Is Github racist? asks Terence Eden in linkbaiting mode. No, but “we should consider the practice of not supporting Unicode as outmoded and dangerous as assuming every year can be represented by a two digit number”.
CSS stacking with display:table – a way of moving blocks out of source order without Flexbox by HTML5 Doctor Ian Devlin. Not as powerful as Flexbox, but for the use cases it serves its terser and better supported.
Exposing privileged APIs to web content – “a discussion on the challenges we face in exposing privileged APIs to web content and a proposal for exposing such APIs to web pages by mitigating the risks inherent in doing so.” by Rich Tibbett
Resource Priorities – “Using the lazyload attribute on a resource will signal to the User Agent that it may want to lower the download priority of that resource”
The “When Can I Use” Web Widget -”include up to date information about browser support for a feature they are talking about based on the data crafted by CanIUse.com” (4K library).
Do not view source! says CyberTrial Lawyer’s user agreement (which I paraphrase as it forbids me from quoting it). View source is prohibited because they own the intellectual property on all of the code. Which may come as a surprise the the jQuery and WordPress teams
This week’s reading list comes to you with a renewed vigour, and a zesty swagger in its stride, as several people sought me out at Google I/O to tell me how useful it is. Thanks for the feedback.
This is simply a list of stuff I’ve read this week, and posted links to over Twitter. However, I know that lots of real people don’t read Twitter all day, or it’s blocked at work, so this is an amalgamated list. Note that these links interested me, but I neither endorse them nor vouch for their accuracy.
Posthaven is a new blogging platform from co-founders of Posterous: “We’re not going to show ads. We’re not looking for investors. We’re going to make money the best way we know how: charging for it.”
Here’s your reading list for the next 2 weeks – I’m off to Google i/o where I’ll be speaking at the “Web Platform Fireside Chat” 3pm (to 3.40pm) on the Friday, Room 5. Come and say hi if you’re going to San Francisco (be sure to wear some flowers in your hair).
Some very meaty stuff this week, so it’ll last you 2 weeks (next week I’m in Las Vegas for Future Insights Live conference – use the discount code “Bruce” to get 10% off the ticket price).
Web Standards
HTML5 VIDEO bytes on iOS Mobile devices by Steve Souders: “Mobile devices ignore all values of PRELOAD in order to avoid high data plan costs, and instead only download the video when the user initiates playback … However, my testing shows that iOS downloads up to 298K of video data, resulting in unexpected costs to users.”
blink-dev: Intent to implement lazy-block layout – “Developers can page in new content while the user is scrolling without fear of making the app slow as well … Our demo has a 4 second layout that’s reduced to 32ms with lazy-block.”
ptb/flexgrid: a flexbox-based CSS grid in 3.6k – “The flexbox layout is supported on Chrome, all versions of iOS, Safari 3+, IE 10+, Opera 12.10+, and Firefox 22+. Other browsers get the fluid Bootstrap 3 layout, except Internet Explorer 6 and 7 which use a fixed layout.”
Testing WebP compression for app icons – “Looking at the ratio of WebP file sizes to PNG file sizes ratio, we can see WebP constantly provides better results”
Stop standardizing HTML says Simon St. Laurent. It’s XML again, but without draconian parsing or schemas. Essentially, every web page has its own private vocabulary.
It’s about time: RuneScape dumps Java for HTML5 – “With more than 200 million RuneScape accounts and thousands online at the same time, RuneScape is a big reason for a lot of people not to uninstall Java”
jQuery 2.0 Released – “leaves behind the older Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 browsers”. I wonder if this, and Windows XP in its last year of Microsoft support, will give devs/ biz “permission” to stop supporting older browsers?
I Stand With Trolls – “I’m calling out our culture of blaming the employer for the mouthiness of their employees in a personal capacity … We’ll end up with a Twitter full of teen-agers talking about their bowel movements and a million carefully curated corporate accounts.
Element Queries – “like a Media Query (specifically, the min-width/etc queries), but for a parent or ancestor element, rather than the viewport” by Tab Atkins
HTML5 vs. Native vs. Hybrid. Global developer survey 2013 interesting stats, however, note comment: “surveyed individuals were (mostly? I am one of them) Telerik customers including Kendo UI customers might have leaned the results towards Windows and HTML 5?”
As you probably know, Google announced Blink, the new rendering engine that will power Opera and Chrome, forked from WebKit (which itself was forked from KHTML).
Thoughts on Blink – “WebKit wasn’t a love fest of like-minded engineers but 2 lions circling each other, always prepared for the battle” by Krzysztof Kowalczyk, an early contributor to WebKit
asm.js is a cool initiative from Mozilla. It’s a subset of JavaScript that will behave identically whether it is run in an existing JavaScript engine or an ahead-of-time (AOT) compiling engine
Nintendo Web Framework “is a development environment based on WebKit technologies, supporting application development on the Wii U system using HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS.”
Responsive Retrofitting – “finding a way to use responsive techniques on legacy sites to create a better experience for more users”
Industry
Introducing Tabula – “Upload a PDF, get back tabular CSV data.” Another cool Mozilla initiative.
Forty mobile phone facts – “every fifth person you meet has two phones and is probably a crystal meth dealer/having an affair.” Or is a developer.
Pull Quotes with HTML5 and CSS using data-* attributes and generated content. “A pull quote is a purely visual technique, and therefore should not change the structure of the body”
Introducing TAL – TV Application Layer, an open source library for building applications for Connected TV devices, developed internally within the BBC as a way of vastly simplifying TV application development
What The Web Is Made Of – Interesting stats on what semantics (HTML, microdata, ARIA) are on the web.
The Short Cutts – For SEO-minded people, “we’ve done the hard work and watched every Matt Cutts video to pull out simple, concise versions of his answers”. Very useful, serviceable, beneficial, advantageous, helpful, cheap iphone, sex
Is this photo grounds for death? asks Clementine Ford about the Tunisian blogger Amina whose topless protests against Islamism earned her death threats. The article appears in Daily Life, “a proudly female biased website with content tailored to women”, an Australian publication which proudly censors the photo of Amina’s breasts after noting “In a rational society, breasts have no more power to hurt anyone than a gentle breeze can blow down a house made of bricks”. (Ford told me that the censorship is not her choice.)
“Browser Versions Are Dead”- One hour talk by @getify on why feature detection is the only sensible development methodology
Media queries for multichannel audio? – suggestion by Netflix: “This would save network bandwidth as well as providing better quality (if the custom-mixed stereo audio is likely better than the end-device down-mixed version)”
Encrypted Media Extensions (the official term for HTML5 DRM) – 1 hour 40 mins video presentation from John Simmons of Microsoft
The purpose of DRM by Hixie. Interesting analysis (“The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations. The purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage against creators of playback devices”) but avoids direct question of why Google supports it.
Hyperbole corner: “websites are dead” says person employed by Asda to do social media rather than its website (which they haven’t taken offline) “while exploring ways to tie-in the mobile and social customer journey to their in-store experiences”