WDRL — Edition 253: Welcome back to a new year with Jank-Free Images, Styled Web Components, Human Branding and Code-Splitting

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Hey,

I’m happy to be back with a new edition of my Web Development Reading List in 2019. I’m grateful for all your ongoing givings to support my work and it makes me happy to hear that so many people find this resource very helpful. So if you enjoy reading it, share it with people you know, give me feedback or support it with a small amount of money.

This article hit myself hard this week. I’m seeing myself in this group of people described “Millenials” (I do think it affects way more and older people than just the today 20 year olds) and when a friend sent me this article it took me a while to read through but I could relate to so many things, struggles mentioned in there that I’m now thinking these problems are bigger than I ever imagined. And they will affect society, politics, each individual on our planet. It will be necessary to get way more people who can guide or help people with mental struggles, to help people find their path in life and re-introduce the concept of real, human friendship which allows us to talk with our closest friends about anything that disturbs us or show our fears and talk about them. It’s crazy to hear that most people today will answer that they don’t have a friend they could talk to about mental health issues while two decades ago the average answer was still around five.

Let’s ensure we offer our friends to talk with us about tough things, and try to understand younger generations instead of ignoring them or even making fun of them. 2019 should be a year where we, in our circle of influence, make it great to live in a human community and can think with excitement and happiness about our friends, neighbours and people we work with or talk to on the Internet.

News

• Joseph Medley shows us the deprecations in Chrome 72, which include the blocking of popups during page unload via window.open, removed HTTP-Based Public Key Pinning, and deprecation of TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1.

UI/UX

• It doesn’t sound like big news that Jesse Weaver is writing about here, but she shows how easily we’re dragged into the mindset of copying a product strategy that works for others to our own. Jesse shares why that’s a very bad idea and you should always try to find your own, custom solution that fits your product.

Web Performance

• Tim Kadlec explains why performance is an ethical point as it can include or exclude people, add or reduce waste of energy, network traffic, and time.

JavaScript

• Chrome is currently working on an API called getInstalledRelatedApps that lets you detect on the web if a user has your native app installed. This could be useful to not show them the App banners anymore or to let them open a specific product feature in the app directly from your website.
• Harry Wolff shows us how we can use React.lazy and suspense to split up the code in our JavaScript apps. This is important to reduce the original load size of the application bundle and can make a huge difference on the performance and experience of a website.

CSS

• Eric Portis explains the concept of the intrinsicsize HTML-attribute that’s likely going to help us very soon in providing Jank free image loads in browsers by hinting expected dimensions of the images to the browser before it has parsed them.
• Scott Jehl updated the open source custom appearance select module and in this blog post describes how we can do this in 2019, much easier than in previous times.
• Chris Coyier wrote up how we can style a web component and decide whether we want it to inherit global styles or whether we want to start from scratch for the component.

Work & Life

• This is the article I used for the introduction of this WDRL edition which I found highly interesting and important to read: How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation gives insights into how people today think, how society and politics changed and what we can do to make livings better in future.
• We all try to combine so many things in life all the time, being successful and productive at work, at home, with our children, in our relatioship, doing sports, have good finances, and some hobbies. But we blindly ignore that it’s impossible to manage all that on the same level at the same time. We feel regret over not having gotten everything done during a certain timeframe such as at the end of a calendar year. Shawn Blanc says we should rather celebrate that because in reality we just found something better, more worth doing instead of the work task or cleaning up the house.

Go beyond…

• Interesting news for climate improvement from trees this week: A team of arborists has successfully cloned and grown saplings from the stumps of some of the world’s oldest and largest coast redwoods, some of which were 3,000 years old and measured 35 feet in diameter when they were cut down in the 19th and 20th centuries. Earlier this month, 75 of the cloned saplings were planted at the Presidio national park in San Francisco. It’s so interesting because it seems that these ancient trees are able to sequester 250 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over their lives, compared to 1 ton for an average tree.
• The ongoing technological development and strive to build new services that automate more and more things for humans, make it even more important to emphasize human connection with employees. Companies that show no effort on improving things for their clients, their employees or the environment will begin to struggle soon, Ryan Paugh says.
• We usually don’t expect much nice news about technology inventions by car vendors and their willingness to share it with others. But Toyota now has decided to share with rivals an automated safety system called ‘Guardian’ that uses self-driving technology to keep cars from crashing. “We will not keep it proprietary to ourselves only. But we will offer it in some way to others, whether that’s through licensing or actual whole systems.” says Gill Pratt from the company.

—Anselm