Bruce Lawson’s personal site

Closing the gap between native and web

• The Revolution Will Be Written In HTML – “The internet is the greatest democratizing force of our time” from a developer in Kenya.
• Why I create for the web – “the most amazing thing about the web is simple yet devastatingly powerful, and the whole reason the web exists in the first place. It’s the humble hyperlink.”
• Apps are too much like 1990’s CD-ROMs and not enough like the Web said Scott Hanselman (in 2011)
• How can HTML5 compete with Native? “Browser politics play a key role to HTML5 development: Besides Opera, all major browser vendors are mobile OS vendors.” Yay, independence!
• Native Mobile Apps are the New Flash – “A great stopgap measure while the web caught up”

Standards

Use cases for browser sniffing – interesting survey by Mozilla on UA detection use cases. If you do it, don’t be shy – tell us why!
• Explaining The Last Clause of the src-n Grammar (and why srcset is “fucking terrible”) by Tab Atkins
• Responsive Image proposals: fight between WebKit and Blink reps. Tab’s right. Bring your art-directed popcorn. Meanwhile, Mozilla marks the bug to implement srcset “wontfix”; “will file a bug to implement src-n instead” writes Mozilla’s Mr Marcos.
• CARGO CULT CSS
• Creating Non-Rectangular Layouts with CSS Shapes
• Open-Sourced H.264 Removes Barriers to WebRTC – Cisco releases open h.264, absorbs licensing costs. Note: this is just the video codec, not the accompanying audio codec that usually makes up mp4 video
• CSS Scroll Snap Points – another interesting W3C submission from Microsoft
• cite and blockquote – reloaded – “The definitions of the blockquote and cite elements in the HTML specification have recently been updated. This article explains what the changes mean for developers.”
• State of the Mobile Web: Bangladesh: 3 in 4 Opera Mini page views are Facebook. Nokia is dominant handset. Opera Mini on Smartphone use up 220% year on year
• “Steve Jobs patent upheld”
• Lossy Compressed Image Formats Study – Mozilla
• Icon fonts, unicode ranges, and IE8’s compatibility mode using icon fonts in the private use area of the unicode range makes IE8 pretend to be IE7.
• Talking of unicode, What’s new in Unicode 7.0 ? – Reversed Hand with Middle Finger Extended”, “Reversed Victory Hand” (British equivalent of the finger), and “Raised Hand with Part Between Middle and Ring Fingers” (live long and prosper) and “MAN IN BUSINESS SUIT LEVITATING” as well as many, many others
• Thoughts on “the end ™” of MathML in Chrome/Chromium
• Avoiding Unnecessary Paints: Animated GIF Edition
• Streams API (Editors Draft) “provides an API for representing binary and string data in web applications as a Stream object, as well as programmatically building and reading its contents.”
• Long Term Web Semantics by Alex Russell. “Something irks me about the phrase “semantic HTML”. TL;DR – semantic elements have to do something; Semantic Web is not going to happen; Web Components are the future.

Tools’n’stuff

• A guide to using Github Pages
• RemoteDebug – ” an initiative to unify remote debugging across browsers”. Also .nex, to unify extensions
• Extensionizr “helps you create the basis for your own awesome chrome extension!”
• ios-webkit-debug-proxy A DevTools proxy (WebKit Remote Debugging Protocol) for iOS devices (Safari Remote Web Inspector).

Misc

• Burka Avenger: Pakistan’s first female super-hero: a teacher-by-day, masked-vigilante-by-night who uses books and pens to defeat Taliban-like figures. Should (can?) a super-hero be wearing a burka?
• Best Pictures from Russian Dating Sites
• Weblebrity trumps
• Rude Tube Map
• fuck yeah psychedelic cats

If Molly Holzschlag has helped you (and if you’re a webdev, she has), please help her pay for her chemotherapy. And then have a think about the morals of a first world society that doesn’t provide this to its citizens.

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