Archive: August, 2018

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Friday, August 31st, 2018

Really enjoyed chatting with @tweetsmariam about front-end development today.

Smart agencies of Brighton: you should hire her.

Thursday, August 30th, 2018

Offline Web Experiences with Jeremy Keith « CTRL+CLICK CAST

I had a great time chatting with Lea and Emily about service workers on this episode of their podcast—they’re such great hosts!

Here’s the huffduffed audio.

The Complete CSS Demo for OpenType Features - OpenType Features in CSS

Every single font-feature-settings value demonstrated in one single page.

An excellent idea for people in low-bandwidth situations: automatically disable JavaScript. As long as the site is built with progressive enhancement, there’s no problem (and if not, the user is presented with the choice to enable scripts).

Power to the people!

Sunday, August 26th, 2018

Checked in at Kookaburra Beach. Coffee and Kindle — with Jessica

map — Checked in at Kookaburra Beach. Coffee and Kindle — with Jessica

Reading The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin.

Saturday, August 25th, 2018

Breaking the law. Totally worth it. — Breaking the law.

Totally worth it.

Friday, August 24th, 2018

Wednesday, August 22nd, 2018

Reading The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin.

Going to Saint Augustine, Florida. brb

Tuesday, August 21st, 2018

Design Laws in Nature by Jordan Moore

A deep, deep dive into biomicry in digital design.

Nature is our outsourced research and development department. Observing problems solved by nature can help inform how we approach problems in digital design. Nature doesn’t like arbitrary features. It finds a way to shed unnecessary elements in advancing long-term goals over vast systems.

The Web I Want - DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻

Scores of people who just want to deliver their content and have it look vaguely nice are convinced you need every web technology under the sun to deliver text.

This is very lawnoffgetting but I can relate.

I made my first website about 20 years ago and it delivered as much content as most websites today. It was more accessible, ran faster and easier to develop then 90% of the stuff you’ll read on here.

20 years later I browse the Internet with a few tabs open and I have somehow downloaded many megabytes of data, my laptop is on fire and yet in terms of actual content delivery nothing has really changed.

A Tale of Two Buttons

In defence of the cascade (especially now that we’ve got CSS custom properties).

I think embracing CSS’s cascade can be a great way to encourage consistency and simplicity in UIs. Rather than every new component being a free for all, it trains both designers and developers to think in terms of aligning with and re-using what they already have.

Remember, every time you set a property in CSS you are in fact overriding something (even if it’s just the default user agent styles). In other words, CSS code is mostly expressing exceptions to a default design.

Documenting my messy talk-writing process.

This one is for https://2018.stateofthebrowser.com

I think this is still my favourite explanation of HTTPS:

https://amberwilson.co.uk/blog/httpspoem/

Mozilla Protocol - Protocol Design System

Mozilla’s work-in-progress style guide and pattern library.

Monotype restored the font Walbaum, a 200-year-old serif typeface — Quartzy

The history and restoratin of a neglected typeface, complete with this great explanation of optical sizing:

Nix illustrated the point with an analogy: “Imagine if we all decided that 10-year-old boys would be the optimal human form,” he says. “Rather than having babies, we just shrunk 10-year-old boys to baby size, and enlarge them to the size of a full grown man. That’s kind of what we’re combatting.”

Monday, August 20th, 2018

Went to the cinema to watch Mission Impossible: Fallout, and then came home and watched University Challenge.

I don’t think my body can handle any more adrenaline.

Playing with the Indieweb

A good half-hour presentation by Stephen Rushe on the building blocks of the indie web. You can watch the video or look through the slides.

I’ve recently been exploring the world of the IndieWeb, and owning my own content rather than being reliant on the continued existence of “silos” to maintain it. This has led me to discover the varied eco-system of IndieWeb, such as IndieAuth, Microformats, Micropub, Webmentions, Microsub, POSSE, and PESOS.

How can designers get better at learning from their mistakes?

Jon has seven answers:

Build a culture to learn from mistakes

Embrace healthy critique

Fail little and often

Listen to users

Design. Learn. Repeat

Create a shared understanding

Always be accountable

It’s gratifying to see how much of this was informed by the culture of critique at Clearleft.

Front-End Performance Checklist

A handy pre-launch go/no-go checklist to run through before your countdown.

Sunday, August 19th, 2018

Thursday, August 16th, 2018

On HTTPS and Hard Questions - TimKadlec.com

A great post by Tim following on from the post by Eric I linked to last week.

Is a secure site you can’t access better than an insecure one you can?

He rightly points out that security without performance is exlusionary.

…we’ve made a move to increase the security of the web by doing everything we can to get everything running over HTTPS. It’s undeniably a vital move to make. However this combination—poor performance but good security—now ends up making the web inaccessible to many.

Security. Performance. Accessibility. All three matter.

How to build a simple Camera component - Frontend News #4

A step-by-step guide to wrapping up a self-contained bit of functionality (a camera, in this case) into a web component.

Mind you, it would be nice if there were some thought given to fallbacks, like say:

<simple-camera>
<input type="file" accept="image/*">
</simple-camera>

A web of anxiety: accessibility for people with anxiety and panic disorders [Part 1] | The Paciello Group – Your Accessibility Partner (WCAG 2.0/508 audits, VPAT, usability and accessible user experience)

Enumerating the anti-patterns that cause serious user experience issues that don’t get nearly enough attention:

Urgency
Unpredictability
Powerlessness
Sensationalism

While such intrusions can be a source of irritation or even stress for many people, they may be complete showstoppers for people with anxiety or panic disorders.

I’m looking forward to reading the follow-up post.

(I was going to say I was anxiously awaiting the follow-up post but …never mind.)

Going Offline by Jeremy Keith – a post by Marc Thiele

This is such a lovely, lovely review from Marc!

Jeremy’s way of writing certainly helps, as a specialised or technical book on a topic like Service Workers, could certainly be one, that bores you to death with dry written explanations. But Jeremy has a friendly, fresh and entertaining way of writing books. Sometimes I caught myself with a grin on my face…

Wednesday, August 15th, 2018

Google AMP - A 70% drop in our conversion rate. - Rockstar Coders

Google hijacking and hosting your AMP pages (in order to pre-render them) is pretty terrible for user experience and security:

I’m trying to establish my company as a legitimate business that can be trusted by a stranger to build software for them. Having google.com reeks of a phishing scam or fly by night operation that couldn’t afford their own domain.

Tuesday, August 14th, 2018

Just write.

What you write might help someone understand a concept that you may think has been covered enough before. We each have our own unique perspectives and writing styles.

Yes! This!!

That voice telling you that people are just sitting somewhere watching our every step and judging us based on the popularity of our writing is a big fat pathetic attention-needing liar.

005: Service workers - Web Components Club

I strongly recommend that you read Going Offline by Jeremy Keith. Before his book, I found the concept of service workers quite daunting and convinced myself that it’s one of those things that I’ll have to set aside a big chunk of time to learn. I got through Jeremy’s book in a few hours and felt confident and inspired. This is because he’s very good at explaining concepts in a friendly, concise manner.

Monday, August 13th, 2018

The power of progressive enhancement – No Divide – Medium

The beauty of this approach is that the site doesn’t ever appear broken and the user won’t even be aware that they are getting the ‘default’ experience. With progressive enhancement, every user has their own experience of the site, rather than an experience that the designers and developers demand of them.

A case study in applying progressive enhancement to all aspects of a site.

Progressive enhancement isn’t necessarily more work and it certainly isn’t a non-JavaScript fallback, it’s a change in how we think about our projects. A complete mindset change is required here and it starts by remembering that you don’t build websites for yourself, you build them for others.

Myself and @dhuntrods really enjoyed our visit to the digitisation department in the Natural History Museum. Thanks, Jen, Josh, Robin, Phaedra, and @scuff_el!

Sunday, August 12th, 2018

Let’s serve everyone good-looking content

A terrific piece by Hidde, about CSS grid, but also about a much bigger question:

I don’t think we owe it to any users to make it all exactly the same. Therefore we can get away with keeping fallbacks very simple. My hypothesis: users don’t mind, they’ve come for the content.

If users don’t mind, that leaves us with team members, bosses and clients. In my ideal world we should convince each other, and with that I mean visual designers, product owners, brand people, developers, that it is ok for our lay-out not to look the same everywhere. Because serving good-looking content everywhere is more important than same grids everywhere.

map — Checked in at Firle Place. with Jessica

Saturday, August 11th, 2018

Weft. — Ethan Marcotte

I think we often focus on designing or building an element, without researching the other elements it should connect to—without understanding the system it lives in.

Phew! I don’t think anyone at @ConcatenateConf noticed that I was still in my pyjamas when I gave my talk.

Friday, August 10th, 2018

Flexibility

Over on A List Apart, you can read the first chapter from Tim’s new book, Flexible Typesetting.

I was lucky enough to get an advance preview copy and this book is ticking all my boxes. I mean, I knew I would love all the type nerdery in the book, but there’s a bigger picture too. In chapter two, Tim makes this provacative statement:

Typography is now optional. That means it’s okay for people to opt out.

That’s an uncomfortable truth for designers and developers, but it gets to the heart of what makes the web so great:

Of course typography is valuable. Typography may now be optional, but that doesn’t mean it’s worthless. Typographic choices contribute to a text’s meaning. But on the web, text itself (including its structural markup) matters most, and presentational instructions like typography take a back seat. Text loads first; typography comes later. Readers are free to ignore typographic suggestions, and often prefer to. Services like Instapaper, Pocket, and Safari’s Reader View are popular partly because readers like their text the way they like it.

What Tim describes there isn’t a cause for frustration or despair—it’s a cause for celebration. When we try to treat the web as a fixed medium where we can dictate the terms that people must abide by, we’re doing them (and the web) a disservice. Instead of treating web design as a pre-made contract drawn up by the designer and presented to the user as a fait accompli, it is more materially honest to treat web design as a conversation between designer and user. Both parties should have a say.

Or as Tim so perfectly puts it in Flexible Typesetting:

Readers are typographers, too.

Creating the “Perfect” CSS System – Gusto Design – Medium

This is great advice from Lindsay Grizzard—getting agreement is so much more important than personal preference when it comes to collaborating on a design system.

When starting a project, get developers onboard with your CSS, JS and even HTML conventions from the start. Meet early and often to discuss every library, framework, mental model, and gem you are interested in using and take feedback seriously. Simply put, if they absolutely hate BEM and refuse to write it, don’t use BEM.

It’s all about the people, people!

“Designer + Developer Workflow,” an article by Dan Mall

Dan compares the relationship between a designer and developer in the web world to the relationship between an art director and a copywriter in the ad world. He and Brad made a video to demonstrate how they collaborate.

PWA: Progressive Web All-the-things - Tales of a Developer Advocate by Paul Kinlan

Very valuable observations from Paul on his travels, talking to developers and business people about progressive web apps—there’s some confusion out there.

My personal feeling is that everyone is really hung up on the A in PWA: ‘App’. It’s the success and failure of the branding of the concept; ‘App’ is in the name, ‘App’ is in the conscious of many users and businesses and so the associations are quite clear.

Understanding why Semantic HTML is important, as told by TypeScript.

Oh, this is such a good analogy from Mandy! Choosing the right HTML element is like choosing the right data type in a strongly typed programming language.

Get to know the HTML elements available to you, and use the appropriate one for your content. Make the most it, like you would any language you choose to code with.

Stop building for San Francisco

Overwhelmingly, our software is built by well-paid teams with huge monitors and incredibly fast computers running on a high-bandwidth internet connection. We run MacBook Pros, we have cinema displays, we carry iPhones.

That’s not what the rest of the world looks like.

Accessible Comics - Axess Lab

Nice! It sounds like Lucy and Andy went above and beyond the call of duty when it came to the alt text for 100 Demon Dialogues.

Wednesday, August 8th, 2018

The SHE Is Series | SHE Is Ire Aderinokun

I started writing for myself. The writing was helpful for me and luckily it was helpful for other people as well. But even if you’re the only one that reads your blog it is still helpful as a way to learn.

Tuesday, August 7th, 2018

Writing a talk. It’s messy. — Writing a talk.

It’s messy.

Console methods

Whenever I create a fetch event inside a service worker, my code roughly follows the same pattern. There’s a then clause which gets executed if the fetch is successful, and a catch clause in case anything goes wrong:

fetch( request)
.then( fetchResponse => {
    // Yay! It worked.
})
.catch( fetchError => {
    // Boo! It failed.
});

In my book—Going Offline—I’m at pains to point out that those arguments being passed into each clause are yours to name. In this example I’ve called them fetchResponse and fetchError but you can call them anything you want.

I always do something with the fetchResponse inside the then clause—either I want to return the response or put it in a cache.

But I rarely do anything with fetchError. Because of that, I’ve sometimes made the mistake of leaving it out completely:

fetch( request)
.then( fetchResponse => {
    // Yay! It worked.
})
.catch( () => {
    // Boo! It failed.
});

Don’t do that. I think there’s some talk of making the error argument optional, but for now, some browsers will get upset if it’s not there.

So always include that argument, whether you call it fetchError or anything else. And seeing as it’s an error, this might be a legitimate case for outputing it to the browser’s console, even in production code.

And yes, you can output to the console from a service worker. Even though a service worker can’t access anything relating to the document object, you can still make use of window.console, known to its friends as console for short.

My muscle memory when it comes to sending something to the console is to use console.log:

fetch( request)
.then( fetchResponse => {
    return fetchResponse;
})
.catch( fetchError => {
    console.log(fetchError);
});

But in this case, the console.error method is more appropriate:

fetch( request)
.then( fetchResponse => {
    return fetchResponse;
})
.catch( fetchError => {
    console.error(fetchError);
});

Now when there’s a connectivity problem, anyone with a console window open will see the error displayed bold and red.

If that seems a bit strident to you, there’s always console.warn which will still make the output stand out, but without being quite so alarmist:

fetch( request)
.then( fetchResponse => {
    return fetchResponse;
})
.catch( fetchError => {
    console.warn(fetchError);
});

That said, in this case, console.error feels like the right choice. After all, it is technically an error.

Securing Web Sites Made Them Less Accessible – Eric’s Archived Thoughts

This is a heartbreaking observation by Eric. He’s not anti-HTTPS by any stretch, but he is pointing out that caching servers become a thing of the past on a more secure web.

Can we do anything? For users of up-to-date browsers, yes: service workers create a “good” man in the middle that sidesteps the HTTPS problem, so far as I understand. So if you’re serving content over HTTPS, creating a service worker should be one of your top priorities right now, even if it’s just to do straightforward local caching and nothing fancier.

Coming to a browser near you - faster than ever before!

A great long-term perspective from Rachel on the pace of change in standards getting shipped in browsers:

The pace that things are shipping, and at which bugs are fixed is like nothing we have seen before. I know from sitting around a table with representatives from each browser vendor at the CSS Working Group how important interop is. No-one wants features to be implemented differently in browsers. This is what we were asking for with WaSP, and despite the new complexity of the platform, browsers rendering standard features in different ways is becoming increasingly rare. Bugs happen, sometimes in the browser and sometimes in the spec, but there is a commitment to avoid these and to create a stable platform we can all rely on. It is exciting to be part of it.

‘Never assume anything’: The golden rules for inclusive design

Inclusive design is also future-proofing technology for everyone. Swan noted that many more developers and designers are considering accessibility issues as they age and encounter poor eyesight or other impairments.

The Web is Made of Edge Cases by Taylor Hunt on CodePen

Oh, this is magnificent! A rallying call for everyone designing and developing on the web to avoid making any assumptions about the people we’re building for:

People will use your site how they want, and according to their means. That is wonderful, and why the Web was built.

I would even say that the % of people viewing your site the way you do rapidly approaches zilch.

Seriously, though. What is a progressive web app? – Amberley Romo – Medium

What an excellent question! And what an excellent bit of sleuthing to get to the bottom of it. This is like linguistic spelunking on the World Wide Web.

Oh, and of course I love the little sidenote at the end.

Monday, August 6th, 2018

If a religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam.

— Sapiens

The Man Who Invented The Web - TIME

This seventeen year old profile of Tim Berners-Lee is fascinating to read from today’s perspective.

Sunday, August 5th, 2018

Joymaker by Frederik Pohl from The Age of The Pussyfoot

From Frederik Pohl’s 1966 novel:

The remote-access computer transponder called the “joymaker” is your most valuable single possession in your new life. If you can imagine a combination of telephone, credit card, alarm clock, pocket bar, reference library, and full-time secretary, you will have sketched some of the functions provided by your joymaker.

Essentially, it is a transponder connecting you with the central computing facilities of the city in which you reside on a shared-time, self-programming basis.

Friday, August 3rd, 2018

Greater expectations

I got an intriguing email recently from someone who’s a member of The Session, the community website about Irish traditional music that I run. They said:

When I recently joined, I used my tablet to join. Somewhere I was able to download The Session app onto my tablet.

But there is no native app for The Session. Although, as it’s a site that I built, it is, a of course, progressive web app.

They went on to say:

I wanted to put the app on my phone but I can’t find the app to download it. Can I have the app on more than one device? If so, where is it available?

I replied saying that yes, you can absolutely have it on more than one device:

But you don’t find The Session app in the app store. Instead you go to the website https://thesession.org and then add it to your home screen from your browser.

My guess is that this person had added The Session to the home screen of their Android tablet, probably following the “add to home screen” prompt. I recently added some code to use the window.beforeinstallprompt event so that the “add to home screen” prompt would only be shown to visitors who sign up or log in to The Session—a good indicator of engagement, I reckon, and it should reduce the chance of the prompt being dismissed out of hand.

So this person added The Session to their home screen—probably as a result of being prompted—and then used it just like any other app. At some point, they didn’t even remember how the app got installed:

Success! I did it. Thanks. My problem was I was looking for an app to download.

On the one hand, this is kind of great: here’s an example where, in the user’s mind, there’s literally no difference between the experience of using a progressive web app and using a native app. Win!

But on the other hand, the expectation is still that apps are to be found in an app store, not on the web. This expectation is something I wrote about recently (and Justin wrote a response to that post). I finished by saying:

Perhaps the inertia we think we’re battling against isn’t such a problem as long as we give people a fast, reliable, engaging experience.

When this member of The Session said “My problem was I was looking for an app to download”, I responded by saying:

Well, I take that as a compliment—the fact that once the site is added to your home screen, it feels just like a native app. :-)

And they said:

Yes, it does!

StyleURL - share CSS tweaks instantly

This is an interesting tool: mess around with styles on any site inside Chrome’s dev tools, and then hit a button to have the updated styles saved to a URL (a Gist on Github).

Altering expectations by improving PWA on iOS | Responsive Web Design

Justin responds to a post of mine which was itself a response to a post by Luke.

I love having discussions like this!

Post Haste

Look, it’s Friday—were you really going to get any work done today anyway?

Thursday, August 2nd, 2018

New Facebook Platform Product Changes and Policy Updates - Facebook for Developers

Welp! As of today, none of my posts, links, or notes can be syndicated to Facebook:

The publish_actions permission will be deprecated. This permission granted apps access to publish posts to Facebook as the logged in user. Apps created from today onwards will not have access to this permission. Apps created before today that have been previously approved to request publish_actions can continue to do so until August 1, 2018.

If you’re reading this on Facebook: so long, it’s been good to know ya.

Switching

Chris has written about switching code editors. I’m a real stick-in-the-mud when it comes to switching editors. Partly that’s because I’m generally pretty happy with whatever I’m using (right now it’s Atom) but it’s also because I just don’t get that excited about software like this. I probably should care more; I spend plenty of time inside a code editor. And I should really take the time to get to grips with features like keyboard shortcuts—I’m sure I’m working very inefficiently. But, like I said, I find it hard to care enough, and on the whole, I’m content.

I was struck by this observation from Chris:

When moving, I have to take time to make sure it works pretty much like the old one.

That reminded me of a recent switch I made, not with code editors, but with browsers.

I’ve been using Chrome for years. One day it started crashing a lot. So I decided to make the switch to Firefox. Looking back, I’m glad to have had this prompt—I think it’s good to shake things up every now and then, so I don’t get too complacent (says the hypocrite who can’t be bothered to try a new code editor).

Just as Chris noticed with code editors, it was really important that I could move bookmarks (and bookmarklets!) over to my new browser. On the whole, it went pretty smoothly. I had to seek out a few browser extensions but that was pretty much it. And because I use a password manager, logging into all my usual services wasn’t a hassle.

Of all the pieces of software on my computer, the web browser is the one where I definitely spend the most time: reading, linking, publishing. At this point, I’m very used to life with Firefox as my main browser. It’s speedy and stable, and the dev tools are very similar to Chrome’s.

Maybe I’ll switch to Safari at some point. Like I said, I think it’s good to shake things up and get out of my comfort zone.

Now, if I really wanted to get out of my comfort zone, I’d switch operating systems like Dave did with his move to Windows. And I should really try using a different phone OS. Again, this is something that Dave tried with his switch to Android (although that turned out to be unacceptably creepy), and Paul did it ages ago using a Windows phone for a week.

There’s probably a balance to be struck here. I think it’s good to change code editors, browsers, even operating systems and phones every now and then, but I don’t want to feel like I’m constantly in learning mode. There’s something to be said for using tools that are comfortable and familiar, even if they’re outdated.

Nutrition Cards for Accessible Components A11Y Expectations

A handy bunch of checklists from Dave for creating accessible components. Each component gets a card that lists the expectations for interaction.

Accessibility: Start with the foundations | susan jean robertson

I encourage you to think about and make sure you are using the right elements at the right time. Sometimes I overthink this, but that’s because it’s that important to me - I want to make sure that the markup I use helps people understand the content, and doesn’t hinder them.

Dynamic resources using the Network Information API and service workers

Smart thinking—similar to this post from last year—about using the navigator.connection API from a service worker to serve up bandwidth-appropriate images.

This is giving me some ideas for my own site.

The Cost Of JavaScript In 2018 – Addy Osmani – Medium

Addy takes a deep, deep dive into JavaScript performance on mobile, and publishes his findings on Ev’s blog, including this cra-yay-zy suggestion:

Maybe server-side-rendered HTML would actually be faster. Consider limiting the use of client-side frameworks to pages that absolutely require them.

The Bullshit Web — Pixel Envy

There is a cumulative effect of bullshit; its depth and breadth is especially profound. In isolation, the few seconds that it takes to load some extra piece of surveillance JavaScript isn’t much. Neither is the time it takes for a user to hide an email subscription box, or pause an autoplaying video. But these actions compound on a single webpage, and then again across multiple websites, and those seemingly-small time increments become a swirling miasma of frustration and pain.

I agree completely. And AMP is not the answer:

Given the assumption that any additional bandwidth offered to web developers will immediately be consumed, there seems to be just one possible solution, which is to reduce the amount of bytes that are transmitted. For some bizarre reason, this hasn’t happened on the main web, because it somehow makes more sense to create an exact copy of every page on their site that is expressly designed for speed. Welcome back, WAP — except, for some reason, this mobile-centric copy is entirely dependent on yet more bytes. This is the dumbfoundingly dumb premise of AMP.