Archive: August 23rd, 2016

This week’s @asyncjs is looking mighty fine.

https://asyncjs.com/twofer-games-and-bots/

Writing Less Damn Code | HeydonWorks

I’m in complete agreement with Heydon here:

But it turns out the only surefire way to make performant Web Stuff is also to just write less. Minify? Okay. Compress? Well, yeah. Cache? Sounds technical. Flat out refuse to code something or include someone else’s code in the first place? Now you’re talking.

Just like the “mobile first” mindset, if you demand that everything must justify its existence, you end up with a better experience for everyone:

My favorite thing about aiming to have less stuff is this: you finish up with only the stuff you really need — only the stuff your user actually wants. Massive hero image of some dude drinking a latte? Lose it. Social media buttons which pull in a bunch of third-party code while simultaneously wrecking your page design? Give them the boot. That JavaScript thingy that hijacks the user’s right mouse button to reveal a custom modal? Ice moon prison.

Hypothesis: if you really insist on using a pull quote online, you should apply aria-hidden=”true”.

Why do pull quotes exist on the web?

There you are reading an article when suddenly it’s interrupted by a big piece of text that’s repeating something you just read in the previous paragraph. Or it’s interrupted by a big piece of text that’s spoiling a sentence that you are about to read in subsequent paragraphs.

There you are reading an article when suddenly it’s interrupted by a big piece of text that’s repeating something you just read in the previous paragraph.

To be honest, I find pull quotes pretty annoying in printed magazines too, but I can at least see the justification for them there: if you’re flipping through a magazine, they act as eye-catching inducements to stop and read (in much the same way that good photography does or illustration does). But once you’re actually reading an article, they’re incredibly frustrating.

You either end up learning to blot them out completely, or you end up reading the same sentence twice.

You either end up learning to blot them out completely, or you end up reading the same sentence twice. Blotting them out is easier said than done on a small-screen device. At least on a large screen, pull quotes can be shunted off to the side, but on handheld devices, pull quotes really make no sense at all.

Are pull quotes online an example of a skeuomorph? “An object or feature which imitates the design of a similar artefact made from another material.”

I think they might simply be an example of unexamined assumptions. The default assumption is that pull quotes on the web are fine, because everyone else is doing pull quotes on the web. But has anybody ever stopped to ask why? It was this same spiral of unexamined assumptions that led to the web drowning in a sea of splash pages in the early 2000s.

I think they might simply be an example of unexamined assumptions.

I’m genuinely curious to hear the design justification for pull quotes on the web (particularly on mobile), because as a reader, I can give plenty of reasons for their removal.

Alas, tomorrow evening’s Brighton Homebrew Website Club is cancelled—apologies, my fellow website tinkerers.

Using Feature Queries in CSS ★ Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog

A thorough explanation of @supports from Jen, with plenty of smart strategies for using it in your CSS today.

If it weren’t for retargeting, we might not have ad blocking

The more I reflect on the current practices of the online advertising industry, the more I think that ad-blocking is a moral imperative.

10K Apart

The 10K competition—spiritual successor to Stewart Butterfield’s 5K.org—is back. This time there’s no escape clause with web fonts or jQuery. You can lazy-load in more content after the initial 10K payload …but whatever you’re building needs to be usable in that first 10K.

Give it a go. There’s nothing like having a constraint to really get the creative juices flowing.

What is React?

I’m in a similar position to Remy:

I don’t use React. I don’t really gravitate towards larger frameworks, only because my daily work doesn’t require it, and I’m personally more interested in the lower level techniques and parts of the web and JavaScript.

But, like Remy, I’m interested in knowing what are the ideas and techniques embedded within large frameworks that will end up making their way into the web stack:

What I want to know is: what should I be taking away from React into my own continued evolution as a web developer?

There are some good responses in the comments.

gmetais/sw-delta: An incremental cache for the web

Here’s an interesting use of service workers: figure out the difference (the delta) between the currently-cached version of a file, and the version on the network, and then grab only the bits that have changed. It requires some configuration on the server side (to send back the diff) but it’s an interesting approach that could be worth keeping an eye on.

Download Blisk - a browser for web developers

A browser aimed specifically at web developers. It’s got some nice features around mobile device emulation.