Bruce Lawson's personal site

The <picture> element

I proposed it 2.5 years ago. Loads of cleverer people worked hard on it. The RICG is holding a fundraiser to pay developer Yoav Weiss to code it in Blink and WebKit. Opera (my employer) contributed $1000, dozens of individual developers – people like you – pledged money as well.

The inital target of $10,000 has been reached, but don’t let that deter you from contributing – it means Yoav can work for longer, and maybe even have a break for a coffee and a piss now and then. (Coders, eh?)

• A Q&A on the Picture Element including “why <picture> *and* src-set?”
• Bringing Responsive Images to Browsers
• Srcset and sizes – A jolly illustrated guide to the newest bits in new <picture> spec: sizes and w in srcset

Standards ‘n’ Shiz

• In a world�� of web apps that don’t work off-line, one spec shall find his destiny. That spec�� is ��Service Worker. Think of it as AppCache done right: a non-slapdash AppCache.
• 2014 State of Element Queries by Tab Atkins.
• Removing showModalDialog() from the Web platform> – why, when and what to use instead.
• Happy first birthday to Blink – by me, and Blink’s First Birthday (chromium.org)
• The W3C Web Payments Workshop minutes of the first meeting. This is an important problem to solved, and work has begun.
• Confessions of a CSS Expert – “Before long, I’d gotten into the hard stuff. I was putting multiple classes on any one element… Soon enough, sites in production were using <div>s for everything: buttons, headings, checkboxes, whatever. It was like Drupal, but even more obsolete.”
• A Proposal for Credential-based Login – “There is a growing need for digitally verifiable credentials on the Web. Being able to prove that you are who you say you are is important when paying or receiving payment.”
• CSS Aliases (Draft) – “This specification defines methods of defining “aliases�� for long or commonly-used values in several CSS features, reducing repetition in the stylesheet.”
• Peter Gasston: Introduction to Web Components (Edge Conf video, 10 minutes)
• Accessibility and the Shadow DOM
• Practical application and usage of the W3C Device Orientation API – amazingly in-depth article by Rich Tibbett. As a bonus, it uses the phrase “gimbal lock”.

Industry n Stuff

• Africa’s top 10 sites and mobile handsets (most visited domains: Facebook & Google) from the monthly State of the Mobile Web Report
• Waterfalls 101: How to use a waterfall chart to diagnose your website’s performance pains
• Make dropbox to serve html pages as UTF-8
• One link on GOV.UK � 350,000 more organ donors A/B testing copy on government website generates more sign-ups to organ donation service
• You Got the Documents. Now What? – guide for journalists on turning documents (including paper, and 1.7GB CSV files) into data for analysis and publication
• Learn from the BPAS web site data breach Pregnancy advice charity fined�200,000 after hack by anti-abortionist for inadvertently storing contact form submissions
• ‘Censor my internet please!’ – a Pakistani blogger writes “The Government in Pakistan does not censor the web – rather it follows a strategic covert control model… When a stance for the opening up of a video portal is equated with blasphemy, how many can be expected to speak up?”

Misc

• Angkor Wat on Street View
• Metal Cats: Hardcore Metal Musicians Pose With Their Cats
• The Clichéd Stock Photo Song

Buy "Calling For The Moon", my debut album of songs I wrote while living in Thailand, India, Turkey. (Only £2, on Bandcamp.)

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