Bruce Lawson, briefly, on why picture, srcset, and sizes are better for adaptive images than CSS or JavaScript any day of the week when it comes to performance:
The only way to beat the preloader is to put all the potential image sources in the HTML and give the browser all the information it needs to make the selection there.
Good stuff, Bruce. I’m sorry I won’t be in Barcelona to see this presentation (and you)!
Watching the Windows 10 announcement today and the “unveiling” of its new browser, codenamed “Project Spartan”, I was amazed… not by what was said so much as what wasn’t.
PPK nails it as usual:
Back-enders work with only one environment, their server. They have the option of changing their environment; for instance by installing new software or upgrading the hardware.
Front-enders work with an unknown number of radically different environments, ranging from state-of-the-art desktop computer to three-year-old, crappy phones with limited memory and processor time. They cannot change these environments because they have no power over their users’ browsers. Still, their code should work in all of them.
I shared similar thoughts in my post A Fundamental Disconnect.
This brilliant piece from Eileen Webb discusses her experience as a woman who has been working in tech since her first internship in 1997. In it, she chronicled a number of incredibly inappropriate work-related activities and situations she has endured—that sucks, Eileen, I’m sorry you had to deal with all that crap—but the point of the post is not to dwell on these. Instead Eileen urges us to listen when women (and I have to imagine any underrepresented group) vent about mistreatment and to reflect on it rather than reacting:
Yes, many women are angry, and injured, and our public seething will make you uncomfortable. Sit with that. Let it wash over you, and through you. Breathe, and feel the urge to squirm, and choose to be still instead. For we who have been living with this discomfort our whole careers, you can handle not-reacting for a few minutes.
We need to listen in order to be aware. We need to reflect in order to understand. And when we do that, we can recognize forms of oppression and disrespectful behavior, identify it as such, and stand together in declaring it unacceptable.
This is a handy interactive, mash-up reference for the WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines from the W3C and related recommendations from WebAIM. Thanks Viget!
Today is Martin Luther King Day in the United States, so I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on one aspect of equality I think is incredibly important: egalitarianism.
In this extensive piece, PPK does a brilliant job voicing the thoughts and feeling I think a lot of us front-enders have when it comes to Angular. You should do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. Seriously. Especially if you are in IT in a large company that is using or thinking of using Angular. Seriously.
Go. Read. It.
This week the W3C published a couple of really cool new Working Drafts I wanted to bring to your attention (just in case you missed them).
It seems every week we are seeing more and more low-cost devices being launched in an effort to connect the unconnected. For instance, this past week saw the announcement of two new entries in the Microsoft Lumia line, the 435 and the 532, and the announcement of Samsung’s first Tizen phone, the Z1.
This is a beautiful account of the struggles of bringing cellular networks to poor, rural areas that are uninteresting (e.g. unprofitable) to the major providers.
Of the world’s 7 billion or so cell phones, a few hundred of them are already in Yaee—they’re just not connected to a network. Kids use them as cameras and mp3 players, and Hernández, like many adults, bought his to use in Oaxaca City, a seven-hour bus ride away. When he’s there, his cell phone can connect to plenty of base stations, which, in turn, link him to his choice of commercial network. But back in Yaee, there are no base stations and therefore no network. Every time Hernández wants to make a call in his hometown, he hikes for 20 minutes to the top of the highest hill around and hopes to catch some signal trickling in from a faraway base station, installed in a place deemed more profitable for telecoms than small towns like Yaee.
Articles like this are a great reminder of how fortunate we are and how our experiences are not universal. They help us empathize with the struggles others must overcome to participate in the “modern world”.