WDRL — Edition 237: HTTP Not Secure in Chrome, PWA Retrospective, Page Lifecycle API, And Plastic Roads

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Hey,

My Twitter timeline sometimes results in an interesting mix between various topics from the tech industry, politics and human or environmental matters. Today I had such a moment when I scrolled and two tweets made a great connection without the authors knowing about it. First, I read that current temperatures are through the roof, followed by Uber and Lyft being responsible for additional car traffic in cities. I couldn’t resist to build a connection on that, being reminded that not every tech business is helping making things better but some are just there for profit. Car traffic is doomed already in many cities and additional traffic caused by mostly one person hiring one entire car for themselves to get somewhere is just egoistic and not social to other people needing to move around in a city. And finally, the environmental impact is significant — regardless if it’s a fuel car or electric one; every new car produced and running with some kind of non-renewable energy is doing harm to our climate. To underline why I’m not able to think positive about such companies let me link you to my personally experienced climate at home. See that no month except February was on average in the past 12 months right here, in south Germany where climate change is expected to have not much impact? And no, it’s not just a bit… it’s almost over three degrees in average and I can say I can’t remember such a dry and hot summer in a very long time. I know it’s not the nicest thing to read about these issues nearly every week but what if we do nothing? I will suffer from it, we all will. Let’s try to change our habits now in order to make our own lives as good as it is today in the mid future.

News

• Starting in the latest version of Chrome (68), you’ll see a new “not secure” notification when visiting HTTP pages. Be aware of this and upgrade any sites that shouldn’t have this badge displayed to a HTTPS connection.
• Chrome 68 is out and brings the new Page Lifecycle API, a great new API for page events, the Payment Handler API, and HTTP cache is now ignored when requesting updates to a service worker, bringing Chrome inline with the spec and other browsers. Apart from that, the cursor values grab and grabbing are now unprefixed — finally.

Generic

• Deep-learning machines are a big topic these days but there are some people exploring even better algorithms that outperform deep-learning machines easily at video games.

Tooling

• WebP is an image format with a couple of nice features and likely one of the best known new formats besides the common JPEG/PNG ones. However, creating WebP images can still be a challenge so Jeremy Wagner wrote a guide howe to convert images to WebP.
• Douglas Creager introduces the new Network Error Logging which allows you to instruct user agents to collect the same set of information that would appear in your server logs.
• Many of us are addicted to communication tools like Slack or HipChat (who announced today that they’ll join forces). The folks from Wildbit did an experiment and shut down Slack for a week and now work entirely differently afterwards. An interesting case study of how we get too comfortable with a useful tool and don’t use it as we should anymore. From time to time, it’s important to reset your mind.

Web Performance

• You remember QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections)? The protocol engineered by Google that they use internally and that is shaping up quite well for larger use? While the IETF is currently standardizing the format towards the end of the year, Cloudflare engineers test it a lot and try to provide it as soon as possible to their customers and share their experience.

HTML & SVG

• When you have user-generated content, you often don’t know if you’ll just have one element or a list of elements to output. At Colloq, we wanted to do semantics right and build a system that allows us to output a p tag when only one element is in the container, otherwise a ol/ul list with various list-items.

JavaScript

• Zack Argyle from the Pinterest engineering team shares their experience after providing their Progressive Web App for over one year and shows interesting results. It’s important to note why they decided to build a PWA: “Our mobile web experience for people in low-bandwidth environments and limited data plans was not good”, but the results for them are amazing to see.
• Philip Walton introduces the new Page Lifecycle API which helps us developers to determine page states in the browser more easily via events, such as the page being in the background (not visible), active, frozen or even terminated.
• Whoops, you all know eval() in JavaScript is bad, right? That’s why we usually forbid its usage in Content Security Policies. But Remy Sharp reminds us that you can easily write a line of code that’s equally bad for security and doesn’t look like it.

CSS

• Sara Souedian explains how we can build inclusive, nice toggle switches with modern HTML and CSS easily.

Go beyond…

• India has a big plastic waste problem and until recently the fishing industry had a big problem. But since a couple of months, a couple of fishermen don’t ignore the plastic problem anymore but instead collect all the waste in their nets, bring it back to the shore where it’s used to build roads now. A great idea of making use of trash efficiently.
• Worms frozen in permafrost for up to 42,000 years come back to life, previously stored in Siberian permafrost ground.

—Anselm