59 - WDRL – Web Development Reading List

Hey,

I’m a bit late this week with the reading list but so much stuff has taken my time in the past days. Enjoy reading this week’s articles and consider supporting me to cover the costs of the weekly resource you love:

Big news: Internet Explorer now has a uservoice page where you as a user can vote for features to be supported by IE.
Microsoft also announced Windows 10 technical preview and its new IE featuring HTTP/2, better JS performance and some more little improvements.
You wonder why Windows 10 instead of 9? Well, some thoughts which might indeed be true, say because of OS sniffing. Here’s the appropriate search on GitHub.
Cloudflare recently made big news by announcing free universal SSL for everyone on their platform. Yes, even free plans get it. This is a huge step and I hope others step up and will also offer this for free by default.
Ericsson has open sourced their experimental Bowser browser and released it for iOS bringing WebRTC to the platform.

Some further thoughts on privacy is a good read why we struggle with Privacy advisors and their zero tolerance strategy.
The previous link is sharead because this experiment came to my attention: How much of your data would you trade for a free cookie? You might guess, it’s ridiculously much private information people traded for just as much as one free cookie!
Oh man, the indie web movement is so important! If you just care a bit about it, see if you can join border:none 2014 in a few weeks.

A good reminder how important it is to have a good balance of line length in responsive web designs.
Mike Monteiro’s second book “You’re my favorite client” can now be purchased and sounds very promising.
If you use video backgrounds on a website, be sure to follow these guidelines.
If you’re interested in hand crafted arts and design and live in the UK you should give Whosit&Whatsit a visit and support their crowdfunding campaign.

See what Remy Sharp discovered using Firefox DevTools instead of Chrome’s for just one week.
Firefox DevTools now display pseudo elements (:after) in the DOM. Yay!
There’s a new alternative to Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator tools on OS X: Affinity Designer
Use Font Family Reunion to see compatibility tables for default local fonts.
Learn from Paul Irish how to do advanced debugging with the Chrome DevTools.
Drag Gradients is a great webapp that lets you create advanced gradients via Drag and Drop.
Advice of the day: Don't rm yourself.

Learn how to rewrite history in Git. It’s super powerful and needs much caution and care as you could delete important things but sometimes it’s very helpful.

Ian Feather’s talk at NightlyBuild 2014 about “Establishing Performance Contexts”
To Picturefill, or not to Picturefill… that is the question. And Scott Jehl gives an answer here in his article.
By the way, here’s an article sharing how a responsive images implementation could look like also from a backend view.
Lastly, Jason Grigsby shares his insights on Image Resizing Services.
Do you have questions on HTTP/2? Here’s the FAQ page that helps you out.

Whoop whoop! Libsass 3.0-rc1 is out with massive improvements, new features (yes @extend!) and more spec matching than ever before. Along with that, the founders and core developers of Sass announced feature parity and a unified roadmap for rubysass and libsass. Exciting days ahead!
More news on Sass from the SassConf 2014 can be seen in this massive roundup.

Why your Passion is the most important thing to keep things running and why you should hold it even when things don’t go as expected.
Aaron Mentele shares in The Crow and the Cave Dweller his insights how the web industry works and how to find your personal place of interest between agencies and other freelancers.
Your code will and must change over time.

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Thanks and all the best,
Anselm

WDRL 59 from 5.10.2014