Frontend Focus
Issue 189 — May 20, 2015
A look at the all-new Web Audio API support in Microsoft’s IE replacement, Edge.
Microsoft Edge Team

Starting in just over 6 hours, there will be 24 x 1 hour online presentations on the topic of Web accessibility taking place over the entire day. It’s quite a line up.
The Paciello Group

An insightful opinion piece that looks at the role of libraries, package managers, and other tools in the growth and development of the Web Platform and why the future of the Web is in ‘more tools, not fewer.’
Sebastian Markbåge

Mailgun
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Mailgun   Sponsor

While CSS’s ‘text-rendering: optimizeLegibility’ can improve text kerning slightly, it can have dramatic negative impacts on a page’s overall performance.
Bocoup

The Web Messaging specification defines two mechanisms for communicating between browsing contexts in HTML documents: postMessage, and the MessageChannel and MessagePort APIs.
W3C

A nice explanation of a progressive and cross-browser (except IE) technique for doing text clipping masks (where an image can appear within text).
Dudley Storey

Microsoft’s new Web browser now experimentally supports some of the Media Capture and Streams API (a.k.a. getUserMedia), a feature that its predecessor, IE, never had.
Microsoft Edge Team

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In Brief

Last Call Working Draft of HTML Canvas 2D Context news
Provides objects, methods, and properties to draw and manipulate graphics on an HTML5 Canvas. Comments welcomed through June 11.
W3C

Web Notifications Now a W3C Candidate Recommendation news
W3C

Working Draft of CSS Basic User Interface Module Level 3 (CSS3 UI) news
W3C

Web NFC (Near Field Communication) API news
A draft specification from the Web NFC Community Group.
W3C

Developer Tools Updates in Firefox 40 news
Mozilla Hacks

ngrok, the Tool That Brings Local Site Testing to RemoteIE tutorial
Rey Bango

How to Make A Carousel using only HTML and CSS tutorial
Dan Cortes

Let’s Get Charged: Updates to the Battery Status API tutorial
Francesco Iovine looks at the Battery Status API and how it can be used from JavaScript on supported devices.
Mozilla Hacks

SVG 101: An Instructive SVG Collection tutorial
‘SVG demos that either demonstrate basic concepts, or explain advanced concepts in an easy-to-understand manner.’
Katrine-Marie Burmeister

SQL Source Control: track each change to your SQL Server database tools
Get a full history in your source control system. See who made changes, what they did why. See how.
Red Gate Software  Sponsor

Accessibility Drives Front End Professionalization opinion
George Gooding

Sex, Houdini and the Extensible Web opinion
Brian Kardell

Meet The Heisenberg: An Online Synthesizer demo
A cool HTML5 and Web Audio synth on a Web page, playable with your keyboard or, in Chrome, over MIDI.
Audiotool

17 WebGL Demos from the 3D Web Fest demo
3D Web Fest

HTML5 Fractal Playground demo

Introducing SimpleMaps: Create Beautiful Interactive HTML5 Maps code
Responsive, zoomable, SVG maps of the world, USA and more. Easy to customize and install.
SimpleMaps  Sponsor

15 Inspiring Examples of CSS Animation on CodePen demo code
Tuts+

fakeIndexedDB: A Pure JS In-Memory Implementation of IndexedDB code
Passes the W3C IndexedDB test suite, and can even run server-side with Node.
Jeremy Scheff