Reading List
URLs
- Burying the URL “Today, a Canary build of Google Chrome removed something kind of important from the browser: the URL.”
- Improving the URL bar by Jank Archibald (a Chromo Sapian)
- URLy warning by Jeremy Keith
- On Chrome hiding URLs to protect users from phishing – Remy Sharp
- Security changes in Opera 21 – on reworking of the Address field, to cope with some situations which could have caused confusion. (Opera 15-20 obscured some of URL, Opera 21 ships with a setting to always show it in full.)
- URLs are already dead by Nicholas Zakas. Some compelling arguments here.
- Some data: Does Domain Highlighting Help People Identify Phishing Sites? (PDF, 10 pages)
App Links
Facebook announced App Links, a “an open, cross-platform solution for app-to-app linking”.
- Facebook-backed spec lets apps link to other apps on mobes (“Look, ma, we’ve invented the web – only with no browser”)
- Bye-Bye Browsers: Why Facebook’s New App Links Are a Big Deal
- Related-ish: The ebb of the web by Boris Smus (Google) “By dropping the notion of THE WEB (singular), and ushering an era of specialized browsers, we can split our universe of devices into subsets and increase the baseline greatest common denominator.”
Other standards ‘n’ stuff
- Why Service Workers will be HTTPS only. I complained on Twitter that “This means devs must pay to use SW. Also feels like social engineering?“. Pascal Hartig replied “There are free playground services like GitHub pages that are served over HTTPS as well as free certificates.” Jake Archibald said, “Free certs are available (eg startssl.com/?app=1). As you can see from that thread, the decision was purely for security reasons”. However, setting up SSL isn’t trivial, opined Matt Wilcox.
- WebComponents.org – a place to discuss and evolve web component best-practices
- talking of Web Components, should we require the use of a hyphen in custom attributes of custom elements? Yes, in my opinion; as custom elements must have a hphen in the name, requiring a hyphen in custom attributes establishes a useful convention that means they won’t clash with future global attributes.
- Tips for Creating Accessible SVG by Léonie Watson. If I could snog an article, I’d snog this one.
- Inline SVG vs Icon Fonts by Chris Coyier
- The new srcset and sizes explained by Martin Wolf
- Moving Forward with CSS Shapes by Sara Soueidan
- Mozilla hacks: How fast is PDF.js? – Opera and Mozilla working together to display PDFs with web technologies, fast
- Is HTML Too Big To Fail? by Robin Berjon (HTML editor, W3C)
- Create Rich Web Typography With OpenType: Discretionary Ligatures & True Small Caps (a year old; new to me.)
- The Secret Messages Inside Chinese URLs – Decoding 4008-517-517.com
And finally:
On October 4th 2013, YouTubers ‘Sophie Danze’ and ‘JilianlovestheBiebs’ had a conversation on the video ‘One Direction: That’s what makes you beautiful. The following is a reconstruction.”
Buy "Calling For The Moon", my debut album of songs I wrote while living in Thailand, India, Turkey. (Only £2, on Bandcamp.)