Reading List
This reading list is sponsored by Wix Engineering, who give me money to research stuff, and when I find interesting things, I put them here.
- Why Are App Install Banners Still A Thing? – Progressive Web App banners convert 56x more often than native apps banners. More than 50% of those choosing native don’t finish install; PWA install is near-instant By Alex Russell and Owen Campbell-Moore.
- CSS Animations vs Web Animations API
- Responsive Images – The srcset and sizes Attributes – by Ire Aderinokun (and some comments from me).
- Using CSS variables correctly – AKA “Custom Properties”
- How To Approach CSS layouts in 2017and beyond – Basic intro to Flexbox & CSS Grids, if you know nothing about them. (FWIW, I disagree that display:table is a hack, though; it doesn’t require extra markup and it works. That’s what it’s for.)
- Pure CSS grid overlays for designing – “Just link the CSS that fits your grid or create your custom overlay”
- Powerful New Additions to the CSS Grid Inspector in Firefox Nightly – Firefox Grid Layout inspector about to get even better.
- HTML imports are the best web component
- HTML Modules – a discussion about HTML Imports on top of ES Modules (which doesn’t exist yet).
- multiple pseudo-elements per selector – Why can’t you have multiple pseudo-elements per CSS selector? Co-editor of Selectors level 4 spec, @fantasai, reveals all. What happens next will shock you!
- The State Of Advanced Website Builders – Will Wix (my current paymasters), Squarespace, The Grid et al put web developer out of business? (TL;DR: no).
- A blind customer couldn’t use Winn-Dixie’s website. He sued. Changes are coming – Miami Herald newspaper
- Winn-Dixie Decision in Florida Sets Landmark Precedent in Digital Accessibility – “court used WCAG 2.0 standards to evaluate Winn-Dixie’s website, and built those standards into its court order”
- Top seven free color contrast checkers & analyzers
- An overview of PDF inaccessibility
- Responsive display text by Richard Rutter. (From Xmas; I missed this before.)
- Dealing with the event loop from other specifications – how specs manage main thread vs async work
- Teaching React Without Using React – “How should I teach React to PHP developers?”
- Mobile Fact Sheet – USA demographic data on mobile phone ownership, dependancy, ownership of other devices, etc
- Firefox Focus New to Android, blocks annoying ads and protects your privacy – new browser from Mozilla.
- Google now compresses display ads with Brotli, reducing data usage by 15% to 40% – The amount of bandwidth ads gobble up is of concern to users, but so is tracking, usability and annoyance.
- EU proposes banning encryption backdoors – “End-to-end security could be mandatory across most of Europe”. Compare to UK Investigatory Powers Act.
- NSA’s use of ‘traffic shaping’ allows unrestrained spying on Americans – NSA can trick traffic into routeing outside a territory, where it can hoover up data as “foreign” under an Executive Order signed by Ronald Reagan.
- IoT goes nuclear: creating a ZigBee chain reaction – attack on Philips Hue smart lightbulbs shows how a whole city could be taken over in minutes. “The team then wrote a python script to impersonate a lightbulb and ask for an OTA update using the code.”
- Virgin Media urges password change over hacking risk – “In one case a home CCTV system was hacked using an administrator account that was not password protected. Hackers were able to watch live pictures and in some cases were able to move cameras inside the house.”
- And now, a brief definition of the web – “Linkable; agnostic to the client” and open. Nothing revelatory here, but a good summary, and one I agree with.
- Elephant in the Valley – a survey of 200 senior women in tech (overwhelmingly Silicon Valley) reveals predictably disappointing sexism
- This Machine Turns Trump Tweets into Planned Parenthood Donations – “And it’s open source so you can help make it better”. When Trump tweets about a corporation, the stock price changes. So you can use it to invest your money and (optionally) donate that money to charities.
Buy "Calling For The Moon", my debut album of songs I wrote while living in Thailand, India, Turkey. (Only Β£2, on Bandcamp.)