‘Web Development Reading List #120: Safari 9.1, Chakra Core Open Sourced, ES6 Object Shorthand Syntax’

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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? 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.

One thing we should learn to embrace more this year is to enjoy the good things and focus more on the positive news than on the negative. I started to learn more ES6 this year and have scheduled 1 to 2 small learning modules of ES6 and 1 to 2 accessibility features I don’t know yet to study each week. Currently, this works out great. If you learn something from this resource and are able to spend a few bucks this month, consider rewarding my efforts.

News

  • This week, Apple announced the pre-release of Safari 9.1 which will introduce the <picture>–element, Fast Tap on iOS, changes to modal dialogs, CSS Variable support, all, unset, font-variant-* and will-change property support as well as unprefixed CSS filter. Let’s hope that shorter release–cycles are Apple’s new strategy for a more open, more responsive browser culture.
  • jQuery 2.2 and 1.12 have been released — probably the last minor updates before jQuery 3. The updates include selector performance improvements, SVG class manipulation, and a couple of other small changes.
  • As still a lot of websites are horribly broken in Firefox, Firefox starts accepting -webkit- prefixes. With that step, they follow Microsoft with its Edge browser. Another occurrence of why vendor prefixes are nothing we should be proud of using.
  • Following Microsoft’s earlier announcement, its JavaScript engine Chakra Core is now open-source. If you want to see how it performs compared to Blink’s engine, you’ll find a small comparison here.

General

hand made illustration showing a character scaping a storm going towards a safe and sunny fortress
When disaster strikes, can you make the switch to another data center within minutes?

Tools

  • Typography Supply is an inventory of typographic tools. They help you find out which fonts are used somewhere, and also include type testers, type measurements, and many more.
  • If you use the ZSH shell, this short guide gives you a lot of advice to enhance and customize your shell.

Security

  • Guy Podjarny shares how you can eliminate known node.js / npm vulnerabilities easily.
  • If you store passwords, you probably use bcrypt for hashing them (or let’s hope so, at least). But times change, and given our computing power today, bcrypt isn’t very safe anymore. In fact, with a highly–parallelized GPU, it’s easy to crack bcrypt in a short time. That’s why you should upgrade to Argon2, which will soon be the official new standard by the IETF. Now check out how to use it.

JavaScript

  • Ian Feather shows the new ES6 object shorthand syntax and rest properties.
  • Starting with the soon to be released Firefox 46, Firefox will warn you to alter scroll positions in a scroll event listener. This is due to the newly implemented asynchronous scrolling technique. The Firefox Site Compatibility Working Group also provides workarounds and fixes for that.
  • It’s easy to forget when you build JavaScript applications, but you should always remember to provide meaningful fallback content via the <noscript> element. It also targets people disabling scripts in their browsers or using content blockers.

Work & Life

  • Seeing Basecamp’s article about employee benefits made me again aware of the big gaps that exist in social and employee care around the world. In Germany, many of the mentioned benefits are a requirement for companies and supported by the government (health insurance, parental leave, retirement plan). It’s great to see such things being provided unsolicitedly by the company and my hope is that this will become a government standard all over the world in the next decade.

Go Beyond…

The anatomy of 6 sea cucumbers
The anatomy of sea cucumbers — one of the 180,000 copyright–free images that the New York Public Library released to the public.

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 E–Mail, RSS and online.

Thanks and all the best, Anselm

Further Reading

Smashing Editorial (nl, mrn)