Frontend Focus
Issue 182 — April 1, 2015

Don't fear - we're aiming to be an April Fool's free zone. Let's hope no-one tricked us! ;-)

The Verge takes a high level look at Microsoft’s new browser-in-progress. It looks promising but there’s a long way to go.
The Verge

Many CSS properties exist that allow us to control different aspects of an element’s background and its positioning.
Sara Soueidan

Aims to solve the ‘slow DOM problem’ by rendering normal page elements to WebGL instead. An interesting idea but not something I’d put into production yet.
Denis Radin

Wijmo
Tour the history of this trusted DataGrid control. See how this grid evolved from Windows 95 to HTML5 and what it looked like along the way. FlexGrid is now part of Wijmo 5, a new generation of JavaScript controls.
Wijmo   Sponsor

The first W3Cx course will focus on Web design fundamentals at an intermediate level and start on June 1.
W3C News

Firefox 37 hit the release channel yesterday and has a range of minor improvements. It now opportunistically encrypts HTTP traffic on certain HTTP/2 connections, IndexedDB is now available from worker threads, and it supports enough of MSE to use YouTube’s native HTML5 player.
Mozilla

browser.html is a platform research project (yes, it’s solely a prototype/work in progress, not a product) closely related to Mozilla’s Servo project.
Mozilla

A property that lets you inform the browser of what kinds of changes are likely to occur on an element so it can optimize for them ahead of time.
SitePoint

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  • Front End Engineer at Yelp!Join Yelp's Front-end team and help build a modern, styleguide-driven UX for our 138 million users! We’re looking for people who love good code and working closely with design, product, and other engineers to make great features. Yelp
  • Freelance with Companies like Airbnb, IDEO JPMorganWork on special projects with great companies through Toptal. Set your weekly/hourly rate, and work from anywhere in the world as an elite HTML5 developer. See if you have what it takes. TopTal

Can't find the right job? Want companies to apply to you? Try Hired.com.

In Brief

Announcing Forward 3 Speakers: Doug Crockford, Steve Souders, Christian Heilmann, Sarah Mei many more news
Forward Web Technology Summit  Sponsor

What Do You Want From Your (Firefox) DevTools? news
Mozilla Hacks

What Do You Mean by "Shaders"? How to Create Them with HTML5 and WebGL html5
A rather extensive tutorial.
SitePoint

Setting A Custom Ghost Image When using HTML5 Drag and Drop tutorial
Stuart Langridge

Blocking HTML Links with Pure CSS tutorial
An interesting trick seeking a ‘why’.
Juuso Haavisto

The SVG Canvas, Coordinate System, And Viewport tutorial
Steven Bradley

The State of HTML Content Rasterization with JavaScript opinion
Pixels Commander

The Origin of The 'blink' Tag 
Louis J. Montulli II

HTML Entities for Special Symbols 
Sabina Nore

Modern Tooling (for W3C Standards) 
Capturing the state of the discussion about modernizing the tooling that supports the making of W3C standards.
W3C

WebRTC in Firefox 38: Multistream and Renegotiation 
Mozilla Hacks

Fast HTML5 Charts That Work Everywhere tools
Charts break when data gets big? Compatibility issues? Time to try ZingChart! See it in action.
ZingChart  Sponsor

Pixel Perfect 2: Extension for Firefox Developer Tools tools
Enables web designers to overlay a web page with layers of semi-transparent images so they can tweak the page’s content until it matches.
Mozilla Hacks

TANX: Online Multiplayer Tank Battle using WebGL and Node.js demo
PlayCanvas

Space.js: HTML-Driven Narrative 3D-scrolling code
There’s an article with some background.
Patrik Göthe

gulp-check-unused-css: Check Your HTML Templates for Unused CSS Classes code
Zalando SE

noVNC: VNC Client using HTML5 Tech with Encryption (wss://) Support. code
Joel Martin

RWDGrid: Responsive Grid System for your Next Project code
A small (2KB) mobile-first grid system based around HTML5 Boilerplate.
RWDGrid