Web Development Reading List #160: Real Stories About HTTP/2, Cascading Style Sheets, And Code Of Shame

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About The Author

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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We have great new technology available to enhance our websites. But while theoretical articles explain well what the technologies do, we often struggle to find real use cases or details on how things worked out in actual projects.

This week I stumbled across a couple of great posts that share exactly these precious real-life insights: stories about HTTP/2 implementation, experiences from using the Cascade of CSS in large-scale projects, and insights into employing Service Worker and BackgroundSync to build solid forms.

News

• Support for style input type “checkbox” and “radio” via CSS landed in Firefox Nightly. Also new in Firefox Nightly is the date picker. A time picker was already added a few weeks ago.
• GitLab 8.14 brings Time Tracking, Chat commands, merge prevention until a review is done, and many other small improvements.
• Firefox will soon warn people if they are about to enter a password in insecure (HTTP) contexts. It’s time to secure every login with an HTTPS connection and enforce this as a best practice.

Web Performance

• Kazuho Oku’s slide deck about reorganizing website architecture for HTTP/2 shares real experiences of implementing HTTP/2 and valuable details on browser implementation.

Accessibility

• Tim Wright explains the difference between role="presentation" and aria-hidden="true".

JavaScript

• Michael Scharnagl explains how you can enhance a basic form (i.e. a login or comment form) with custom validation, AJAX requests, auto-expansion of a textarea, and, finally, Service Worker and BackgroundSync to store input when a connection is unstable.

CSS/Sass

• Heydon Pickering wrote about “CSS Inheritance, The Cascade And Global Scope: Your New Old Worst Best Friends.”

Work & Life

• Justin White shares his story of becoming a programmer, his job hunt in the Silicon Valley, and why he chose not to work for an average startup.
• The CTO of Basecamp critizes Microsoft’s new advertising campaign for Office 365. A good read on why sleep and dedicated non-work matter and why we shouldn’t endorse companies that don’t value these needs.
• I don’t want to write too much about this weird Black Friday thing that causes millions of people to buy stuff they’ll never use or need, but Jason Koebler has the best Black Friday deal ever: repair a gadget you already own instead of buying new stuff.

Going Beyond…

• Bill Sourour’s article “The Code I’m Still Ashamed Of” points out an important aspect of our jobs as developers: responsibility. An incredibly important story.

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.

— Anselm

Further Reading

• HTTPS Everywhere With Nginx, Varnish And Apache
• Getting Ready For HTTP/2: A Guide For Web Designers And Developers
• CSS Inheritance, The Cascade And Global Scope: Your New Old Worst Best Friends
• Rekindling Your Passion For Web Design

(mrn)