Web Development Reading List #172: On Reporting Bugs, DNS Subdomain Takeovers, And Sustainable UX

About The Author

Anselm is a freelance front-end developer who cares about sustainable front-end experiences and ethical choices in life. He writes the WDRL, and is co-founder … More about Anselm ↬

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What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at.

As web developers, we all approach our work very differently. And even when you take a look at yourself, you’ll notice that the way you do your work does vary all the time. I, for example, have not reported a single bug to a browser vendor in the past year, despite having stumbled over a couple. I was just too lazy to write them up, report them, write a test case and care about follow-up comments.

This week, however, when integrating the Internationalization API for dates and times, I noticed a couple of inconsistencies and specification violations in several browsers, and I reported them. It took me one hour, but now browser vendors can at least fix these bugs. Today, I filed two new issues, because I’ve become more aware again of things that work in one browser but not in others. I think it’s important to change the way we work from time to time. It’s as easy as caring more about the issues we face and reporting them back.

News

  • Web annotations are now a web standard, with a defined data model, vocabulary, and protocol. Let’s hope many of the browser vendors (Microsoft Edge) and service platforms will adopt the standard soon. For us developers it’s a huge opportunity, too, to build standardized annotations that are interoperable and to communicate with each other.
Web Annotation Architecture
The new Web Annotation standard could make conversation happen anywhere on the web and make comment widgets a thing of the past. (Image credit)

Security

Web Performance

CSS/Sass

Going Beyond…

  • Vicki Boykis wrote an excellent piece called “Fix the internet by writing good stuff and being nice to people” in which she points out one of the major issues on the internet: the fact that making money off content became worth more than the content itself.
  • The free Sustainable UX conference took place two weeks ago. To get some insights into how we can achieve sustainability in tech, you can now watch the conference talks for free.
Fix the internet by writing good stuff and being nice to people
Share and create good content. A philosophy we all should live by.

And with that, I’ll close for this week. If you like what I write each week, please support me with a donation or share this resource with other people. You can learn more about the costs of the project here. It’s available via email, RSS and online.

— Anselm

Further Reading

Smashing Editorial (mrn)