Bruce Lawson's personal site : 2015 : March

Reading List

Friday 13 March 2015

GOLD: grunt-respimg A responsive image workflow for optimizing and resizing your images
Increasing engagement with Web App install banners and Push Notifications on the Open Web – bringing the web closer to native. This is jolly good news from the Chrome team. (I’m one of the team that is working on this in Opera, too.)
js;dr = JavaScript required; Didn’t Read by Tantek Çelik – “Pages that are empty without JS: dead to history (archive-org), unreliable for search results (despite any search engine claims of JS support, check it yourself), and thus ignorable.”
Accessible Drag and Drop with Multiple Items by James “Brothercake” Edwards
Blink has a new memory team, to ensure that memory is used more efficiently. Sigbjorn from Opera’s on the team.
MySpace � what went wrong ��The site was a massive spaghetti-ball mess’ (by former VP of online marketing)
UX Tactics To Make Slow Things Seem Faster – nothing earth-shattering here, but an interesting list.
Brand Simplicity vs. Our Innovation Complex – “while consumers claim interest in complex innovations (“Bring on the shiny new objects!��), they actually buy simpler products”
Apple has a software problem by Matt Wilcox (and bonus follow-up.)
Fifty Shades Generator – Snorem ipsum – goodbye! Spice up your comps with the “50 Shades generator”. NSFW, obvs.

Reading List

Friday 6 March 2015

HTTP2 for front-end web developers by Matt Wilcox
scrap the srcset attribute – an outraged dev hates the syntax. (I hear this a lot). @zcorpan & @tabatkins explain. Responsive images syntax *is* ugly. But it’s less ugly than all the alternatives. Like the web.
The State of Web Type by Bram Stein
Quantity Queries for CSS by Heydon Pickering
Emulating failure – “HTML has a problem. As implemented in browsers many interactive elements cannot be styled as desired by web developers… Is it just me, or are new web UI technologies continuing to try to solve the wrong problems?” by Steve Faulkner.
flexbox in 5 minutes – an interactive Flexbox tour.
Transitioning to TLS – web standards dreamboat @marcosc writes up how he did it (and “triggered a cascade of shit”)
Talking of which, Switching to HTTPS – Jeremy Keith documents the intuitive 768-step process he went through.
So, let’s make upgrading to HTPPS slightly easier. Upgrade Insecure Requests is a draft spec by @mikewest (feedback welcome!) so an author can tell the browser that subresource requests (`*<img>`, etc) should be loaded via HTPPS, even if the code just says “HTTP”. Only same-origin navigational requests (`<a>`) will be upgraded. This is to make it easy for those managing massive piles of archived content.
Intent to Implement: API to support web/native app install banners – “Many websites currently implement ��door slam interstitials’ demanding users install their native app. Our implementation only prompts users to install the app if they have already shown engagement on the site and provides much more respectful UX. We hope developers will adopt this, reducing the number of door slam users experience on the web.”
Pandora’s box model – An experiment in containing stylesheet complexity by Mr Brian Kardell
Box Tree API Level 1 – “A Collection of Interesting Ideas” from Project Houdini, a joint W3C TAG and CSS Working Group initiative to provide APIs into the CSS magic in the browser. (The minutes of the initial meet explain Houdini Aspirations and Scope and Proposed Charter, Box Tree Spec. There’s also a houdini wiki.)
The State of Global Connectivity – Only 40% of the world has ever connected to the Internet. Why? internet.org reports. (My employer, Opera, is part of internet.org.)
The Affordability Report from The Alliance for Affordable Internet.
February in Africa: All the tech news you shouldn’t miss from the past month
Report: Web Compatibility Summit – Mozilla’s nice Mr @miketaylr had a Web Compatibility summit (I attended remotely). Here’s a report.
The future of HTML with Bruce Lawson – Paul Boag’s podcast interview with me (transcribed)
How To Use GitHub and the Terminal: A Guide – illustrated, jargon-free.

Archive for March, 2015