WDRL — Edition 282: Welcome back again, the web has changed, work as well.

Celý článek

Hey,

Hello my fellow readers! After months of silence I’m back. Since my last update in February a lot has changed, not only in my life but in everyones’. A virus makes us living differently than we are used to and work has changed with it. A lot of people work from home these days, others lost their jobs and many are facing a change of rules in any part of life. Kids can’t go to school, vacation is not allowed for a specific time or in other cases is enforced to use during the calm times.

For myself, my life changed quite a bit in March and April. I started with a new field to grow vegetables nearby in March and it keeps me busy for most of the week right now. It’s a CSA and we can already give ten families including our own nearly enough vegetables for the week with the amount growing every week. In April, my son was born, right in the middle of a weird time that enabled us to welcome him calm and easy to our world.

The Web… where to start? For me, now just watching from outside as I laid down all my jobs during the past months to enjoy family time and do the garden, it felt weird to read about all the technological changes during a virus that changes the lives of many people. On the other hand, life goes on, work goes on, and it’s great to see that some people continue to build amazing things, to make better browsers, to invent technologies and services that help all the other people out there struggling right now.

Our own species to me remains a mystery: While during the crisis and lockdowns, we achieved to lower our greenhouse gas emissions, this quickly goes back or even worse since we “recover” from the lockdowns. I lost my hope that people will fly less now for private and business purposes and may rethink their lives and get on a more sustainable track. I read a lot about how to prevent getting sick, how to stay sane during this heavy, exhausting times and it’s all about your inner peace, about health and about happiness. Many solutions how to achieve it are going outside right where you are, meditate, get rid of stuff you don’t use or need. Most people in my country know less about cities and villages or areas in their own country than in Italy or France or even more abroad. Why is it still not cool to go on vacation in your own country or neighbour country? It takes you only 1 – 3 hours by train instead of a flight that takes 16 hours just to enjoy another beach that’s no different to what you could visit also with a 2 – 3 hours flight. We all watch nature and outdoor adventure documentaries on Netflix but we don’t do it ourselves. I’ve never been truly happier at work than in the past months being outdoors on my field every day, no matter which weather. My back does not hurt anymore, I’m less stressed out and overall way happier. I don’t earn a lot of money right now and we all know that earning money with growing vegetables by hand and with love doesn’t pay a lot of bills. But I decided now that it just needs to pay my bills. I’ll continue to be a freelance developer to earn a baseline of money but splitting my work into two jobs was by far the best I could do for myself lately.

As always, my thoughts are thought as a trigger to you. Disregard it if you don’t want to think about it or don’t have the time right now. Reply to me if you think you want to say something or have a question. Share it, if you think you know someone who would benefit from it or write your own thoughts to the public if you think they’ll benefit others.

News

• Uhm, so there’s Firefox 73, 74, 75, 76, and 77 out since my last update. The most important news are: Better WebRTC privacy protections, faster search bar, locally cached trusted Web PKI Certificate Authority certificates, support for the loading attribute on img elements, Picture-in-picture support, Audio Worklet support, and support for the JavaScript API String.prototype.replaceAll().
• WebKit in the meanwhile introduced Full Third-Party Cookie Blocking to improve privacy for users. Quite a big change although we could see it coming.
• Chrome 80, 81, 83 now supports Module Workers, optional chaining in JavaScript, trusted types, new default form styles, support for the native file system API, and new cross-origin policies.
• Safari 13.1 adds support for the Web Animation API, Async Clipboard API, JavaScript replaceAll, nullish coalesing operator, ResizeObserver, the enterkeyhint attribute for form inputs, Picture-in-Picture API, and the RemotePlayback API.

Generic

• José Manrique López de la Fuente on Ethics and Open Source Software Development. The plea for an ethical license for copyleft comes up again.

UI/UX

• Alex Holachek shares her experiences on how to make form inputs better for mobile users by choosing the right input types, attributes, validators.
• “It is not uncommon that I raise an accessibility or usability issue with a client’s design or implementation and am met with either ‘But Google does this,’ or ‘But Apple does this.’” Adrian Roselli in a revealing, open statement on why we really shouldn’t care about what the big companies do because they don’t know either.

Tooling

• Tobias Tom shares how to use bash operators effectively and shows that there’s more than just the && operator.

Security

• deSEC is a free and secure DNS hosting running on open source software and sounds pretty cool. It even has an anycast so it’s fast around the world while offering more security than most other services that you pay for.

Web Performance

• Tim Kadlec on building web solutions with friction and why he loves the concept of Bundlephobia, a tool that warns you about your JavaScript bundle size.
• Danny van Kooten is the author of a very common Wordpress plugin. He made some simple changes and with it saved probably about 59000kg of CO2, all by removing a 20kb JavaScript dependency. There’s little chance you can similarly easy cut your personal emissions so this gives us a clue how important it is to not be careless about what we do on the web.
• How fast is PHP 8 going to be? Although there are only prereleases available yet, it’s probably a lot faster than version 7.

Accessibility

• Here are the Standards for Writing Code Accessibly.

JavaScript

• Arrays, arrays, arrays, one of the most common things we use in programming languages. Here’s Rebecca Uranga explaining the most common modern JavaScript Array methods and when to use which one.
• Arrow functions are handy but they’re also not very great when we need to debug them. But Dmitri Pavlutin shares how to write better arrow functions.

CSS

• Jhey Tompkins shows us how we can create a responsive CSS Motion Path.
• Diagonal layouts are pretty common in the past years, but they often were hacked together quite ugly to achieve the look. However, in 2020 we can do it quite nicely with modern CSS techniques and Nils Binder shares how.
• Sometimes the specification is the best documentation. Inside the CSS Values and Units Module Level 4 you can learn about the min(), max() but more importantly about the clamp() function in CSS that allows you to e.g. force the font-size to stay between 12px and 100px by stating: font-size: clamp(12px, 10 * (1vw + 1vh) / 2, 100px); All we ever wanted for fonts, right?
• Oh, what if we could style form inputs nicely and with simple CSS? Aaron Iker shares how we can do it.

Work & Life

• This news made me very unhappy. It’s one of the main reasons I chose to change my profession, to do something actively against climate change, to become a climate farmer: “One in five children have had nightmares about climate change while more than half do not think they are being listened to on the subject, a survey has found”. It’s upon us, parents, uncles/aunts, and friends of parents to fix this problem, so that these kids don’t need to suffer from bad dreams.
• Leo Babauta on the heartbreaking effects of being only partly committed to most things.
• “When you bought your first smartphone, did you know you would spend more than 1,000 hours a year looking at it? […] If we wasted money the way we waste time, we’d all be bankrupt.” — Seth Godin

Go beyond…

• Ericsson gives us a “quick guide” to our digital carbon footprint that shows our impact of using all the online services. And while the subtitle says it’s little, it also reveals that there’s potential to reduce the impact by 80 percent if providers would use greener energy and infrastructure.
• So who would think about farming when we’re talking about air quality and clean air? Well, it seems that California’s regulations help farms produce more food since the trees’ photosynthesis is more efficient when there’s less ground ozone.
• How does climate change impact Europe? Because common news mostly include other areas in the world, we know little about it. But this great interactive maps model shows the change of weather in a simple way. Heavy rains, forest fires, agricultural issues, draughts will all become more serious and more frequent, it seems.
• As a company you can stand up and protect your clients, you can be political. See the example of Basecamp who now deny to offer their products to employee-surveillance products and services.

Thank you all for reading this, I hope you’re doing fine and stay positive, find your way to make an impact and help build a better society, better friendships and make our world a little better. The next edition will hopefully be served to your inboxes way sooner again and I already have a couple of thoughts and links in the queue.

If you want to support my work, you can give back via PayPal or Stripe. Thank you!

—Anselm