WDRL — Edition 234: Design Patterns, Tech Values, Feature Policy and CSS Grid in IE11

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Hey,

This week Andrea Giammarchi excited me with his article about a bloatless web. In that article he describes how we blindly use Babel as developers when we write JavaScript to be able to write modern ECMAScript. But we usually don’t realize that transpiling all our modern code in modern browser isn’t the most efficient way. And I’m glad that Andrea also offers some ideas on how we can improve that situation and improve our web apps’ performance. Wouldn’t it be amazing to just serve a third of the bundle size by not transpiling the code anymore for every browser?

News

• By now, we know a bit about Content Security Policies — a feature that lets developers limit the load of certain resources by hostnames. But browser vendors have come up with something new now: Feature Policy. This allows web developers to selectively enable, disable, or modify the behavior of certain APIs and web features in the browser. It’s like CSP but instead of controlling security, it controls features and Eric Bidelman wrote an introduction to Feature Policy explaining everything.

Generic

• Anton Sten asks if Tech Sector Values are Broken? Analyzing the marketing strategies by Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon but also small other companies and how we can do really purposeful work and stick to our values instead of treating them as marketing-material that we don’t need to respect or stick to.
• Now that the technology sector of the world is rapidly transforming all of the world’s things into digital things, many have called for more ethics in our field. That is in many instances quite a vague goal, so let’s apply it to one part of digital: front-end development. How can we be more ethical as front-end developers, what kinds of things can we do? Hidde de Vries wrote an article about that.

UI/UX

• Eugen Eşanu shows ten small design mistakes we still make and what we can do instead to make our design more user-friendly.

Security

• Ticketmaster’s customer data has been compromised and as it seems, it’s due to a customized single line of code that includes a third-party script.

Privacy

• This is an interesting report about how Google allows outside app developers to read people’s Google emails, when they grant permission during app authorization. The issue with that is that there is no way to easily prevent that and it might have quite some impact if you use Gmail for your company as it might affect privacy policies and is under subject of GDPR.

Web Performance

• Max Böck on how we can build components that react to the actual device connection speed using the Network Information API. And despite it’s currently only available in Chrome and Samsung Internet browsers, it’s worth trying it out and maybe already serve it to these users.

JavaScript

• Filepond is a nice open source JavaScript file uploader. Now its author, Rik Schennink, shares the challenges faced building it.
• Andrea Giammarchi about the problem of bundling JavaScript with Babel and why transpiling code isn’t the best solution anymore. Instead, we should think about how to serve different bundles depending on the browser support to decrease the bundle size and improve performance.

CSS

• CSS Grid is nice but I often hear that people can’t use it because IE11 doesn’t support it well. But that’s not exactly true as IE11 has a prior version of CSS Grid available that we can easily transpile with autoprefixer. Daniel Tonon explains the CSS Grid differences and which features we can and which we cannot use there and will continue with even more tips.
• For many people CSS Grid is still very new. And it’s very capable and helps us solving a lot of problems when creating grid-based layouts in CSS. But in the current version available in the browsers there are a couple of things that are not possible at the moment. CSS Grid level 2 will bring us sub-grids and Rachel Andrew explains what you need that for.

—Anselm