Jeremy Keith

Jeremy Keith

Making websites. Writing books. Speaking at conferences. Living in Brighton. Working at Clearleft. Playing music. Taking photos. Answering email.

Journal 2410 sparkline Links 6864 sparkline Articles 67 sparkline Notes 3370 sparkline

Saturday, September 23rd, 2017

Progressive Web Apps? No, we are building Alien Web Apps | Condé Nast Technology

There’s a lot of misinformation on the internet as to how to build a PWA and how “appy” and SPA-y one must be.

Yes!

This simply isn’t true. Disappointingly, It is what most of the documentation, blog posts and public discourse seem to imply.

Preach it!

I’m so, so happy to see some pushback against the misinformation that progressive web apps automatically imply client-side rendered single page apps built from scratch. There’s so much value to be had in turbo-charging an existing site into a progressive web app.

But what we don’t need is yet another TLA like Alien Web Apps.

Designing Websites for iPhone X | WebKit

This could be a one-word article: don’t.

More specifically, don’t design websites for any specific device. That way lies pain (and it is not the way of the web).

But read on for a textbook example of how not to introduce new CSS properties. Apple proposed the new syntax that they’re shipping. Now it’s getting standardised …with a different name. So basically Apple are shipping the equivalent of a vendor-prefixed property without the vendor prefix.

Visions - A Literary Science Fiction Magazine

This forthcoming sci-fi quarterly publication looks intriguing:

Each issue contains a part of a previously untranslated novel as well as essays looking at the world through the lens of different writers.

I’m loving their typeface. It’s called Marvin. It was specially made for the magazine, and available to download and use for personal use for free.

Marvin gets its distinctive voice not only from its Art Nouveau vibe but also from its almost geometrically perfect construction. Its roundness and familiarity with Bauhaus typefaces shows its roots in geometric sans serifs at the same time.

The story of its (re)construction is fascinating. (Thanks for the heads-up, Jason.)

Friday, September 22nd, 2017

CloseBrace | A Brief, Incomplete History of JavaScript

Another deep dive into web history, this time on JavaScript. The timeline of JS on the web is retroactively broken down into four eras:

  • the early era: ~1996 – 2004,
  • the jQuery era: ~2004 – 2010,
  • the Single Page App era: ~2010 - 2014, and
  • the modern era: ~2014 - present.

Nice to see “vanilla” JavaScript making a resurgence in that last one.

It’s 2017, the JavaScript ecosystem is both thriving and confusing as all hell. No one seems to be quite sure where it’s headed, only that it’s going to continue to grow and change. The web’s not going anywhere, which means JS isn’t going anywhere, and I’m excited to see what future eras bring us.

The First Web Apps: 5 Apps That Shaped the Internet as We Know It

A great bit of web history spelunking in search of the first websites that allowed users to interact with data on a server. Applications, if you will. It’s well written, but I take issue with this:

The world wide web wasn’t supposed to be this fun. Berners-Lee imagined the internet as a place to collaborate around text, somewhere to share research data and thesis papers.

This often gets trotted out (“the web was intended for scientists sharing documents”), but it’s simply not true that Tim Berners-Lee was only thinking of his immediate use-case; he deliberately made the WWW project broad enough to allow all sorts of thitherto unforeseen uses. If he hadn’t …well, the web wouldn’t have been able to accommodate all those later developments. It’s not an accident that the web was later used for all sorts of unexpected things—that was the whole idea.

Anyway, apart from that misstep, the rest of the article is a fun piece, well worth reading.

Idle Words: Anatomy of a Moral Panic

The real story in this mess is not the threat that algorithms pose to Amazon shoppers, but the threat that algorithms pose to journalism. By forcing reporters to optimize every story for clicks, not giving them time to check or contextualize their reporting, and requiring them to race to publish follow-on articles on every topic, the clickbait economics of online media encourage carelessness and drama.

Thursday, September 21st, 2017

Talking about talking CSS

I had the great pleasure of finally meeting Hui Jing when Mozilla invited me along to Singapore to speak at their developer roadshow. Hui Jing is speaking at each one of the events on the roadshow, and documenting the journey here.

She’s being very modest about her talk: it was superb! Entertaining and informative in equal measure, delivered with gusto. Seriously, frontend conference organisers, try to get Hui Jing to speak about CSS at your event—you won’t regret it.

Web truths: CSS is not real programming | Christian Heilmann

A lot of “CSS is not real programming” arguments are a basic misunderstanding what CSS is there to achieve. If you want full control over and interface and strive for pixel perfection – don’t use it. If you want to build an interface for an inclusive and diverse web, CSS is a great tool.

Christian does a good job of describing the much-misunderstood declarative nature of CSS.

Also:

In any case, belittling people who write CSS and considering them not real developers is arrogant nonsense.

Killing Old Service Workers for the Greater Good – Hackages Blog

Ooh, this is a tricky scenario. If you decide to redirect all URLs (from, say, a www subdomain to no subdomain) and you have a service worker running, you’re going to have a bad time. But there’s a solution here to get the service worker to remove itself.

The server-side specifics are for NGINX but this is also doable with Apache.