Bruce Lawson's personal site

Here’s your Easter reading list. It’s more nourishing than chocolate eggs, and more toe-tapping than any Stravinsky spring-related ballet score.

• The Guardian has 560 million page views a month. So obviously, they implement responsive images. (yes, my favourite newspaper for the last 30 years..)
• Responsive Images 101, Part 5: Sizes – from Jason Grigsby’s excellent series of articles. sizes was the hardest part of the new RIMTs for me to understand.
• Beyond Media Queries ”” It’s Time to Get Elemental – the “wot?” and “why?” of Element Queries, the new @respimg frontier.
• Microsoft’s “Project Spartan” to support <img srcset> – so that’s all the responsive images shebang in Opera, Chrome, Firefox (from May). So far Spartan supports only the x descriptor, similar to Safari/iOS.
• Partnering with Adobe on new contributions to our web platform – Microsoft accepting commits to Spartan from a 3rd party. It’s not open source, but it could be the opening of Checkpoint Charlie.
• Blink to implement Pointer Events joining Firefox and IE. Wonder who’s missing?
• Blink: Shipping new CSS parser – Coming soon in Opera and Chrome. “On most stylesheets, the new parser performed 15-25% faster.”
• Flash’s slide into irrelevance – “The Flash plugin and the technology platform are dead, but the ideas and ambition of replacing the Web haven’t disappeared.” by Mike Davies.
• This API is so Fetching! – “The Fetch specification, which defines the API, nails down the semantics of a user agent fetching a resource.”
• Opera for Android 29 beta replaces off-road mode with a new Turbo mode, offering full HTML5 shiz & new compression
• TAG teleconference: CSS Regions Draft Feedback Can we do “CSS Regions” with “Houdini” (extensible CSS primitives) rather than new magic? ask your chums at W3C TAG
• The State of Video Codecs 2015 – “H.264 still accounts for most video encoding today, but HEVC/H.265 and VP9 are beginning to make noise. What will 2015 bring?”
• Designing For The Elderly: Ways Older People Use Digital Technology Differently
• Interaction Media Features and their potential (for incorrect assumptions) – a good Media Queries rant by the Kaiser of Cuddles, Patrick Lauke.
• CSS WG “[mediaqueries] Use-case for “viewing context” – interesting conversation r/e TV vs tablet. Also, bonus words of wisdom from Patrick Lauke.
• A Baseline for Front-End [JS] Developers: 2015 by Rebecca Murphy
• Gartner Says Worldwide Market for Refurbished Smartphones to Reach 120 Million Units by 2017
• +1 from the W3C TAG your friends at W3C TAG give Mr B. Obama a big thumbs-up for his plans to implement https on US government websites. It’s nice to see the most powerful people in the world agreeing with each other.
• When a SIM Card Goes From $2,000 to $1.50 – report on Myanmar (Burma)
• The $50 device that symbolizes a shift in North Korea – interesting Reuters report on the “notel”, a small portable media player used to watch DVDs or content stored on USB sticks that can be easily smuggled into the country and passed hand to hand, owned by up to half of urban North Koreans.
• China’s Man-on-the-Side Attack on GitHub – “Based on reports we’ve received, we believe the intent of this attack is to convince us to remove a specific class of content”.
• #WearTheRose tweet activated light up rose – Ruth John, who made me a crocheted mankini, makes a crocheted arduino-powered rose that lights up when someone tweets about rugby football.
• web in the woods: 2 days camping in Kent woods & a web conference. “5 main speakers, 5 lightning talks and fish ‘n’ chips” – 50 places only, and a pretty website (hover over the ‘book your tickets’ button)

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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