WDRL — Edition 256: Safari 12.1, Chrome 72, PHP 7 performance, Sourcemaps in production and Maintaining large JavaScript codebases.

Celý článek

Hey,

We need to act now to save our human living. It doesn’t matter that others don’t care, we as individuals need to make sure that we do everything we can to prevent our climate to go over into high-fever state (which is about 10 years away). It upon us to show companies that they need to do something (economical success is entirely based on what people buy). It’s our choice to tell our friends, family members, or colleagues about climate change and we should use the chance to gather more people. Only if we stand together, we can achieve this big goal.

But if we do, not only the climate will profit. As we’d have to change our entire current society system, success will also mean better health, more equality, more happiness and less suffer, less wars for all of us. Ensure we will be able to live a nice, happy life by keeping the climate as it was a few decades ago (or as it is now, which would be still “okay”). Ensure that our children can live on this planet — why else would you have taken all the effort, all the love, all the stress to give birth, to raise them, to earn money for them?

“We must change nearly everything in our society”, says Greta Thunberg in her public speech at World Economic Forum 2019 in Davos.

Start by choosing a hosting service that uses green energy. Fly less, use a train, embrace remote culture, grow your own food, turn off your phone more often and find love and happiness by reflecting on yourself, what you experienced today, what makes you happy and let your mind wander.

It’s a risk and usually I don’t promote country-based stuff but for those of you who live in Bavaria, Germany: Please go into your town hall with your ID and sign this petition to save our wildlife. It’s little effort but could make a huge difference for all of us.

Now, let’s go to the web development resources I found this week which contain some very nice updates for the web platform, and strategies for maintaining and building better JavaScript codebases.

News

• Chrome 72 is out and brings the User Activation API, disallows popups on pageunload, and many more small changes.
• Safari 12.1 release notes are up (iOS 12.2, macOS 10.14.4) and here’s what’s new: Dark mode for the web, Intelligent Tracking Prevention, the push notification prompt for Safari on macOS now requires a user gesture, added Motion & Orientation settings on iOS to enable the DeviceMotionEvent and DeviceOrientationEvent events (note this means it’s disabled by default now). Also new are Intersection Observer API, Web Share API, and the

Generic

• Ian Littman on Twitter: “Moving 50% of servers to PHP 7 from PHP 5 would save $2.5 (edited to 2.0) billion in energy costs per year, and avoid billions of kilograms of CO2 emissions. Upgrade to PHP 7. Save the planet. (…)”
• How did you start to learn web development? I guess most of us relied on the "view source" functionality in the browsers and still do. But with JavaScript SPAs and more tooling that mangles, minifies and uglifies sources we block this road of self-education for countless people out there. Let’s move to a more open approach and at least provide tools like Sourcemaps on production servers so that people can access the real sources via Developer tools again.

UI/UX

• This is a nice roundup of how very popular websites have changed over the past ten years — including Google, YouTube, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and eBay. You can clearly see that we’re in different eras.

Privacy

• Google is one of those companies which always finds new, clever ways to expose user-location data in great ways to sell them to third-parties. And they do it so well that people like this. Here are new plans on how Google wants to sell the exact location data of users in order to improve planning for e.g. urban planners by providing exact data. A nice thing for the clients but still worrying for all users of Google products who might not be aware what’s sold here.

Web Performance

• A topic we didn’t have for quite a long time in web performance: Jens Oliver Meiert shares his research on how writing HTML differently results in better or worse performance. Leaving out optional tags and quotes can make a difference, despite we’re able to use gzip or other techniques to optimize the document response in the browser.

JavaScript

• More and more of us need to maintain large JavaScript applications. But we all struggle with it sometimes so Mathias Schäfer wrote a nice overview of their lessons learned from long-term projects for maintaining large JS codebases.

Work & Life

• We allo know people working 100% in their job and many also do crazy things in their free time in addition. In praise of extreme moderation shares a view of why this is not possible for everyone, why the culture of over-committing, of over-working, of over-delivering in all areas of life isn’t healthy and how we can shift towards a more moderate, calmer path.

Go beyond…

• Watch this talk of Greta Thunberg, a sixteen year old woman who tells all the well-known, famous people out there that she doesn’t care about money and why we need to view climate change from a perspective like hers — her life is in danger and no money will be able to save it. This is great, we need more people like her who aren’t led by corporate or financial rules.

—Anselm