Dispatches From The Internets

The Linkblog

Since re-starting my blog I’ve been continuing to tinker with Octopress and Jekyll in an effort to customize things a bit more to my liking.

I recently began posting links (with commentary) in a bit of a link blog, but I wasn’t really happy with having it mixed in with the rest of my Notebook posts. I finally took a few minutes to formally bust out the links into their own paginated section, so you can keep up with them independently. I also set up a three distinct Atom feeds to let you consume this site’s content how you want to: Latest 20 posts and links, latest 20 posts, and Latest 20 links.

I’m hopeful this organization will prove as helpful to you as it is for my compartmentalization anxiety.

Living on the Edge – Our Next Step in Helping the Web Just Work

With the holidays, I completely missed this announcement from IE team. In IE for Windows 10, we’re getting:

  1. All public (i.e. non-intranet) sites will render in “Edge mode” meaning they get the latest standards implementation. Note: It will ignore X-UA-Compatible version targeting.
  2. CSS Preserve-3D
  3. Content Security Policy 1.0 sandboxing
  4. CSS Interaction Media Queries (Level 4) - pointer type & hover testing!
  5. Gamepad API
  6. Selection API
  7. ECMAScript 6 features including classes, promises, iterators, the arrow function, Math utility functions, Number utility functions, Object utility functions, String utility functions, Object literal enhancements, spread, template strings, symbols, proxies, and weak set.

Pretty awesome stuff! What do you want to see in future versions of IE? You can post your thoughts and votes on UserVoice.

If—like me—you’re on a Mac, you can run the latest version of IE via RemoteIE. Haven’t heard of it? Rey Bango has a great write-up of how to set up RemoteIE on Macs, iOS, and even Android.

Revisiting (and Releasing) Adaptive Web Design

As you probably know, back in 2011 Easy Readers published my first solo book: Adaptive Web Design. It was an immediate hit and the response to continues to be tremendous even though it will turn four this coming May (which has to be like 80 in technology book years… many are outdated before they are even released).

Researching the Performance costs of JavaScript MVC Frameworks

I often talk about the negative performance impact of using front-end MVC frameworks like Angular and Ember to generate your HTML. It should be pretty obvious why: a framework must be downloaded, interpreted, and executed before any HTML is generated and eventually rendered in the browser. The one thing I had yet to do was actually see how the various frameworks stack up side-by-side. Now the Filament Group has done just that.

If you are using or are considering a front-end Javascript framework, you need to read this report.

A Maintainable Style Guide

This is a fantastic overview of the modular architecture Lonely Planet is using to run their website and their style guide, keeping both perfectly in sync. The system that drives all of this, Rizzo, is available on Github.

I Am Not Broken: The Language of Disability

I love this!

The world we live in isn’t defined by two versions of reality. There isn’t the “normal” reality for all the normal people, and the slightly skewed reality for all of the rest of us who yearn for normalcy. Our fiction should reflect that. King George VI wasn’t any less of a powerful speaker or ruler for all of his stuttering. Odetta Holmes wasn’t slowed down by her wheelchair.

I’m not broken and neither are you.

Autoplay, Don’t Do It

A while back GogOm reported on how Facebook’s decision to autoplay videos led to a 60% increase in mobile data usage. It was a business decision with the intent of increasing engagement, but it was a bad decision from a user experience. It’s a tax on users and they weren’t to happy about it. You may be wondering Why is this a bad thing for users? They want to see videos, so we’re just giving them what they want. Well, let me share a little story.