WDRL — Edition 227: Print CSS, Subgrids, EdgeHTML 17 and Bad Design Choices

Celý článek

Hey,

it’s nice to see people caring about less obvious problems in web development such as providing proper CSS so that users can print the page or parts of the website. Whenever I have to print an invoice, I’m not physically printing it but I save it as PDF file. Creating print stylesheets is mostly about adding more responsiveness to your site so people can save it as PDF and still read it nicely. Interestingly, I find that for most websites it’s no hard work to make them look nice on printed out papersheets but yet, so many people forget about it. If you have information on your website that people might want to save or print, such as invoices, long articles or a 2-factor backup code, please consider adding some nice stylesheet for this use-case. Make your users happy.

News

• Github Pages now offers HTTP support for custom domains. Previously, HTTPS was only possible on *.github.io subdomains or via third-party providers such as Cloudflare.
• Chrome 67 is coming up soon and will deprecate a few things before removing support entirely two versions later: HTTP HTTP-Based Public Key Pinning (HPKP) will be deprecated, as well as AppCache on non-secure contexts.
• The Windows 10 April update brings EdgeHTML 17 which brings mute tabs, autofill forms, a new print websites mode to save resources, Service Workers and Push Notifications, Variable Fonts, Screen Capture in RTC via the Media Capture API, Subresource Integrity (SRI), and support for the Upgrade-Insecure-Requests header. Quite a step forwards!

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• Ian Feather reveals that around 1% of all requests for JavaScript on BuzzFeed time out. That’s about 13 million requests per month and reminds us how important it is to think about this problem and provide a solid fallback, progressive enhancement and workarounds to our users.

UI/UX

• Jared M. Spool summarized why users sometimes hate design choices we make but don’t hate change or redesigns overall.

Privacy

• The GDPR checklist is another helpful resource for people to check whether a website is compliant to the upcoming EU directive.

CSS

• Rachel Andrew wrote an article about building and providing print stylesheets in 2018 and why it matters a lot for users even if they don’t own a printer anymore. But we all still want to store invoices and other content as PDF files.
• Osvaldas Valutis shares how to implement the so called “Priority Plus” navigation pattern mostly with CSS, at least in modern browsers. If you need to support older browsers you likely will need to extend this solution further but it’s a great start to implement such a pattern without too much JavaScript.
• Rachel Andrew shares what’s coming up in the CSS Grid Level 2 and Subgrid specifications and explains what it is, can solve and how to use it once it’ll be available in browsers.

—Anselm