News groups and mailing lists 2008
I’ve got some suggestions as to which usenet news groups and mailing lists (or listservs) are worth following with regard to keeping up-to-date on what’s happening in Client-Side (or Presentation Layer or Front-End) Web development.
I’ve been subscribed these groups and lists for a while. Each one has been a regular source of useful or interesting information.
Sign up to mailing lists in digest mode
A lot of these can be read over the Web at Google groups, or you can sign up to receive them as email lists. Where you sign up for emails, I’d recommend subscribing to any of these in “digest” mode. Digest mode means you recieve only 1 email a day, with all the threads for that day summarized. This makes it easy to keep track of whats going on across several different groups.
Before signing up for any of these, you might want to review ESR’s excellent (and amusing) guide to development mailing lists.
Recommended email lists and discussion groups
Selenium discussion, bugs and new features.
JSLint discussion, including new features which are being added weekly. Douglas Crockford runs this list and responds to most questions.
Firebug discussion, including announcements of new Beta features, which are being added weekly. Run by the Firebug team.
For CSS the definitive discussion group is Eric Meyer’s CSS-discuss mailing list (be sure to choose to receive “digest” format, as this is a high-volume list).
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets is another excellent source of discussion about real-world issues with cascading style sheets in XHTML.
comp.lang.javascript is the oldest JavaScript discussion group, where you can find intelligent, informed discussion about interesting topics such as recursion in JavaScript. While you can read this one through Google Groups, a news reader with a kill file is highly recommended.
There is a large and erudite JavaScript developer community at the Evolt JavaScript list. The volume on this list is low but the level of discourse is great. Every discussion is imo interesting.
The EcmaScript 4 Discussion list is headed by Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript. This is the list to read if you are interested in the development of JavaScript 2. Again, you want to choose “digest” format when subscribing here.
Another deeply technical but informative list is the WHATWG’s discussion list for HTML 5.
See also
User Experience
I’ll also point a few more great browser-related resources, though not actually mailing lists:
http://planet.mozilla.org
http://planet.webkit.org
http://ajaxian.com
Policy and Law
If you like to remain aware of online law, the Electronic Privacy and Information Center’s announcement list is worth joining, and Slashdot also has a category devoted to online legal issues.
http://epic.org/alert
http://slashdot.org/yro