From a high-level perspective, web components will enable better composability, reusability and interoperability of front-end web application elements by providing a common way to write components in HTML.
In this article, Sebastian Metzger will show you why this will be such an important step, by showing off what can be accomplished right now using Polymer. Polymer is currently the most advanced and (self-proclaimed) production-ready library based on web components.
Read more…
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.
Read more…
My hope is for you to see that Make is an automation/orchestration tool that can be used in place of other modern build tools, and will help to strengthen your understanding and ability to use the terminal/shell environment (which is a big plus in my opinion, and helps open up many avenues of technical progression). Whole books have been written on the topic of Make and writing Makefiles so Mark will leave it up to you to investigate further beyond this post if he manages to kindle your interest.
Read more…
RAIL is a model for breaking down a user’s experience into key actions. It provides a structure for thinking about performance, so that designers and developers can reliably target the highest-impact work. The RAIL model is a lens to look at a user’s experience with a website or app as a journey comprising individual interactions. Once you know each interaction’s area, you will know what the user will perceive and, therefore, what your goals are. Sometimes it takes extra effort, but if you’re kind to the user, they’ll be good to you.
Read more…
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.
Read more…
Nicholas C. Zakas started looking for a way to automatically detect incorrect patterns. He couldn’t get the idea of a linter with pluggable runtime rules out of his head. He had just spent a bunch of time learning about Esprima and abstract syntax trees (ASTs), and he thought to himself, “It can’t be all that hard to create a pluggable JavaScript linter using an AST.” It was from those initial thoughts that ESLint was born. ESLint is a JavaScript linter that has learned from our collective past of JavaScript development. It is committed to not only being a great linter out of the box, but also to being the center of a great and growing ecosystem of plugins, shareable configs and parsers.
Read more…
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.
Read more…
Back in spring 2013, Smashing Magazine sported a <select> menu as its mobile navigation. It wasn’t considered an anti-pattern back then and Marco Hengstenberg still thinks it’s a viable solution to the complex problem of how to build accessible and functional cross-device navigation. Brad Frost wrote a few words about the pros and cons of this pattern on his blog and Marco couldn’t agree more. In this article, Marco will explain how he helped rebuild the mobile navigation in order to enhance the experience for the readers of Smashing Magazine.
Read more…
For those of us who use Varnish and also want to move to HTTPS, there is a problem: Varnish doesn’t support HTTPS. If you make the move to SSL, configuring Apache to serve your website securely, then you lose the speed advantage of Varnish. There is a relatively straightforward way to deal with this issue, and that is to stick something in between incoming SSL requests and Varnish, a layer that handles the secure connection and SSL certificates and then passes the request back to Varnish. In this article, Rachel Andrew will show you how to move your website to HTTPS, taking advantage of Varnish Cache.
Read more…
In this article, Heydon Pickering mixes old with new, taking a somewhat primitive art and breathing new life into it. With the help of Sass, he streamlines the necessary workflow and hopefully demonstrating that automation can, sometimes, be a friend to creativity. The reason he conceived the technique and wrote the necessary code for this article is because he really wanted to make cel animations of his drawings. There was already a goal. The design part is in determining what we want to make in the first place, for whom, and whether it’s really such a good idea.
Read more…