‘Web Development Reading List #119: Bulletproof Third-Party Content and Progressive Applications’

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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.

I wish you a happy New Year! But although we write another number now — 2016 — your habits and goals won’t change overnight. That is why I’m not convinced of New Year’s resolutions. You should have goals, resolutions and you should try to improve yourself.

But bear in mind to make these goals reasonable, actually achievable for you, and re–iterate in smaller periods than just once a year. I think that works way better than having one large resolution and then feeling bad because, of course, you failed to reach your big goal. Make the small things count and improve in small steps!

News

  • This week, IPv6 is twenty years old and it celebrates its birthday with a global share of 10%. It’s incredible how slow the usage of IPv6 has spread but for two years now we have been seeing a growing adoption of the technology and I’m delighted to see how it will develop over the next two years.
  • Finally, Amazon Cloudfront now supports gzipping text and binary content. You can and should enable it right now if you serve such files over the service.
World Map highlighting the USA in green bright with a label stating that the IPv6 Adoption is 24.41%, the Latency is 10ms and the Impact is 0.08%
The adoption of the IPv6 technology is growing, albeit slowly, reaching 10% in January. (Large preview)

General

  • Really, if you only read one thing this week about web development, let it be this transcript of Maciej Ceglowski’s talk “The Website Obesity Crisis” or watch the talk.
  • Stephen Hay writes about best practices featured in blog articles and why reality is often very different, requiring us to be more pragmatic and less idealistic. The reality is sometimes messy, not all people can spend days optimizing the smallest details.
  • Everybody who has ever linked to a third party and checked the health of links from time to time knows the issue: broken links. And we still change URLs or remove resources (yes, I did this myself a couple of times) without sending a proper redirect or notice to the user. We do that despite knowing that the hyperlink is one of the most important parts of the web. I think this is also a good place to remind you of this article, too.

Concepts & Design

  • Troy Hunt complains that in 2016, websites still fail on basic user experiences and, instead, take over the user’s screen with newsletter subscriptions, surveys, multi–part articles, password restrictions, popover ads, cookie warnings and scroll–jacking.

Tools

  • Working with npm? Then you’re probably annoyed by installing dependencies over and over again over the network. Fortunately, there is a second option that lets you use many features of npm offline. Addy Osmani explains what you need to do to use it.

Security

Web Performance

  • If you include a third-party script, you should always be aware of its consequences. As you don’t control the resource but often rely on it, you should spend some time thoroughly considering whether it’s worth implementing it, what happens if the script is not available on the remote server any longer and, more specifically, whether your application will still work in such cases. Tammy Everts shares a couple of tips to consider when you include a third party script. Lots of great advice regarding advertising scripts, their ROI, caching methods, and how to detect malicious changes in such scripts.
  • Web app loading times are a problem. Gleb Bahmutov has published an article describing what you can do to show the user a nearly instant application state by using Service Workers. Furthermore, a small addition shows how you can run the Express server in the browser with Service Workers.

HTML / SVG

Accessibility

JavaScript

CSS / Sass

  • For many people, CSS Blend Modes are still not very well-known. Justin McDowell explains how the different modes work, what effects you can achieve with them and the remaining (and new) problems you have to deal with.

Work & Life

Go Beyond…

  • In California, a massive methane leak has been happening since October and it’s as bad as the BP oil spill a few years ago. In fact, the daily leakage has the same 20–year climate impact as driving 7 million cars a day. And it’s yet to see if the leak can be fixed by March, 2016. Gosh, this is bad and I still can’t believe it’s only covered so little in the media.
  • Paul Krugman has a good column on privilege, pathology, and power. It’s been proven that extreme wealth can be bad for your soul. But it also affects other people, governments due to bad decisions and our mind which worries more about saving taxes than about other people or laws.
  • SpaceX, the space company by Elon Musk, has created some beautiful posters advertising traveling to Mars as a tourist destination.
Mars Journeys illustration with an astronaut flying on a jetpack in Mars
SpaceX, the space company by Elon Musk, has created some beautiful posters advertising traveling to Mars as a tourist destination. (Large preview)

And with that I’ll close for this week. In case you like what I write each week, please support me with a donationor share this resource with other people. You can learn more [about the costs of the project here](“https://wdrl.info/costs/"). It’s available via E–Mail, RSS and online.

Thanks and all the best, Anselm

Further Reading

Smashing Editorial (nl, mrn)