Web Performance

• Postgres 10 has been here for quite a while already, but I personally struggled to find good information on how to use all these amazing features it brings along. Gabriel Enslein now shares Postgres 10 performance updates in a slide deck, shedding light on how to use the built-in JSON support, native partitioning for large datasets, hash index resiliency, and more.
• Andrew Betts found out that a lot of websites are using outdated headers. He now shares why we should drop old headers and which ones to serve instead.

Accessibility

• Marcy Sutton shares how Wikipedia built their new link preview feature in an accessible way so that people can easily use the keyboard as well as a mouse to trigger the overlay. You can also read more on how this feature was built in this post by Wikipedia designer Nirzar Pangarkar.
• Scott O’Hara explains the differences between hidden and none keywords in ARIA and when we should use which.

CSS

• Rarely talked about for years, CSS tables are still used on most websites to show (and that’s totally the correct way to do so) data in tables. But as they’re not responsive by default, we always struggled when making them responsive and most of us used JavaScript to make them work on mobile screens. Lea Verou now found two new ways to achieve responsive tables by using CSS: One is to use text-shadow to copy text to other rows, the other one uses element() to copy the entire <thead> to other rows — I still try to understand how Lea found these solutions, but this is amazing!
• Rachel Andrew wrote an article about building and providing print stylesheets in 2018 and why they matter a lot for users even if they don’t own a printer anymore.
• Osvaldas Valutis shares how to implement the so-called “Priority Plus” navigation pattern mostly with CSS, at least in modern browsers. If you need to support older browsers, you will need to extend this solution further, but it’s a great start to implement such a pattern without too much JavaScript.
• Rachel Andrew shares what’s coming up in the CSS Grid Level 2 and Subgrid specifications and explains what it is, what it can solve, and how to use it once it is available in browsers.

JavaScript

• Chris Ashton “used the web for a day with JavaScript turned off.” This piece highlights the importance of thinking about possible JavaScript failures on websites and why it matters if you provide fallbacks or not.
• Sam Thorogood shares how we can build a “native undo & redo for the web”, as used in many text editors, games, planning or graphical software and other occasions such as a drag and drop reordering. And while it’s not easy to build, the article explains the concepts and technical aspects to help us understand this complicated matter.
• There’s a new way to implement element/container queries into your application: eqio is a tiny library using IntersectionObserver.

Work & Life

• Johannes Seitz shares his thoughts about project management at the start of projects. He calls the method “Iteration Zero”. An interesting concept to understand the scope and risks of a project better at a time when you still don’t have enough experience with the project itself but need to build a roadmap to get things started.
• Arestia Rosenberg shares why her number one advice for freelancers is to ‘lean into the moment’. It’s about doing work when you can and using your chance to do something else when you don’t feel you can work productively. In the end, the summary results in a happy life and more productivity. I’d personally extend this to all people who can do that, but, of course, it’s best applicable to freelancers indeed.
• Sam Altman shares a couple of handy productivity tips that are not just a ‘ten things to do’ list but actually really helpful thoughts about how to think about being productive.

Going Beyond…

• Ethan Marcotte elaborates on the ethical issues with Google Duplex that is designed to imitate human voice so well that people don’t notice if it’s a machine or a human being. While this sounds quite interesting from a technical point of view, it will push the debate about fake news much further and cause more struggle to differentiate between something a human said or a machine imitated.
• Our world is actually built on promises, and here’s why it’s so important to stick to your promises even if it’s hard sometimes.
• I bet that most of you haven’t heard of Palantir yet. The company is funded by Peter Thiel and is a data-mining company that has the intention to collect as much data as possible about everybody in the world. It’s known to collaborate with various law enforcement authorities and even has connections to military services. What they do with data and which data they have from us isn’t known. My only hope right now is that this company will suffer a lot from the EU GDPR directive and that the European Union will try to stop their uncontrolled data collection. Facebook’s data practices are nothing compared to Palantir it seems.
• Researchers sound the alarm after an analysis showed that buying a new smartphone consumes as much energy as using an existing phone for an entire decade. I guess I’ll not replace my iPhone 7 anytime soon — it’s still an absolutely great device and just enough for what I do with it.
• Anton Sten shares his thoughts on Vanity Metrics, a common way to share numbers and statistics out of context. And since he realized what relevancy they have, he thinks differently about most of the commonly readable data such as investments or usage data of services now. Reading one number without having a context to compare it to doesn’t matter at all. We should keep that in mind.

We hope you enjoyed this Web Development Update. The next one is scheduled for Friday, June 15th. Stay tuned.

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