Web Development Reading List #105

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Tools, Coding, 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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nginx released 1.9.5 this week and with that, lets you enable HTTP/2. Also, Firefox 41 is out and now brings support for SVG favicons. Our dear friend Anselm Hannemann is keeping track of everything in the web development reading list so you don’t have to. The result is a carefully collected list of articles that popped up over the last week and which might interest you.

*What’s happening in the industry? What important techniques have emerged recently? What about new case studies, insights, techniques and tools? Our dear friend Anselm Hannemann is keeping track of everything in the web development reading list so you don’t have to. The result is a carefully collected list of articles that popped up over the last week and which might interest you. — Ed.*

Hey, fog and rain take over, temperatures are falling and the leaves of the trees are changing their colors. Sitting in front of a computer all day, reflecting how fast things change in nature, I can often see a similarity between our world of front-end development and things going on in the world.

Not only our tools and technologies are changing fast, but so does the whole world. If we recognize this, suddenly our attitude changes. It’s important to do something but we need to take care of ourselves and set a pace we can live on—sustainable and not burning our energy to an unhealthy level. Pick a section you want to improve on and don’t worry if you can’t read all articles in my weekly lists… it’s okay.

Firefox 41 is released. — Firefox 41 is out and now brings support for SVG favicons, massively improved `box-shadow` rendering performance and CSS Font Loading API.

News

*   [Firefox 41 is out](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/41.0/releasenotes/) and now brings support for SVG favicons, massively improved `box-shadow` rendering performance, CSS Font Loading API; also, from now on WebRTC requires <abbr title="Perfect Forward Secrecy">Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS)</abbr>.

nginx released 1.9.5 this week and with that, lets you enable HTTP/2. This is a huge step to the next generation of the http protocol. Interested? Check out a tutorial on how to enable HTTP/2 on your nginx.

Tools

*   Ever wanted to have an inline editor on your website? Then go check out [ContentTools](https://getcontenttools.com/), a clean and beautiful inline editor that offers exactly the features you want to have as content editor.</p>

Security

*   With the growing usage of CDNs to deliver your static assets, it’s important to ensure the CDN is not compromised. Imagine an attacker injecting something into your code by intercepting or hacking the CDN. Of course you will not realize it until it’s too late. Since a few months, a web standard called “[Subresource Integrity](https://www.w3.org/TR/SRI/)” has been developed. The github team now shares how you can use [subresource integrity to check if your files are compromised](https://githubengineering.com/subresource-integrity/) or not and act accordingly.</p>

Privacy

*   Probably the topic of the month is ad blocking. I mentioned it in my reading lists already a few times but since the release of iOS9 indeed people went crazy on whether it's ethically correct to block ads or not. Sam Snelling wrote an interesting and great round-up on [what he found out about ad networks infiltrating your privacy](https://snelling.io/on-ad-blocking) and why it’s only natural and understandable that people block all ads after learning about it.</p>

Web Performance

*   Nobody likes it when a webpage suddenly makes weird things. One of them could be an unexpected layout reflow. Paul Irish wrote up a comprehensive [list of what functions, elements, properties or actions force a layout reflow](https://gist.github.com/paulirish/5d52fb081b3570c81e3a).</p>

Accessibility

*   Learn from your errors. That’s what Medium does and you can learn from their errors as well. They wrote up [how they messed up with accessibility](https://medium.com/medium-eng/five-goofy-things-medium-did-that-break-accessibility-3bc804ae818d) in their application by doing simple things wrong and now share how to fix it properly.</p>

CSS / Sass

*   Debugging transitions or animations in a browser has always been a pain. And while Chrome recently introduced a cubic bezier editor and a play controller for DevTools, Firefox 44 will bring us a [visual timeline tool for animations](https://medium.com/@patrickbrosset/inspecting-animations-in-firefox-f1f5fd941567). Patrick Brosset explains how it will work and from what I saw in the tool I suspect this will be extended to a real timeline editor in future.

Vincent Pickering wrote up a few useful use cases for the new CSS calc() function.

Work & Life

*   Give refugees work and they’ll do awesome things. Just by giving people appropriate education and let them work, we will nourish innovation. It doesn’t matter what background they have or where they come from. Following that motto, the crowd-funded Kiron university now wants to solve higher education for immigrants in an unconventional way.

Daniel Mall researched a bit on where the 8-hours work day originates. While doing it, he stumbled over lots of studies on how effective people work on different hours per week. Turns out that working more is not getting more done.
Let’s capture answers to the question “What should you be spending more time on?”. The site was created at the XOXO festival this year and can give you inspiration or self reflection on where you spend your time and what your soul wants to spend time on.

Go Beyond…

*   If you don’t understand the refugee crisis happening in Europe at the moment yet, I can recommend [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnT-iF0CAZk) that explains things visually in short videos so that everyone understands it. Also check out the other videos made by them.

Kickstarter. Often seen as massively profitable company due to the share they get on each campaign, they now set a bold milestone for tech startups. Kickstarter will from now on be a public benefit corporation, making it nearly impossible to be bought by some other company or to go public. Instead, their founders decided that they want to stick to their goals, idealism, and stay independent. As a B-Corp, this is another honorable step into a sustainable direction, showing that startups don’t always sell out and aren’t always about maximum profit in short time.

And with that I’ll close for this week. 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