Monthly Web Development Update 102018: The Hurricane Web, End-To-End-Integrity, And RAIL

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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What happened in the web dev world in the past four weeks? In his monthly reading list, Anselm summarized everything you need to know — from browser news to valuable techniques, tools, and lessons learned.

With the latest studies and official reports out this week, it seems that to avoid an irreversible climate change on Planet Earth, we need to act drastically within the next ten years. This rose a couple of doubts and assumptions that I find worth writing about.

One of the arguments I hear often is that we as individuals cannot make an impact and that climate change is “the big companies’ fault”. However, we as the consumers are the ones who make the decisions what we buy and from whom, whose products we use and which ones we avoid. And by choosing wisely, we can make a change. By talking to other people around you, by convincing your company owner to switch to renewable energy, for example, we can transform our society and economy to a more sustainable one that doesn’t harm the planet as much. It will be a hard task, of course, but we can’t deny our individual responsibility.

Maybe we should take this as an occasion to rethink how much we really need. Maybe going out into nature helps us reconnect with our environment. Maybe building something from hand and with slow methods, trying to understand the materials and their properties, helps us grasp how valuable the resources we currently have are — and what we would lose if we don’t care about our planet now.

News

  • Chrome 70 is here with Desktop Progressive Web Apps on Windows and Linux, public key credentials in the Credential Management API, and named Workers.
  • Postgres 11 is out and brings more robustness and performance for partitioning, enhanced capabilities for query parallelism, Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation for expressions, and a couple of other useful and convenient changes.
  • As the new macOS Mojave and iOS 12 are out now, Safari 12 is as well. What’s new in this version? A built-in password generator, a 3D and AR model viewer, icons in tabs, web pages on the latest watch OS, new form field attribute values, the Fullscreen API for iOS on iPads, font collection support in WOFF2, the font-display loading CSS property, Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.0, and a couple of security enhancements.
  • Google’s decision to force users to log into their Google account in the browser to be able to access services like Gmail caused a lot of discussions. Due to the negative feedback, Google promptly announced changes for v70. Nevertheless, this clearly shows the interests of the company and in which direction they’re pushing the app. This is unfortunate as Chrome and the people working on that project shaped the web a lot in the past years and brought the ecosystem “web” to an entirely new level.
  • Microsoft Edge 18 is out and brings along the Web Authentication API, new autoplay policies, Service Worker updates, as well as CSS masking, background blend, and overscroll.

General

  • Max Böck wrote about the Hurricane Web and what we can do to keep users up-to-date even when bandwidth and battery are limited. Interestingly, CNN and NPR provided text-only pages during Hurricane Florence to serve low traffic that doesn’t drain batteries. It would be amazing if we could move the default websites towards these goals — saving power and bandwidth — to improve not only performance and load times but also help the environment and make users happier.

UI/UX

Redesign portfolio website
Shawn Parks shares the lessons he learned from redesigning his portfolio every year. (Image credit)

Accessibility

Tooling

Privacy

  • Guess what? Our simple privacy-enhancing tools that delete cookies are useless as this article shows. There are smarter ways to track a user via TLS session tracking, and we don’t have much power to do anything against it. So be aware that someone might be able to track you regardless of how many countermeasures you have enabled in your browser.
  • Josh Clark’s comment on university research about Google’s data collection is highlighting the most important parts about how important Android phone data is to Google’s business model and what type of information they collect even when your smartphone is idle and not moving location.

Security

End-to-End Integrity with IPFS illustrated with cats and dogs
Cloudflare’s IPFS gateway allows a website to be end-to-end secure while maintaining the performance and reliability benefits of being served from their edge network. (Image credit)

Web Performance

Illustration of the RAIL model
The four parts of the RAIL performance model: Response, Animation, Idle, Load. (Image credit)

HTML & SVG

JavaScript

  • Willian Martins shares the secrets of JavaScript’s bind() function, a widely unknown operator that is so powerful and allows us to invoke this from somewhere else into named, non-anonymous functions. A different way to write JavaScript.
  • Everyone knows what the “9am rush hour” means. Paul Lewis uses the term to rethink how we build for the web and why we should try to avoid traffic jams on the main thread of the browser and outsource everything that doesn’t belong to the UI into separate traffic lanes instead.

CSS

An item placed inside a grid using negative grid lines
Did you know you can use negative grid line numbers to position Grid items with CSS? (Image credit)

Work & Life

Going Beyond…

  • In the Netherlands, there’s now a legal basis that prescribes CO2 emissions to be cut by 25% by 2020 (that’s just a bit more than one year from now). I love the idea and hope other countries will be inspired by it — Germany, for example, which currently moves its emission cut goals farther and farther into the future.
  • David Wolpert explains why computers use so much energy and how we could make them vastly more efficient. But for that to happen, we need to understand the thermodynamics of computing better.
  • Turning down twenty billion dollars is cool. Of course, it is. But the interesting point in this article about the Whatsapp founder who just told the world how unhappy he is having sold his service to Facebook is that it seems that he believed he could keep the control over his product.

One more thing: I’m very grateful for all of you who helped raise my funding level for the Web Development Reading List to 100% this month. I never got so much feedback from you and so much support. Thank you! Have a great month!

—Anselm

Smashing Editorial (cm)