WDRL — Edition 279: Inclusive docs, Microbrowsers, Kind Companies, and CSS Subgrid Techniques

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Hey,

It’s the last update for this year as the new year holidays are coming up and I’m gonna take a break from web development as well during this time. Time to work on other things like woodwork, or preparing and planning the next year’s Gardening season. I’m going to build a CSA and next year will be the preparation and experimentation season before going into full production for other people so they can enjoy local, fresh and carefully grown food at a reasonable price.

The end of the year is typically the time where everyone asks about new year goals. Well, whether you have goals or not, we can definitely care more about how we treat other people, whether they’re co-workers, our managers or clients. If we show empathy and try to be helpful instead of arrogant, we not only build a better product but also build a network of trust, a network of reliable people that we can count on when we need help. In times where everything happens in virtual worlds, it’s more and more important to not be just any brand out there but one that stands out because they are personal and kind. If you have any feedback on how I can do better with this newsletter or Colloq, write me an email. And if you know great examples that stood out for you, let me know as well e.g. on Mastodon or Twitter.

News

• Chrome 79 is out and brings maskable icons on Android PWAs, the WebXR Device API, and an origin trial of a “Wake Lock API”. In the DevTools, you can now see why a cookie was blocked, emulate CSS media queries like prefers-reduced-motion or prefers-color-scheme.

Generic

• BPF: A New Type of Software. These are interesting softwares as they don’t show up as nomal processes or kernel modules. They introduce a new interface for applications to make kernel requests, alongside syscalls and is a super interesting change in how operating systems work with software.
• It seems that Jeff Bezos grandfather once said to him “one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.” And this is very true, if you think about all the clever technologies and products out there. Most of them are not showing any sort of kindness to other people and we still have a hard time coming up with a list of companies that we would define as “kind” to us customers.
• Colin Bendell explores the world of “microbrowsers”, these little link preview widgets appearing in messaging services like Slack, Messages, Whatsapp, Signal and shows how we can optimise the content of the previews with simple tools.

Privacy

• These days it’s hard to prevent tracking. Even for the big players like the WebKit team, as they point out in their article Preventing Tracking Prevention Tracking.
• How small design changes rewrote the rules of messaging and how we feel about one another, says Adrian Zumbrunnen and shows us how this happened over the past two decades at the example of ICQ, one of the earliest instant messengers.

Web Performance

• Instant Page is a JavaScript that tries to predict really well whether a user will click on a link or not, and, based on that, will prefetch and preload the linked page in the browser for improved performance.

Accessibility

• Paul Grenier writes about how we can and why we should care more about writing good docs. Automating inclusive documentation shows tools and services helping us achieve that.

JavaScript

• Michelle Barker shares how we can easily animate and create beautiful scrolling experiences with a few lines of JavaScript combined with CSS Scroll Snap Points.
• Paul Irish has published a new mini library that provides a super fast YouTube embed for your page using custom elements.
• Erik Terwan wrote a small library that lets a page react to scroll changes called ScrollTrigger.

CSS

• Stas Melnikov shares how to use auto margin values in Flexbox layout.
• Holger Bartel shows us with a simple and practical example of why the new CSS :is() pseudo selector can be very handy and shorten our selector code massively.
• Bryan Robinson on how we can lay out full with content sections in an article layout using CSS Subgrid, something that we always needed ugly hacks for so far.

Work & Life

• Structure does not bring you happiness is a piece of text on how important effectiveness and structure at work are. But keeping in mind that this won’t bring you happiness and adapting your work and lifestyle accordingly is even more important to being a happy person.

Go beyond…

• Aluminium is heavily used today almost in any sector of products. But it’s not problem-free and it’s amazing to see that Apple just bought the first batch of carbon-free aluminium. This makes hopes for less resource-heavy products soon.
• The world’s forests are being carved into pieces — but why is this a problem? Well, animals are likely to pay a heavy price, so we should try to reduce the fragmentation and combine forests again instead of splitting them up further.

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!

We will read each other next year, I wish you all the best until then and hope you get some time for yourself as well.

—Anselm