WDRL — Edition 276: Back again and here’s how we can be a better self and do a good job

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Hey,

Sometimes a break is needed but you don’t notice. With the last WDRL edition on SmashingMag in September, this was apparently the case for me with this project. First, I wanted to pause for two weeks but it turned easily into over a month now. It brought back my motivation to write the summary for you and here is a quite big list with articles I want to recommend to you.

News

• Firefox 70 is out and new is CSS text-decoration-thickness, text-underline-offset, two-keyword display values like display: block flex; to allow outer and inner box settings, numeric separators in JavaScript, Intl improvements. You can now also use % in opacity property values.
• In the meantime, Chrome 77 and 78 have been released and bring the Largest Contentful Paint API, the formdata event as well as Form-associated custom elements, native lazy loading via the loading="lazy" attribute, a new Contact Picker API, and the CSS Properties and Values API.

Generic

• Ethan Marcotte’s talk “The World-Wide Work” is important to read and or watch for all of us. The importance of small little details and their impact on accessibility, or the society, the power of design in our world and how the web plays a role in here, too.
• Itamar Turner-Trauring shares great tips on What can a software developer do about climate change? and yes, it’s providing background and suggesting very useful, practicable actions that everyone of us can do. Not one of those generic, unrealistic posts but really down to the point.

UI/UX

• Why is it important to have an opinion and share your values as a brand? Here’s an evaluation of brands with and without opinions and how they market their product differently.
• The Stripe design team shares how they designed an accessible color system and we can learn a lot from it, not only from accessibility perspective but also to improve the design itself.
• Alexis Beingessner shares the problems of text rendering in browsers in his article “Text Rendering Hates You” and why subpixel-rendering and aliasing can cause quite some problems with text.
• Recycling is hard and we’re not good at it. Now it seems part of it is the messaging around it and the currently used strategy of demanding people to recycle is not motivating to people. If we’d instead advertise recycling as “giving this product a new life, it could e.g. become a new jacket” this is way more motivating for us to separate and care about where we throw our recyclables. A great lesson of how much it matters how you ask people to do something.
• To be planet-centric, designers need to be diverse and inclusive in their influences and practice. Understanding the colonisation of design education and exploring other ways of knowing will be critical to unlocking more interconnected, systemic design practices.

Tooling

• Patrick Fulton provides a good introduction into the most common visual regresstion testing systems and how we can and should use them in our projects.

Web Performance

• Joseph Scott found a Chrome announcement that’s going to change how the browser caches resources, especially those resources coming from CDNs. It’s also a nice little lesson on browser and web security.

Accessibility

• An one presentation tries to rule it all about accessibility, and it’s a good and massive one. Easy to understand, we can learn what our common mistakes are as developers and learn how to implement accessibility correctly without any compromises in design.

JavaScript

• The most common One Time Password (OTP) method today is via SMS. With the new SMS Receiver API, available in Chrome as Origin trial, brings this verification method to the web. Native apps had the feature of verifying an account via SMS and automatically retrieving the code from the SMS in your app already, and the goal is to make that feature available in the web, too. Note that SMS still is not a very secure method and can be intercepted by a third-party.

CSS

• Can I email is a great resource to find out which elements and CSS properties and values you can use in email clients…
• Tobias Ahlin shares how we can create smoother and sharper shadows with layered box-shadows. A very good solution!
• You can use pseudo elements to create cool effects for hover states in CSS.

Work & Life

• “Don’t throw in the day job to follow your dream”. Join the bifurcators who juggle work-for-pay and their work-for-love.
• How to make life more pleasurable is a reminder how we should try to limit what we consume, what we watch, drink, eat, and how we see sleep in order to make the experience better.
• Everyone I know has this problem: there never seems to be enough time in the day for everything we need or want to do. The secret is to work and act with appreciation and focus and this article gives suggestions and hints how we can implement that into our daily work.

Go beyond…

• These washing machines try to stop microfibers right before they enter the water ecosystem from our households. IT’s nice to see that there is new traditional household hardware coming up to solve our society’s biggest problems.
• Despite the lawsuits and predictions of gridlock, restricting a single Manhattan street to buses has been a success. So why don’t we start from here and take it further to improve our lives and planet?
• Big tech isn’t interested in a better world, just a more profitable one. To beat it, we need to break its stranglehold on us. A very insightful piece of writing around how companies fuel and influence politics and our entire economy and world, not always to the better.
• Technology was supposed to bring us together. Instead, it has been tearing us apart. Human relationships are increasingly being replaced with virtual ones. This grassroots project questions this trend, in the the hope that we reconnect again.

If you want to support produce WDRL, contribute via PayPal or Stripe. Every small amount you pledge will help pay my costs. Thanks a lot!

—Anselm