Archive: November, 2016

I had a really enjoyable time at Codebar Brighton last week, not least because Morty came along.

I particularly enjoy teaching people who have zero previous experience of making a web page. There’s something about explaining HTML and CSS from first principles that appeals to me. I especially love it when people ask lots of questions. “What does this element do?”, “Why do some elements have closing tags and others don’t?”, “Why is it textarea and not input type="textarea"?” The answer usually involves me going down a rabbit-hole of web archeology, so I’m in my happy place.

But there’s only so much time at Codebar each week, so it’s nice to be able to point people to other resources that they can peruse at their leisure. It turns out that’s it’s actually kind of tricky to find resources at that level. There are lots of great articles and tutorials out there for professional web developers—Smashing Magazine, A List Apart, CSS Tricks, etc.—but no so much for complete beginners.

Here are some of the resources I’ve found:

• MarkSheet by Jeremy Thomas is a free HTML and CSS tutorial. It starts with an explanation of the internet, then the World Wide Web, and then web browsers, before diving into HTML syntax. Jeremy is the same guy who recently made CSS Reference.
• Learn to Code HTML & CSS by Shay Howe is another free online book. You can buy a paper copy too. It’s filled with good, clear explanations.
• Zero to Hero Coding by Vera Deák is an ongoing series. She’s starting out on her career as a front-end developer, so her perspective is particularly valuable.

If I find any more handy resources, I’ll link to them and tag them with “learning”.

In a post called Side Effects in CSS that he wrote a while back, Philip Walton talks about different kinds of challenges in writing CSS:

There are two types of problems in CSS: cosmetic problems and architectural problems.

The cosmetic problems are solved by making something look the way you want it to. The architectural problems are trickier because they have more long-term effects—maintainability, modularity, encapsulation; all that tricky stuff. Philip goes on to say:

If I had to choose between hiring an amazing designer who could replicate even the most complicated visual challenges easily in code and someone who understood the nuances of predictable and maintainable CSS, I’d choose the latter in a heartbeat.

This resonates with something I noticed a while back while I was doing some code reviews. Most of the time when I’m analysing CSS and trying to figure out how “good” it is—and I know that’s very subjective—I’m concerned with what’s on the outside of the curly braces.

selector {
    property: value;
}

The stuff inside the curly braces—the properties and values—that’s where the cosmetic problems get solved. It’s also the stuff that you can look up; I certainly don’t try to store all possible CSS properties and values in my head. It’s also easy to evaluate: Does it make the thing look like you want it to look? Yes? Good. It works.

The stuff outside the curly braces—the selectors—that’s harder to judge. It needs to be evaluated with lots of “what ifs”: What if this selects something you didn’t intend to? What if the markup changes? What if someone else writes some CSS that negates this?

I find it fascinating that most of the innovation in CSS from the browser makers and standards bodies arrives in the form of new properties and values—flexbox, grid, shapes, viewport units, and so on. Meanwhile there’s a whole other world of problems to be solved outside the curly braces. There’s not much that the browser makers or standards bodies can do to help us there. I think that’s why most of the really interesting ideas and thoughts around CSS in recent years have focused on that challenge.

Every front-end developer at Clearleft went to FFConf last Friday: me, Mark, Graham, Charlotte, and Danielle. We weren’t about to pass up the opportunity to attend a world-class dev conference right here in our home base of Brighton.

The day was unsurprisingly excellent. All the speakers brought their A-game on a wide range of topics. Of course JavaScript was covered, but there was also plenty of mindfood on CSS, accessibility, progressive enhancement, dev tools, creative coding, and even emoji.

Normally FFConf would be a good opportunity to catch up with some Pauls from the Google devrel team, but because of an unfortunate scheduling clash this year, all the Pauls were at Chrome Dev Summit 2016 on the other side of the Atlantic.

I’ve been catching up on the videos from the event. There’s plenty of tech-related stuff: dev tools, web components, and plenty of talk about progressive web apps. But there was also a very, very heavy focus on performance. I don’t just mean performance at the shallow scale of file size and optimisation, but a genuine questioning of the impact of our developer workflows and tools.

In his talk on service workers (what else?), Jake makes the point that not everything needs to be a single page app, echoing Ada’s talk at FFConf.

He makes the point that if you really want fast rendering, nothing on the client side quite beats a server render.

They’ve written a lot of JavaScript to make this quite slow.

Unfortunately, all too often, I hear people say that a progressive web app must be a single page app. And I am not so sure. You might not need a single page app. A single page app can end up being a lot of work and slower. There’s a lot of cargo-culting around single page apps.

Alex followed up his barnstorming talk from the Polymer Summit with some more uncomfortable truths about how mobile phones work.

Cell networks are basically kryptonite to the protocols and assumptions that the web was built on.

And JavaScript frameworks aren’t helping. Quite the opposite.

But make no mistake: if you’re using one of today’s more popular JavaScript frameworks in the most naive way, you are failing by default. There is no sugarcoating this.

Today’s frameworks are mostly a sign of ignorance, or privilege, or both. The good news is that we can fix the ignorance.

I spoke at the GOTO conference in Berlin this week. It was the final outing of a talk I’ve been giving for about a year now called Resilience.

Looking back over my speaking engagements, I reckon I must have given this talk—in one form or another—about sixteen times. If by some statistical fluke or through skilled avoidance strategies you managed not to see the talk, you can still have it rammed down your throat by reading a transcript of the presentation.

That particular outing is from Beyond Tellerrand earlier this year in Düsseldorf. That’s one of the events that recorded a video of the talk. Here are all the videos of it I could find:

• Coldfront
• Render
• Beyond Tellerrand
• Nordic.js
• View Source
• Smashing Conference

Or, if you prefer, here’s an audio file. And here are the slides but they won’t make much sense by themselves.

Resilience is a mixture of history lesson and design strategy. The history lesson is about the origins of the internet and the World Wide Web. The design strategy is a three-pronged approach:

1. Identify core functionality.
2. Make that functionality available using the simplest technology.
3. Enhance!

And if you like that tweet-sized strategy, you can get it on a poster. Oh, and check this out: Belgian student Sébastian Seghers published a school project on the talk.

Now, you might be thinking that the three-headed strategy sounds an awful lot like progressive enhancement, and you’d be right. I think every talk I’ve ever given has been about progressive enhancement to some degree. But with this presentation I set myself a challenge: to talk about progressive enhancement without ever using the phrase “progressive enhancement”. This is something I wrote about last year—if the term “progressive enhancement” is commonly misunderstood by the very people who would benefit from hearing this message, maybe it’s best to not mention that term and talk about the benefits of progressive enhancement instead: robustness, resilience, and technical credit. I think that little semantic experiment was pretty successful.

While the time has definitely come to retire the presentation, I’m pretty pleased with it, and I feel like it got better with time as I adjusted the material. The most common format for the talk was 40 to 45 minutes long, but there was an extended hour-long “director’s cut” that only appeared at An Event Apart. That included an entire subplot about Arthur C. Clarke and the invention of the telegraph (I’m still pretty pleased with the segue I found to weave those particular threads together).

Anyway, with the Resilience talk behind me, my mind is now occupied with the sequel: Evaluating Technology. I recently shared my research material for this one and, as you may have gathered, it takes me a loooong time to put a presentation like this together (which, by the same token, is one of the reasons why I end up giving the same talk multiple times within a year).

This new talk had its debut at An Event Apart in San Francisco two weeks ago. Jeffrey wrote about it and I’m happy to say he liked it. This bodes well—I’m already booked in for An Event Apart Seattle in April. I’ll also be giving an abridged version of this new talk at next year’s Render conference.

But that’s it for my speaking schedule for now. 2016 is all done and dusted, and 2017 is looking wide open. I hope I’ll get some more opportunities to refine and adjust the Evaluating Technology talk at some more events. If you’re a conference organiser and it sounds like something you’d be interested in, get in touch.

In the meantime, it’s time for me to pack away the Resilience talk, and wheel down into the archives, just like the closing scene of Raiders Of The Lost Ark. The music swells. The credits roll. The image fades to black.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

—W.H. Auden

After An Event Apart San Francisco, which was—as always—excellent, it was time for me to get to the next event: Indie Web Camp Los Angeles. But I wasn’t going alone. Tantek was going too, and seeing as he has a car—a convertible, even—what better way to travel from San Francisco to LA than on the Pacific Coast Highway?

It was great—travelling through the land of Steinbeck and Guthrie at the speed of Kerouac and Springsteen. We stopped for the night at Pismo Beach and then continued on, rolling into Santa Monica at sunset.

The weekend was spent in the usual Indie Web Camp fashion: a day of BarCamp-style discussions, followed by a day of hacking on our personal websites.

I decided to follow on from what I did at the Brighton Indie Web Camp. There, I made a combined tag view—a way of seeing, for example, everything tagged with “indieweb” instead of just journal entries tagged with “indieweb” or links tagged with “indieweb”. I wanted to do the same thing with my archives. I have separate archives for my journal, my links, and my notes. What I wanted was a combined view.

After some hacking, I got it working. So now you can see combined archives by year, month, and day (I managed to add a sparkline to the month view as well):

• adactio.com/archive/2016
• adactio.com/archive/2016/10
• adactio.com/archive/2016/10/29

I did face a bit of a conundrum. Both my home page stream and my tag pages show posts in reverse chronological order, with the newest posts at the top. I’ve decided to replicate that for the archive view, but I’m not sure if that’s the right decision. Maybe the list of years should begin with 2001 and end with 2016, instead of the other way around. And maybe when you’re looking at a month of posts, you should see the first posts in that month at the top.

Anyway, I’ll live with it in reverse chronological order for a while and see how it feels. I’m just glad I managed to get it down—I’ve been meaning to do it for quite a while. Once again, I’m amazed by how much gets accomplished when you’re in the same physical space as other helpful, motivated people all working on improving their indie web presence, little by little.

Tom wrote a post on Ev’s blog a while back called JavaScript Frameworks: Distribution Channels for Good Ideas (I’ve been hoping he’d publish it on his own site so I’d have a more permanent URL to point to, but so far, no joy). It’s well worth a read.

I don’t really have much of an opinion on his central point that browser makers should work more closely with framework makers. I’m not so sure I agree with the central premise that frameworks are going to be around for the long haul. I think good frameworks—like jQuery—should aim to make themselves redundant.

But anyway, along the way, Tom makes this observation:

Google has an institutional tendency to go it alone.

JavaScript not good enough? Let’s create Dart to replace it. HTML not good enough? Let’s create AMP to replace it. I’m just waiting for them to announce Google Style Sheets.

I don’t really mind these inventions. We’re not forced to adopt them, and generally, we don’t. Tom again:

They poured enormous time and money into Dart, even building an entire IDE, without much to show for it. Contrast Dart’s adoption with the adoption of TypeScript and Flow, which layer improvements on top of JavaScript instead of trying to replace it.

See, that’s a really, really good point. It’s so much easier to get people to adjust their behaviour than to change it completely.

Sass is a really good example of this. You can take any .css file, save it as a .scss file, and now you’re using Sass. Then you can start using features (or not) as needed. Very smart.

Incidentally, I’m very curious to know how many people use the scss syntax (which is the same as CSS) compared to how many people use the sass indented syntax (the one with significant whitespace). In his brilliant Sass for Web Designers book, I don’t think Dan even mentioned the indented syntax.

Or compare the adoption of Sass to the adoption of HAML. Now, admittedly, the disparity there might be because Sass adds new features, whereas HAML is a purely stylistic choice. But I think the more fundamental difference is that Sass—with its scss syntax—only requires you to slightly adjust your behaviour, whereas something like HAML requires you to go all in right from the start.

This is something that has been on my mind a lately while I’ve been preparing my new talk on evaluating technology (the talk went down very well at An Event Apart San Francisco, by the way—that’s a relief). In the talk, I made a reference to one of Grace Hopper’s famous quotes:

Humans are allergic to change.

Now, Grace Hopper subsequently says:

I try to fight that.

I contrast that with the approach that Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau took with their World Wide Web project. The individual pieces were built on what people were already familiar with. URLs use slashes so they’d be feel similar to UNIX file paths. And the first fledging version of HTML took its vocabulary almost wholesale from a version of SGML already in use at CERN. In fact, you could pretty much take an existing CERN SGML file and open it as an HTML file in a web browser.

Oh, and that browser would ignore any tags it didn’t understand—behaviour that, in my opinion, would prove crucial to the growth and success of HTML. Because of its familiarity, its simplicity, and its forgiving error handling, HTML turned to be more successful than Tim Berners-Lee expected, as he wrote in his book Weaving The Web:

I expected HTML to be the basic waft and weft of the Web but documents of all types: video, computer aided design, sound, animation and executable programs to be the colored threads that would contain much of the content. It would turn out that HTML would become amazingly popular for the content as well.

HTML and SGML; Sass and CSS; TypeScript and JavaScript. The new technology builds on top of the existing technology instead of wiping the slate clean and starting from scratch.

Humans are allergic to change. And that’s okay.

I wrote my first tweet ten years ago.

I’m off to grab some lunch.

— Jeremy Keith (@adactio) November 1, 2006

That’s the tweetiest of tweets, isn’t it? (and just look at the status ID—only five digits!)

Of course, back then we didn’t call them tweets. We didn’t know what to call them. We didn’t know what to make of this thing at all.

I say “we”, but when I signed up, there weren’t that many people on Twitter that I knew. Because of that, I didn’t treat it as a chat or communication tool. It was more like speaking into the void, like blogging is now. The word “microblogging” was one of the terms floating around, grasped by those of trying to get to grips with what this odd little service was all about.

Twenty days after I started posting to Twitter, I wrote about how more and more people that I knew were joining :

The usage of Twitter is, um, let’s call it… emergent. Whenever I tell anyone about it, their first question is “what’s it for?”

Fair question. But their isn’t really an answer. You send messages either from the website, your mobile phone, or chat. What you post and why you’d want to do it is entirely up to you.

I was quite the cheerleader for Twitter:

Overall, Twitter is full of trivial little messages that sometimes merge into a coherent conversation before disintegrating again. I like it. Instant messaging is too intrusive. Email takes too much effort. Twittering feels just right for the little things: where I am, what I’m doing, what I’m thinking.

“Twittering.” Don’t laugh. “Tweeting” sounded really silly at first too.

Now at this point, I could start reminiscing about how much better things were back then. I won’t, but it’s interesting to note just how different it was.

• The user base was small enough that there was a public timeline of all activity.
• The characters in your username counted towards your 140 characters. That’s why Tantek changed his handle to be simply “t”. I tried it for a day. I think I changed my handle to “jk”. But it was too confusing so I changed it back.
• We weren’t always sure how to write our updates either—your username would appear at the start of the message, so lots of us wrote our updates in the third person present (Brian still does). I’m partial to using the present continuous. That was how I wrote my reaction to Chris’s weird idea for tagging updates.

Thinking that hashtags disrupt the reading flow of natural language. Sorry @factoryjoe.

— Jeremy Keith (@adactio) November 6, 2007

I think about that whenever I see a hashtag on a billboard or a poster or a TV screen …which is pretty much every day.

At some point, Twitter updated their onboarding process to include suggestions of people to follow, subdivided into different categories. I ended up in the list of designers to follow. Anil Dash wrote about the results of being listed and it reflects my experience too. I got a lot of followers—it’s up to around 160,000 now—but I’m pretty sure most of them are bots.

There have been a lot of changes to Twitter over the years. In the early days, those changes were driven by how people used the service. That’s where the @-reply convention (and hashtags) came from.

Then something changed. The most obvious sign of change was the way that Twitter started treating third-party developers. Where they previously used to encourage and even promote third-party apps, the company began to crack down on anything that didn’t originate from Twitter itself. That change reflected the results of an internal struggle between the people at Twitter who wanted it to become an open protocol (like email), and those who wanted it to become a media company (like Yahoo). The media camp won.

Of course Twitter couldn’t possibly stay the same given its incredible growth (and I really mean incredible—when it started to appear in the mainstream, in films and on TV, it felt so weird: this funny little service that nerds were using was getting popular with everyone). Change isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just different. Your favourite band changed when they got bigger. South by Southwest changed when it got bigger—it’s not worse now, it’s just very different.

Frank described the changing the nature of Twitter perfectly in his post From the Porch to the Street:

Christopher Alexander made a great diagram, a spectrum of privacy: street to sidewalk to porch to living room to bedroom. I think for many of us Twitter started as the porch—our space, our friends, with the occasional neighborhood passer-by. As the service grew and we gained followers, we slid across the spectrum of privacy into the street.

I stopped posting directly to Twitter in May, 2014. Instead I now write posts on my site and then send a copy to Twitter. And thanks to the brilliant Brid.gy, I get replies, favourites and retweets sent back to my own site—all thanks to Webmention, which just become a W3C proposed recommendation.

It’s hard to put into words how good this feels. There’s a psychological comfort blanket that comes with owning your own data. I see my friends getting frustrated and angry as they put up with an increasingly alienating experience on Twitter, and I wish I could explain how much better it feels to treat Twitter as nothing more than a syndication service.

When Twitter rolls out changes these days, they certainly don’t feel like they’re driven by user behaviour. Quite the opposite. I’m currently in the bucket of users being treated to new @-reply behaviour. Tressie McMillan Cottom has written about just how terrible the new changes are. You don’t get to see any usernames when you’re writing a reply, so you don’t know exactly how many people are going to be included. And if you mention a URL, the username associated with that website may get added to the tweet. The end result is that you write something, you publish it, and then you think “that’s not what I wrote.” It feels wrong. It robs you of agency. Twitter have made lots of changes over the years, but this feels like the first time that they’re going to actively edit what you write, without your permission.

Maybe this is the final straw. Maybe this is the change that will result in long-time Twitter users abandoning the service. Maybe.

Me? Well, Twitter could disappear tomorrow and I wouldn’t mind that much. I’d miss seeing updates from friends who don’t have their own websites, but I’d carry on posting my short notes here on adactio.com. When I started posting to Twitter ten years ago, I was speaking (or microblogging) into the void. I’m still doing that ten years on, but under my terms. It feels good.

I’m not sure if my Twitter account will still exist ten years from now. But I’m pretty certain that my website will still be around.

And now, if you don’t mind…

I’m off to grab some lunch.