Change is difficult in large corporations. But sometimes it is possible. In fact, we published Inside Microsoft’s New Rendering Engine For The “Project Spartan” when the new browser was just announced. A year has passed since then. We kindly thank Microsoft for keeping Smashing Magazine alive and supporting the community with technical articles on practical JavaScript techniques, open source projects and interoperability best practices. Our editors are working with Microsoft engineers to deliver useful insights to you. — Ed.
In 2015, Microsoft launched its first new browser in 20 years: Microsoft Edge. After eight months, it’s on a great trajectory for web standards support, but there are many exciting features to come. This article is part of the web development series from our tech evangelists and engineers on JavaScript skills, community projects and best practices including Microsoft Edge browser and the new EdgeHTML rendering engine.
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Have you heard of Docker but thought that it’s only for system administrators and other Linux geeks? Or have you looked into it and felt a bit intimidated by the jargon? Or are you silently suffering with a messy development environment that seems to break all of the time in various mysterious ways? Then read on. By the end of this article, you should have a basic understanding of Docker and have it working on your computer!
The first part of this article gives a bit of background to help you understand the concepts behind Docker through some metaphors. But if you just want to get started with the tutorial, skip to the “Time to Play!” section.
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Have you ever wanted to use a particular CSS feature but didn’t because it wasn’t fully supported in all browsers? Or, worse, it was supported in all browsers, but the support was buggy, inconsistent or even completely incompatible? If this has happened to you — and I’m betting it has — then you should care about Houdini.
Houdini is a new W3C task force whose ultimate goal is to make this problem go away forever. It plans to do that by introducing a new set of APIs that will, for the first time, give developers the power to extend CSS itself, and the tools to hook into the styling and layout process of a browser’s rendering engine.
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If you’ve ever worked in an agile environment, chances are you’ve had your share of “retrospectives” — meetings where people write what made them “glad,” “mad” or “sad” onto different-colored notes, post them onto a board, arrange them in groups and — most importantly — talk about them.
These meetings are straightforward, as long as everyone is in the same room. But if you’re working with a locally distributed team, things can get a bit tricky. Let’s address this by creating a virtual version of our board to allow team members in different locations to hold their retrospective just as if they were in the same room.
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Mark Zuckerberg once said, “The biggest mistake that we made, as a company, is betting too much on HTML5 as opposed to native… because it just wasn’t there. And it’s not that HTML5 is bad. I’m actually, long term, really excited about it.” And who wouldn’t be excited by the prospect of a single code base that works across multiple platforms?
Unfortunately, Facebook felt that HTML5 didn’t offer the experience it was looking to build, and that’s what it’s really about: the experience. I believe what Mark was really trying to say was that their biggest mistake was making a technology-driven decision instead of a user experience-driven decision. At the end of the day, we should be making decisions that deliver value to our customers, and sticking to a particular technology is generally not the best way to achieve that.
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This article explains what a service worker is and how to put together your own by registering, installing, and activating it without any hassle.
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This article introduces a new free open source web tool that will allow you to generate breakpoints for your images interactively: the Responsive Breakpoints Generator.
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The development of CSS, like all languages, is an iterative process. With every major release, we get new features and syntaxes that help us write our styles. CSS Level 3 introduced features that enable us to design interactions that previously were possible only with JavaScript. With every new day, tools emerge to make styling easier and more flexible.
One of the relatively recent tools introduced for styling is PostCSS. PostCSS aims to reinvent CSS with an ecosystem of custom plugins and tools. Working with the same principles of preprocessors such as Sass and LESS, it transforms extended syntaxes and features into modern, browser-friendly CSS.
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In this article, we’ll look at a few examples of how to use calc() including what support problems they have (if any) and whether they’re ultimately the best solution.
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One upcoming technology that represents a big leap forward in making the web a mature application platform is web components. From a high-level perspective, web components will enable better composability, reusability and interoperability of front-end web application elements by providing a common way to write components in HTML.
The goal of this article is to show you why this will be such an important step, by showing off what can be accomplished right now using Polymer. Polymer is currently the most advanced and (self-proclaimed) production-ready library based on web components.
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