Web Development Reading List #156: Browser News, Webpack 2, And Lessons Learned From HPKP

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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.

Is a person who is sitting by herself in a room alone? From an outside perspective, it might seem so, but the human brain is way more interesting in these regards. We carry a map of relationships inside ourselves, and it depends on this map if the person actually does feel alone or not.

I just read “Stress and the Social Self: How Relationships Affect Our Immune System”, and I feel that we can learn a lot from it. In fact, I might see social media from a different perspective now. We’re social beings, I love sharing good content with you, so, without further ado, here’s this week’s web dev reading list.

News

  • Opera 41 and Chrome 54 are out, and they come with some interesting new features. The updates now support Custom Elements v1 as well as some new and convenient JavaScript methods like ParentNode.prototype.append() or unprefixed CSS user-select. On the other hand, they removed TouchEvent.prototype.initTouchEvent (you’ll need to use the constructor from now on), and KeyboardEvent.prototype.keyIdentifier has been replaced by KeyboardEvent.prototype.key.
  • Following a suggestion by other major browser vendors, Mozilla will distrust WoSign and StartCom certificates from January 1st, 2017 due to backdated certificates and non-disclosure and denial of an acquisition of the two companies. A great step for better CA security.
  • Node.js v6 transitioned to the current LTS version this week and Node.js v7 has been released, too. It covers 98% of ES6, brings the new V8 engine, improved reliability and performance, and a new URL-parser based on the WHATWG URL standard.

General

  • With the upcoming Chrome 55 (now in beta), the browser will finally get support for Pointer Events. It will also support JavaScript async/await-functions and revive the CSS hyphens property after years of absence in Chromium browsers. The once Event Listener option will also be added and, to improve load times and prevent failed navigations, cross-origin and parser-blocking scripts injected using document.write() will no longer load over 2G connections (which also means that 3rd-party fallbacks as used by the HTML5Boilerplate won’t work anymore in upcoming Chrome versions).

Tools & Workflows

Vectr
Vectr is a simple yet powerful cross-platform vector graphics editor. (Image credit: Vectr)

Security

Privacy

Web Performance

  • Brian Armstrong from Canopy explains why you shouldn’t rely on default DNS settings, as the recent Dyn DNS outage has shown. He covers how to configure DNS the right way, why a longer TTL is important, and why having different nameservers from different providers can save your service’s uptime.
Multiple nameservers from only one DNS provider
Having multiple nameservers is good, but make sure that they come from different DNS providers so that requests can be resolved by others if one fails. (Image credit: Brian Armstrong)

JavaScript

  • Fuse.js is a new and light-weight JavaScript fuzzy-search library.

CSS/Sass

  • Roman Komarov wrote about conditions in CSS Custom Properties, about solutions, challenges, and how you can benefit from preprocessors when it comes to more complex conditions. The article also mentions a couple of interesting ideas on how the web standard could be extended.

Work & Life

Going Beyond…

And with that, I’ll close for this week. If 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 email, RSS, and online.

Further Reading

Smashing Editorial (ah, mrn)