Web Development Reading List #118: Opera Mini, BPG Format, Accessible Tabs and Flexbox

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Web Design, Design, Web Development Reading List
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Anselm is a freelance front-end developer who cares about sustainable front-end experiences and ethical choices in life. He writes the WDRL, and is co-founder … More about Anselm ↬

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What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at.

Today is the Christmas day for many of us around the world and I hope you’re already enjoying the day with your family or friends. This time is often a rare opportunity to relax a bit, avoid emails for a couple of days and not to be disturbed by daily routine, as other people aren’t working either. Before the new year comes up next, there’s a yet another web development reading list, so you won’t get bored over the next few days! ;)

Wi-Fi in public places — What happens if you put a hacker into a cafe with public WiFi for 20 minutes? You can learn a lot about people around you.

General

What happens if you put a hacker into a cafe with public WiFi for 20 minutes? You suddenly know where everyone else using this network was born, what schools they attended, and the last five things they googled.
With Opera Mini covering a huge, growing market, it’s important that we care about the experience on that platform as well. WTF Opera Mini tells you what features and technologies Opera Mini does not support.
The Year We All Dogearmark Our Bitscriptions, Contextually is a lovely forecast for 2016 by Ryan Gantz, and it’s a fun read. He reveals that in 2016, finally, the original promise of the Internet will be totally, fully reached.

News

You might not be the kind of person who’s interested in international politics. But in 2016 the legal foundations which underpin our work on the web are being revisited. And that affects you. Heather Burns summarizes what might be changed and how it affects you as a digital professional. Time to read and take action if you don’t agree with that.
The IESG approved a new HTTP status code. HTTP Code 451 can now be send if a content is unavailable for legal reasons.

Security

Microsoft reacts to recent discoveries of companies intercepting certificates on computers to inject ads, and, thus weakening the security of the PC user.

Privacy

New data protection regulations reveal the funding of Adblock Plus – one of the biggest players in the advertisement blocker world. Maybe it’s time to tell your friends and relatives to switch to something that is really independent like uBlock Origin or similar ones. Also a good alternative would be privacy tools like Disconnect (funded by premium paid services) or Firefox’ Privacy Protection mode.

Web Performance

Tobias Baldauf shares how we can optimize our imagery on websites to be as small as possible, using lazy loading, responsive images, and, if it’s applicable, the BPG image format via JavaScript.
If you have a static website, you can speed it up by delivering it over a CDN. This article explains how you can do that and what effect it has for your users.

JavaScript

Remy Sharp tells us how to properly build a tab component for the web, accessible, functional, and progressively enhanced.

CSS / Sass

As web developers, we anticipated that moment when we could use Flexbox so much that we now misuse it for entire layouts (and now with a promising Flexbox polyfill for legacy IE). But actually it hasn’t been built to allow us to build page layouts — it was always intended to help us build flexible elements on a page. To create an entire layout, we can use the grid layout technology. Rachel Andrew gives an introduction to the Grid module and shows the difference between it and Flexbox.

Work & Life

Jeremy Girard writes about how to get more done without adding more workload as this has proven to be difficult. A good read about finding your most productive time, scheduling emails, and a few tricks to improve your effectiveness at work.

Go Beyond…

I often tell you that you don’t need to read every link, every edition. Christoph Rumpel now covers another aspect of articles, screencasts and any other learning resource: We’re all learning all the time. Therefore, if you read an article you don’t need to change everything and adopt the principles mentioned in the article but think about it and adopt it if it makes sense to you.
A few smart people have founded and funded an open, non-profit company for AI called OpenAI. The goal is to make AI an extension of individual human wills without focusing on making money of this new field but focus on values and ethics instead. On board are a couple of well-known tech scene people, with some of them already working on AI.

And with that, I’ll close for this week. I wish you a happy holidays and enjoy your time. In case you like what I write each week, please support me with a donation or share this resource with other people. You can learn more about the costs of the project here. It’s available via E-Mail, RSS and online.

Thanks and all the best, Anselm