This is a treasure trove of software development resources—Web and otherwise—compiled by Jeff Petty.
The Best Of The Internets
Accessibility Resources for Developers
Dropdown Menus with More Forgiving Mouse Movement Paths
Chris Coyier put together a nice overview of ways to reduce user frustration when dealing with dropdown and flyout menus because, you know, some people still use a mouse.
Keeping srcset and sizes under control
Matt Wilcox walks through his methodical process for managing srcset and sizes. It’s a good read an will be helpful for keeping you from being unnecessarily verbose (or getting to granular).
Can We Please Stop Fighting The Native vs. Web App Wars?
Matt Asay does a great job dispelling some of the myths frequently spouted in the Web vs. platform-specific debate. It’s definitely worth a read.
Note: I no longer use “native” in this context, but it remains in quoted material.
A break from the past: the birth of Microsoft’s new web rendering engine
Charles Morris wrote a lengthy post about the germination of Microsoft’s new browser rendering engine. If you ever wondered where babies browsers come from, this is full of insights.
On a side note, this is one of the most exciting aspects of the new browser (and new Microsoft) for me:
Our mission to create a Web that “just works” won’t be successful without your help.
Five Easy Ways to Be a Better Web Professional
My old friend Jason Garber—who I, sadly, haven’t seen in probably a decade—came up with a great list of “professional self-improvement tips for anyone working on the Web today”. I’ll give you the synopses, but you should do yourself a favor and read the full post for the background:
- Know Your History
- Know Your Medium
- Respect Those Who Came Before You
- Respect Your Audience
- Get Involved
I would absolutely echo these to anyone looking to become (or improve as) a web professional.
Client-side MVC’s Major Bug
Astute observations (as always) from Tim Kadlec. I’ll let Tim set the scene:
Over the past year I conducted performance audits on a handful of sites that all used client-side MVC’s, typically Angular but not always. Each site had their own optimizations that needed to take place to improve performance. Yet a pattern emerged: client-side MVC’s were the major bottleneck for each. It slowed down the initial rendering of the page (particularly on mobile) and it limited our ability to optimize the critical path.
Obviously Tim knows what he’s talking about.
He goes on to bring in the voices of the Filament Group and PPK (both of whom I’ve linked to previously for the same reasons): lots of smart people have come to the conclusion that relying on client-side generation of web pages is a bad idea. Tim goes so far as to say “if your client-side MVC framework does not support server-side rendering, that is a bug” and I can’t help but agree.
His post is great, you should read it. Frankly, I wish I’d written it.
Accessible toggle-style checkbox
This is, by far, the best implementation of a toggle slider checkbox replacement I’ve seen.
Let’s Write Fast JavaScript
You may have already seen this piece from Mahdi Dibaiee, but if you haven’t it’s definitely worth a read. I also highly recommend Nicholas Zakas’ High Performance JavaScript and Amy Hoy & Thomas Fuchs’ JavaScript Performance Rocks.
This Uncanny Valley of Voice Recognition
I am incredibly excited about the future of voice-based user experiences, but I also fully recognize that we’ve got a long way to go. This post from Zach Holman does a great job illustrating the issues we are currently dealing with. And it’s a fun read to boot!