Become W3C Recommendations
- HTML Imports – draft of one of the Web Component suite, allowing import of HTML blocks to facilitate code re-use
- FreedomHTML is a profile of HTML without the DRM-enabling Encrypted Media Extension, because ignoring it makes it go away
- Gathering the Web tribes together for the common good – Dion Almaer
- Designing CSS Layouts With Flexbox Is As Easy As Pie by web cleverchap/ international love machine David Storey
Industry
- 10% of notebooks sold in first quarter of 2013 have touchscreens
- Why is Facebook losing active users in Nigeria?
- Teens Are Turning Away from Facebook Because Tumblr Is Real, and Parent-Free
- The new Flickr: Goodbye customers, hello ads – Change, eh? Always bad, especially on a static medium like the Web
- Posthaven is a new blogging platform from co-founders of Posterous: “We’re not going to show ads. We’re not looking for investors. We’re going to make money the best way we know how: charging for it.”
- Meanwhile, outside our Web hipster bubble, “nearly 15% of all new enterprise app functionality is written in COBOL“
Misc
- Clippy.js – “Clippy.js is a full Javascript implementation of Microsoft Agent (AKA Clippy and friends), ready to be embedded in any website.”
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I’m another one who very much appreciates the reading list. It helps me keep abreast of current developments in stuff where I simply don’t have the bandwidth to do so. It’s intriguing but even simple lists like this are valuable because they provide some context.