RWD Weekly #338
Hello again and welcome to this week’s responsive design weekly newsletter.
This week we take a closer look at what it means for the web if we lose another browser to the Chromium rendering engine.
Let’s get linking!
Headline
Risking a Homogeneous Web
I always like the way which Tim explains concepts and this is no difference. As I mention later in the email, I’m not a fan of Microsoft’s hint towards going Chromium and Tim explains those reasons better than I could.
Sponsor
SmashingConf San Francisco 2019 (Apr 16-17)
Hailed as friendly, inclusive events, SmashingConf has broadened the horizons of what a web design conference is. Instead of showing slides, presenters prefer showing attendees how they work in a practical sense, from live debugging to live redesign. 13 speakers including Miriam Suzanne, Chris Coyier and Sara Soueidan will be exploring practical front-end techniques and design strategies. Early Birds are now available!
SmashingConfs are friendly, inclusive events focused on real-world problems and solutions. You can also download the Convince Your Boss PDF (417 KB).
Articles
Browser Diversity Commentary, Regarding the Edge News
By the time you’re reading this there could be more news and an official announcement around Microsoft ditching the current Edge browser rendering engine in favour of using Chromium. I’m sad to hear that this is likely the case, diversity is always advantageous
While we Blink, we loose the Web
Another look at the impact that Chromium has on the web market when you look at all the browsers that are running it. Is it strange that although we aim for standards, we also want competition?
Progressive Web Apps: The Case for PWAs
“Does your organization have a website? If so, you would probably benefit from a progressive web app. This may sound flippant, but it’s true: nearly every website should be a progressive web app, because they represent best practices for the web.” – Check out this excerpt from Jason Grigsby’s new book.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1—for People Who Haven’t Read the Update
The 24Ways advent calendar is pretty amazing, and this article is no exception. I learned LOADS from this article about Accessibility and the simple things you can do to make your website much more accessible.
Metrics from 1M Sites
A timeline of performance metric medians from the HTTP Archive for the world’s top ~1.3 million sites. This looks at TTFB, First paint, first contentful paint, meaningful paint, DOM interactive, Speed index and more.
Tutorials
3 Pro Tips on Alignment
A few examples where “just align it” doesn’t seem to be doing the trick.
A CSS Venn Diagram
I love this approach to a Venn diagram using CSS Grid.
Creating My First Chrome Extension
Browser plugins are super neat and can help us do a lot of helpful things within the browser. This tutorial covers how you might create one that reminds you to look away from the screen after x amount of time, but there’s plenty of potential for what you could create (like a new tab that shows the latest code pens for example).
Going Offline First (Video Series)
This is a great video series from Ire that takes you through five steps on how to create an offline experience on your website. The videos range between 8 and 23 minutes so you could watch them all in your lunch break, or take a short moment out of each day of your week next week and become offline ready.
Responsive Images on the Apple Watch
Eric Portis takes you through the steps you should be following if you want your site, and in particular your images, to look great if someone is looking at your site on their watch.
Resources & Tools
Advent of Code 2018
Advent of Code is an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like.
Why Does Site Speed Matter?
Cloudflare have built a resource centre that can help you understand why performance matters, or how to teach your boss/client/colleagues the importance of fast loading experiences.
Finally
That’s it for this week, see you next week.
Cheers,
Justin.
