Archive: February, 2020

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Saturday, February 29th, 2020

Rain on a plane.

Rain on a plane.

Going to Galway. brb

Friday, February 28th, 2020

Why the GOV.UK Design System team changed the input type for numbers - Technology in government

Some solid research here. Turns out that using input type=”text” inputmode=”numeric” pattern="[0-9]*" is probably a better bet than using input type="number".

Replying to a tweet from @chriscoyier

Will this turn into a webmention?

Indeed it will!

https://adactio.com/links/16470#comment79857

Why is CSS Frustrating? | CSS-Tricks

Why do people respect JavaScript or other languages enough to learn them inside-out, and yet constantly dunk on CSS?

The headline begs the question, but Robin makes this very insightful observation in the article itself:

I reckon the biggest issue that engineers face — and the reason why they find it all so dang frustrating — is that CSS forces you to face the webishness of the web. Things require fallbacks. You need to take different devices into consideration, and all the different ways of seeing a website: mobile, desktop, no mouse, no keyboard, etc. Sure, you have to deal with that when writing JavaScript, too, but it’s easier to ignore. You can’t ignore your the layout of your site being completely broken on a phone.

The Permanent Legacy Foundation

A non-profit that offers digital preservation services for individuals.

Permanence means no subscriptions; a one-time payment for dedicated storage that preserves your most precious memories and an institution that will be there to protect the digital legacy of all people for all time.

Why 543 KB keep me up at night - Manuel Matuzović

How and when did I get to the point where I would consider a page weight of 4 MB on a large page and 500 KB on a small page normal?

This isn’t just a well-earned rant from Manuel. I mean, it *is that, but it’s also packed with practical performance advice.

Currying in CSS? | Trys Mudford

I don’t understand what currying is, but Trys points out a really interesting thing about custom properties in CSS:

The value after the : in the CSS custom property does not have to be valid CSS.

That means you can use custom properties to store arbitrary strings of text, which can then be combined within a calc() function, at which point they get evaluated.

Fixed Headers and Jump Links? The Solution is scroll-margin-top | CSS-Tricks

I didn’t know about scroll-margin-top! I wonder if you could apply a universal rule …like, say you’ve got a fixed header that’s 2em in height, couldn’t you declare:

:target { scroll-margin-top: 2em; }

Replying to a tweet from @keinegurke_

I got sent an advance copy (for some reason), and so far it’s really good!

Wednesday, February 26th, 2020

Checked in at Jolly Brewer. 🎻🎶 — with Jessica map

Checked in at Jolly Brewer. 🎻🎶 — with Jessica

Today I helped a colleague with some JavaScript (DOM scripting), did some proofreading and copy-editing on an excellent article written by another colleague, and made some progress on a new conference talk I’m working on.

A good day!

Roam Research – A note taking tool for networked thought.

This looks like an interesting hypertexty tool.

Picture 1 Picture 2 Picture 3 Picture 4

A feast of fish finery.

The Markup

A new online publication from Julia Angwin:

Big Tech Is Watching You. We’re Watching Big Tech.

…and they’re not going to track you.

Software and Home Renovation | Jim Nielsen’s Weblog

Lessons for web development from a home renovation project:

  • Greenfield Projects Are Everyone’s Favorite
  • The Last Person’s Work Is Always Bewildering
  • It’s All About the Trade-Offs
  • It ALWAYS Takes Longer Than You Think
  • Communication, Communication, Communication!

And there’s this:

You know those old homes people love because they’re unique, have lasted for decades, and have all that character? In contrast, you have these modern subdivision homes that, while shiny and new, are often bland and identical (and sometimes shoddily built). node_modules is like the suburbia/subdivision of modern web development: it seems nice and fancy today, and most everyone is doing it, but in 30 years everyone will hate the idea. They’ll all need to be renovated or torn down. Meanwhile, the classical stuff that’s still standing from 100 years ago lives on but nobody seems to be building houses that way anymore for some reason. Similarly, the first website ever is still viewable in all modern web browsers. But many websites built last year on last year’s bleeding edge tech already won’t work in a browser.

Tuesday, February 25th, 2020

Got some great books in the post from @Senongo and @Dellsystem—thanks, @ABookApart and @RepeaterBooks!

Got some great books in the post from @Senongo and @Dellsystem—thanks, @ABookApart and @RepeaterBooks!

Reflections on software performance - Made of Bugs

I’ve really come to appreciate that performance isn’t just some property of a tool independent from its functionality or its feature set. Performance — in particular, being notably fast — is a feature in and of its own right, which fundamentally alters how a tool is used and perceived.

This is a fascinating look into how performance has knock-on effects beyond the obvious:

It’s probably fairly intuitive that users prefer faster software, and will have a better experience performing a given task if the tools are faster rather than slower.

What is perhaps less apparent is that having faster tools changes how users use a tool or perform a task.

This observation is particularly salient for web developers:

We have become accustomed to casually giving up factors of two or ten or more with our choices of tools and libraries, without asking if the benefits are worth it.

Inspiring high school students with HTML and CSS - Stephanie Stimac’s Blog

I love, love, love this encounter that Stephanie had with high school students when she showed them her own website (“Your website? You have a website?”).

I opened the DevTools on my site and there was an audible gasp from the class and excited murmuring.

“That’s your code?” A student asked. “Yes, that’s all my code!” “You wrote all of that?!” “Yes, it’s my website.”

And the class kind of exploded and starting talking amongst themselves. I was floored and my perspective readjusted.

When I code, it’s usually in HTML and CSS, and I suppose there’s a part of me that feels like that isn’t special because some tech bros decide to be vocal and loud about HTML and CSS not being special nearly everyday (it is special and tech bros can shut up.)

And the response from that class of high school students delighted me and grounded me in a way I haven’t experienced before. What I view as a simple code was absolute magic to them. And for all of us who code, I think we forget it is magic. Computational magic but still magic. HTML and CSS are magic.

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Reading Abolish Silicon Valley by Wendy Liu.

Buy this book

Monday, February 24th, 2020

Calling for a More-Than-Human Politics - Anab Jain - Medium

It may be the end of the world as we know it, but other worlds are possible.

Web bloat

Pages are often designed so that they’re hard or impossible to read if some dependency fails to load. On a slow connection, it’s quite common for at least one depedency to fail.

Fire up Reader Mode and read this excellent article informed by data from using a typically slow connection in rural USA today. Two findings are:

  1. A large fraction of the web is unusable on a bad connection. Even on a good (0% packetloss, no ping spike) dialup connection, some sites won’t load.
  2. Some sites will use a lot of data!

Let’s Define CSS 4 · Issue #4770 · w3c/csswg-drafts

Jen kicked off a fascinating thread here:

It’s come up quite a few times recently that the world of people who make websites would greatly benefit from the CSS Working Group officially defining ”CSS 4”, and later “CSS 5“, etc.

The level is discourse is impressively smart and civil.

Personally, I don’t (yet) have an opinion on this either way, but I’ll be watching it unfold with keen interest.

Le Corbusier: How A Utopic Vision Became Pathological In Practice | Orange Ticker

Through planning and architectural design, Le Corbusier hoped to create a scientifically rational and comprehensive solution to urban problems in a way that would both promote democracy and quality of life. For him, the factory production process applied to high-rise buildings with prefabricated and standardized components is the most modern and egalitarian of urban forms.

Something something top-down design systems.

Extinguished Countries

Guidebooks to countries that no longer exist.

The first book will be on the Republic of Venice. There’ll be maps, infographics, and I suspect there’ll be an appearance by Aldus Manutius.

Our first guidebook tells the story of the Republic of Venice, la Serenissima, a 1000-year old state that disappeared in 1797.

Saturday, February 22nd, 2020

Checked in at Jolly Brewer. Learning a tune — with Jessica map

Checked in at Jolly Brewer. Learning a tune — with Jessica

Friday, February 21st, 2020

How I think about solving problems - Human Who Codes

  1. Is this really a problem?
  2. Does the problem need to be solved?
  3. Does the problem need to be solved now?
  4. Does the problem need to be solved by me?
  5. Is there a simpler problem I can solve instead?

Thursday, February 20th, 2020

Replying to a tweet from @jensimmons

It would be disastrous (and counterproductive).

https://adactio.com/journal/13498

“Let us Calculate!”: Leibniz, Llull, and the Computational Imagination – The Public Domain Review

The characteristica universalis and the calculus racionator of Leibniz.

Emma Willard’s Maps of Time

The beautiful 19th century data visualisations of Emma Willard unfold in this immersive piece by Susan Schulten.

Picture 1 Picture 2 Picture 3 Picture 4

Popped into W.H. Smiths on the way into work to pick up a copy of @NetMag: I wrote this month’s cover story.

(More importantly, there’s a feature on @A_Adewusi and a Q&A with @LauraKalbag!)

Replying to a tweet from @_AshConnolly

You’ve got it the wrong way around. I only post on my site. The tweets (like this one) are copies, syndicated automatically.

My website is the canonical source for my notes. The copies have a link back to the source.

monica.css – Monica Dinculescu

Monica shares the little snippet of handy CSS she uses at the start of any project.

Replying to a tweet from @jaffathecake

Wednesday, February 19th, 2020

Checked in at Jolly Brewer. Tunes! — with Jessica map

Checked in at Jolly Brewer. Tunes! — with Jessica

Slopes | Tinkersynth

Have fun with this little machine, tweaking the parameters for generating a Joy Division/Jocelyn Bell-Burnell data visualisation.

The interface is quite delightful!

Tuesday, February 18th, 2020

Utopia

Trys and James recently unveiled their Utopia project. They’ve been tinkering away at it behind the scenes for quite a while now.

You can check out the website and read the blog to get the details of how it accomplishes its goal:

Elegantly scale type and space without breakpoints.

I may well be biased, but I really like this project. I’ve been asking myself why I find it so appealing. Here are a few of the attributes of Utopia that strike a chord with me…

It’s collaborative

Collaboration is at the heart of Clearleft’s work. I know everyone says that, but we’ve definitely seen a direct correlation: projects with high levels of collaboration are invariably more successful than projects where people are siloed.

The genesis for Utopia came about after Trys and James worked together on a few different projects. It’s all too easy to let design and development splinter off into their own caves, but on these projects, Trys and James were working (literally) side by side. This meant that they could easily articulate frustrations to one another, and more important, they could easily share their excitement.

The end result of their collaboration is some very clever code. There’s an irony here. This code could be used to discourage collaboration! After all, why would designers and developers sit down together if they can just pass these numbers back and forth?

But I don’t think that Utopia will appeal to designers and developers who work in that way. Born in the spirit of collaboration, I suspect that it will mostly benefit people who value collaboration.

It’s intrinsic

If you’re a control freak, you may not like Utopia. The idea is that you specify the boundaries of what you’re trying to accomplish—minimum/maximum font sizes, minumum/maximum screen sizes, and some modular scales. Then you let the code—and the browser—do all the work.

On the one hand, this feels like surrending control. But on the other hand, because the underlying system is so robust, it’s a way of guaranteeing quality, even in situations you haven’t accounted for.

If someone asks you, “What size will the body copy be when the viewport is 850 pixels wide?”, your answer would have to be “I don’t know …but I do know that it will be appropriate.”

This feels like a very declarative way of designing. It reminds me of the ethos behind Andy and Heydon’s site, Every Layout. They call it algorithmic layout design:

Employing algorithmic layout design means doing away with @media breakpoints, “magic numbers”, and other hacks, to create context-independent layout components. Your future design systems will be more consistent, terser in code, and more malleable in the hands of your users and their devices.

See how breakpoints are mentioned as being a very top-down approach to layout? Remember the tagline for Utopia, which aims for fluid responsive design?

Elegantly scale type and space without breakpoints.

Unsurprisingly, Andy really likes Utopia:

As the co-author of Every Layout, my head nearly fell off from all of the nodding when reading this because this is the exact sort of approach that we preach: setting some rules and letting the browser do the rest.

Heydon describes this mindset as automating intent. I really like that. I think that’s what Utopia does too.

As Heydon said at Patterns Day:

Be your browser’s mentor, not its micromanager.

The idea is that you give it rules, you give it axioms or principles to work on, and you let it do the calculation. You work with the in-built algorithms of the browser and of CSS itself.

This is all possible thanks to improvements to CSS like calc, flexbox and grid. Jen calls this approach intrinsic web design. Last year, I liveblogged her excellent talk at An Event Apart called Designing Intrinsic Layouts.

Utopia feels like it has the same mindset as algorithmic layout design and intrinsic web design. Trys and James are building on the great work already out there, which brings me to the final property of Utopia that appeals to me…

It’s iterative

There isn’t actually much that’s new in Utopia. It’s a combination of existing techniques. I like that. As I said recently:

I’m a great believer in the HTML design principle, Evolution Not Revolution:

It is better to evolve an existing design rather than throwing it away.

First of all, Utopia uses the idea of modular scales in typography. Tim Brown has been championing this idea for years.

Then there’s the idea of typography being fluid and responsive—just like Jason Pamental has been speaking and writing about.

On the code side, Utopia wouldn’t be possible without the work of Mike Reithmuller and his breakthroughs on responsive and fluid typography, which led to Tim’s work on CSS locks.

Utopia takes these building blocks and combines them. So if you’re wondering if it would be a good tool for one of your projects, you can take an equally iterative approach by asking some questions…

Are you using fluid type?

Do your font-sizes increase in proportion to the width of the viewport? I don’t mean in sudden jumps with @media breakpoints—I mean some kind of relationship between font size and the vw (viewport width) unit. If so, you’re probably using some kind of mechanism to cap the minimum and maximum font sizes—CSS locks.

I’m using that technique on Resilient Web Design. But I’m not changing the relative difference between different sized elements—body copy, headings, etc.—as the screen size changes.

Are you using modular scales?

Does your type system have some kind of ratio that describes the increase in type sizes? You probably have more than one ratio (unlike Resilient Web Design). The ratio for small screens should probably be smaller than the ratio for big screens. But rather than jump from one ratio to another at an arbitrary breakpoint, Utopia allows the ratio to be fluid.

So it’s not just that font sizes are increasing as the screen gets larger; the comparative difference is also subtly changing. That means there’s never a sudden jump in font size at any time.

Are you using custom properties?

A technical detail this, but the magic of Utopia relies on two powerful CSS features: calc() and custom properties. These two workhorses are used by Utopia to generate some CSS that you can stick at the start of your stylesheet. If you ever need to make changes, all the parameters are defined at the top of the code block. Tweak those numbers and watch everything cascade.

You’ll see that there’s one—and only one—media query in there. This is quite clever. Usually with CSS locks, you’d need to have a media query for every different font size in order to cap its growth at the maximum screen size. With Utopia, the maximum screen size—100vw—is abstracted into a variable (a custom property). The media query then changes its value to be the upper end of your CSS lock. So it doesn’t matter how many different font sizes you’re setting: because they all use that custom property, one single media query takes care of capping the growth of every font size declaration.

If you’re already using CSS locks, modular scales, and custom properties, Utopia is almost certainly going to be a good fit for you.

If you’re not yet using those techniques, but you’d like to, I highly recommend using Utopia on your next project.

An app can be a home-cooked meal

I am the programming equivalent of a home cook.

The exhortation “learn to code!” has its foundations in market value. “Learn to code” is suggested as a way up, a way out. “Learn to code” offers economic leverage, a squirt of power. “Learn to code” goes on your resume.

But let’s substitute a different phrase: “learn to cook.” People don’t only learn to cook so they can become chefs. Some do! But far more people learn to cook so they can eat better, or more affordably, or in a specific way.

Sunday, February 16th, 2020

Replying to a tweet from @lottejackson

Happy birthday, Charlotte!

Saturday, February 15th, 2020

Same HTML, Different CSS

Like a little mini CSS Zen Garden, here’s one compenent styled five very different ways.

Crucially, the order of the markup doesn’t consider the appearance—it’s concerned purely with what makes sense semantically. And now with CSS grid, elements can be rearranged regardless of source order.

CSS is powerful and capable of doing amazingly beautiful things. Let’s embrace that and keep the HTML semantical instead of adapting it to the need of the next design change.

CrUX.RUN

This is so useful! Get instant results from Google’s Chrome User Experience Report without having to wait (or pay) for BigQuery.

Here’s an example of my site’s metrics over the last few months, complete with nice charts.

Link Targets and 3.2.5 | Adrian Roselli

Here are the many, many reasons why you should not open links in a new window (or tab).

Regardless of what accessibility conformance level you target, do not arbitrarily open links in a new window or tab. If you are required to do so anyway, inform users in text.

Standards for Writing Accessibly – A List Apart

  • Write Chronologically, Not Spatially
  • Write Left to Right, Top to Bottom
  • Don’t Use Colors and Icons Alone
  • Describe the Action, Not the Behavior

Things I’ve been wrong about, things I’ve been right about | Nolan Lawson

  • Wrong: web workers will take over the world
  • Wrong: Safari is the new IE
  • Right: developer experience is trumping user experience
  • Right: I’m better off without a Twitter account
  • Right: the cost of small modules
  • Mixed: progressive enhancement isn’t dead, but it smells funny

Maybe I should do one of these.

The Map of Mathematics | Quanta Magazine

An absolutely gorgeous piece of hypermedia!

Data visualisations and interactive widgets enliven this maze of mathematics. Dig deep—you may just uncover the secret passages that join these concepts together.

Friday, February 14th, 2020

A Complete Guide to Links and Buttons | CSS-Tricks

Chris takes two side-by-side deep dives; one into the a element, the other into the button element.

Even if you think you already know those elements well, I bet there’ll be something new here for you. Like, did you know that the button element can have form over-riding attributes like formaction, formenctype, formmethod, formnovalidate, and formtarget?

Page Speed Benchmarks | SpeedCurve

This is going to be so useful for client work at Clearleft—instant snapshots of performance metrics across industries and regions!

For example, we’ve been working a lot with the travel sector, and now we can call up these benchmarks without having to generate a whole bunch of Web Page Test results ourselves.

See Tammy’s blog post for me details.

ARIA labels | Amber’s Website

A great explanation of aria-label and aria-labelledby!

Picture 1 Picture 2 Picture 3 Picture 4

I moderated two panel discussions on product design at a @Clearleft event in London yesterday morning.

I loved it!

If you’re ever looking for a compere for your event, let me know.

Variable fonts’ past, present and future, according to Dalton Maag

In this interview, Biance Berning says:

Cassie Evans from Clearleft is an interesting person to follow as she combines web animation with variable font technology, essentially exploring the technology’s practicality and expression.

Hells yeah!

We’re only just scratching the surface of what variable fonts can do within more interactive and immersive spaces. I think we’ll see a lot more progress and experimentation with that as time goes on.

Replying to a tweet from @dracos

Oh no, you’re not!

Thursday, February 13th, 2020

Replying to a tweet from @faraixyz

Thanks for reading it, Farai—much appreciated!

Reading The Word For World Is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Buy this book

Replying to a tweet from @jasonmesut

You should demand a refund! 😉

Checked in at Jolly Brewer. Wednesday session 🎶🎻 — with Jessica map

Checked in at Jolly Brewer. Wednesday session 🎶🎻 — with Jessica

Wednesday, February 12th, 2020

Putting down the mandolin for the night.

Putting down the mandolin for the night.

Some humans can’t read some URLs.

Just because the word “some” is qualifying both nouns doesn’t mean you can cancel them out like in an equation, to give you the falsehood:

Humans can’t read URLs.

Replying to a tweet from @genmon

This is so good!!

Replying to a tweet from @genmon

Yup!

Here’s a transcript of the talk I gave at Reboot in 2006—I don’t think a conference today would want this:

https://adactio.com/articles/1132

Tuesday, February 11th, 2020

Replying to a tweet from @genmon

I think Reboot might’ve been where we met.

That was a fun event.

Fluid scale and tokens: a match made in heaven - Andy Bell

Andy takes Utopia for a spin—it very much matches his approach.

Utopia

This is the project that Trys and James have been working on at Clearleft. It’s a way of approaching modular scales in web typography that uses CSS locks and custom properties to fantastic effect.

Utopia is not a product, a plugin, or a framework. It’s a memorable/pretentious word we use to refer to a way of thinking about fluid responsive design.

Complexity Explained

Emergence and complex systems, explained with interactive diagrams.

Monday, February 10th, 2020

Open source beyond the market - Signal v. Noise

The transcript of David Heinemeier Hansson keynote from last year’s RailsConf is well worth reading. It’s ostensibily about open source software but it delves into much larger questions.

Custom Styling Form Inputs With Modern CSS Features | CSS-Tricks

It’s now easier than ever to style form controls without sacrificing semantics and accessibility:

The reason is that we can finally style the ::before and ::after pseudo-elements on the <input> tag itself. This means we can keep and style an <input> and won’t need any extra elements. Before, we had to rely on the likes of an extra <div> or <span>, to pull off a custom design.

The demo is really nice. And best of all, you can wrap all of these CSS enhancements in a feaure query:

Hopefully, you’re seeing how nice it is to create custom form styles these days. It requires less markup, thanks to pseudo-elements that are directly on form inputs. It requires less fancy style switching, thanks to custom properties. And it has pretty darn good browser support, thanks to @supports.

Friday, February 7th, 2020

IncrementURL

Last month I wrote some musings on default browser behaviours. When it comes to all the tasks that browsers do for us, the most fundamental is taking a URL, fetching its contents and giving us the results. As part of that process, browsers also show us the URL of the page currently loaded in a tab or window.

But even at this fundamental level, there are some differences from browser to browser.

Safari only shows you the domain name—and any subdomain names—by default. It looks like nice and tidy, but it obfuscates what page you’re on (until you click on the domain name). This is bad.

Chrome shows you the full URL, nice and straightforward. This is neutral.

Firefox, like Chrome, shows you the full URL, but with a subtle difference. The important part of the URL—usually the domain name—is subtly highlighted in a darker shade of grey. This is good.

The reason I say that what it highlights is usually the domain name is because what it actually highlights is eTLD+1.

The what now?

Well, if you’re looking at a page on adactio.com, that’s the important bit. But what if you’re looking at a page on adactio.github.io? The domain name is important, but so is the subdomain.

It turns out there’s a list out there of which sites and top level domains allow registrations like this. This is the list that Firefox is using for its shading behaviour in displaying URLs.

Safari, by the way, does not use this list. These URLs are displayed identically in Safari, the phisherman’s friend:

  • example.com
  • example.github.io
  • github.example.com

Whereas Firefox displays them as:

  • example.com
  • example.github.io
  • github.example.com

I learned all this from Jake on a recent edition of HTTP 203. Nicolas Hoizey has writen a nice little summary.

Jake acknowledges that what Apple is doing is shisuboptimal, what Firefox is doing is good, and then puts forward an idea for what Chrome could do. (But please note that this is Jake’s personal opinion; not an official proposal from the Chrome team.)

There’s some prior art here. It used to be that, if your SSL certificate included extended validation, the name would be shown in green next to the padlock symbol. So while my website—which uses regular SSL from Let’s Encrypt—would just have a padlock, Medium—which uses EV SSL—would have a padlock and the text “A Medium Corporation”.

Extended validation wasn’t quite the bulletproof verification it was cracked up to be. So browsers don’t use that interface pattern any more.

Jake suggests repurposing this pattern for all URLs. Pull out the important bit—eTLD+1—and show it next to the padlock.

Screenshots of @JaffaTheCake’s idea for separating out the eTLD+1 part of a URL in a browser’s address bar. Screenshots of @JaffaTheCake’s idea for separating out the eTLD+1 part of a URL in a browser’s address bar.

I like this. The full URL is still displayed. This proposal is more of an incremental change. An enhancement that is applied progressively, if you will.

I also like that it builds on existing interface patterns—Firefox’s URL treatment and the deprecated treatment of EV certs. In fact, I think the first step for Chrome should be to match Firefox’s current behaviour, and then go further with something like Jake’s proposal.

This kind of gradual change was exactly what Chrome did with displaying https and http domains.

Chrome treatment for HTTPS pages.

Jake mentions this in the video

We’ve already seen that you have to take small steps here, like we did with the https change.

There’s a fascinating episode of the Freakonomics podcast called In Praise of Incrementalism. I’ve huffduffed it.

I’m a great believer in the HTML design principle, Evolution Not Revolution:

It is better to evolve an existing design rather than throwing it away.

I’d love to see Chrome take the first steps to Jake’s proposal by following Firefox’s lead.

Then again, I’d love it if Chrome followed Firefox’s lead in implementing subgrid.

Replying to a tweet from @qwertykate

Ooh, exciting!!!

Replying to a tweet from @resource11

Agreed! I would’ve loved to amplify other voices. Are there any posts I missed?

Thursday, February 6th, 2020

Innovation Can’t Keep the Web Fast | CSS-Tricks

I’ve come to accept that our current approach to remedy poor performance largely consists of engineering techniques that stem from the ill effects of our business, product management, and engineering practices. We’re good at applying tourniquets, but not so good at sewing up deep wounds.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that web performance isn’t solely an engineering problem, but a problem of people.

Replying to a tweet from @Iztok

Then you’re back to the first scenario I outlined:

The user is left staring at a blank screen, waiting for something—anything!—to appear.

Local First, Undo Redo, JS-Optional, Create Edit Publish - Tantek

Tantek documents the features he wants his posting interface to have.

On design systems and agency | Andrew Travers

Design systems can often ‘read’ as very top down, but need to be bottom up to reflect the needs of different users of different services in different contexts.

I’ve yet to be involved in a design system that hasn’t struggled to some extent for participation and contribution from the whole of its design community.

Hydration

As you may have noticed, I’m a fan of progressive enhancement.

It’s not cool. It’s often at odds with “modern” web development, so I end up looking like an old man yelling at a cloud to get off my lawn. Or something.

At its heart though, progressive enhancement seems fairly uncontroversial and inoffensive to me. It’s an approach. A mindset. Here’s how I describe it in Resilient Web Design:

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

Progressive enhancement makes use of the principle of least power:

Choose the least powerful language suitable for a given purpose.

That’s step two of the three-step process. But the third step is vital.

I think a lot of the hostility towards progressive enhancement comes from a misunderstanding of that three-step process, perhaps thinking that it stops at step two. I’m sure that some have intrepreted progressive enhancement as preventing developers from using the latest and greatest technology. Nothing could be further from the truth!

Taking a layered approach to building on the web gives you permission to try cutting‐edge JavaScript APIs, regardless of how many or how few browsers currently implement them.

The most common misunderstanding of progressive enhancement is that it’s inherently about JavaScript. That’s not true. You can apply progressive enhancement at every step of front-end development: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

But because of JavaScript’s strict error-handling model (at least compared to HTML and CSS), it’s in the JavaScript layer that the lack of a progressive enhancement mindset is most often felt.

That’s why I was saddened by the rise of frameworks and mindsets that assume the availability of JavaScript. Single page apps generally follow this assumption. Everything is delivered via JavaScript: content, markup, styles, and behaviour.

This leads to a terrible situation for performance. The user is left staring at a blank screen, waiting for something—anything!—to appear. Browsers are optimised to stream HTML as soon as they can. Delivering your content via JavaScript rather than HTML means you’re not taking advantage of that optimisation. Your users suffer.

But I was very heartened when I saw the pendulum start to swing back the other way a bit…

Let’s say you’re using a JavaScript framework like React. But the reason you’re using it isn’t because you’re doing anything particularly complex in the browser involving state management. You might be using React because you really like the way it encourages modularity and componentisation.

A few years ago, making a single page app was pretty much the only way you could use React. For you as a developer to experience the benefits of modularity and componentisation, users had to pay the price in the payload (and fragility) of client-side JavaScript.

That’s no longer the case. Now that we can run JavaScript on the server, it’s possible to build in a modular, componentised way and still use progressive enhancement.

When I first heard about Gatsby and Next.js, I thought that was the selling point. Run React on the server; send pre-generated HTML down the wire to the user; then enhance with client-side JavaScript.

But that’s not exactly how it works. The pre-generated HTML isn’t functional. It still needs a bucketload of JavaScript before it can do anything. The actual process is: Run React on the server; send pre-generated HTML down the wire to the user; then send everything again but this time in JavaScript, bundled with the entire React library.

This leads to a situation for users that’s almost worse than before. Instead of staring at a blank screen, now they get HTML lickety-split—excellent! But if they try to interact with what’s on screen, they’ll find that nothing is working yet. Even worse, once the JavaScript is delivered, and is being parsed, they probably can’t even scroll—their device is too busy interpreting all that JavaScript. Your users suffer.

All your content is sent twice. First HTML is sent from the server. These days this is called “server-side rendering”, even though for decades the technical term was “serving a web page” (I’m pretty sure the rendering part happens in a browser). Then a JavaScript library—plus all your bespoke JavaScript—is loaded. Then all your content is loaded again as JSON.

So you’ve got a facade of an interface that you can’t actually interact with until a deluge of JavaScript has been loaded, parsed and executed. The term used for this stage of the process is “hydration”, which makes it sound more like a relaxing treatment from Gwyneth Paltrow than the horrible user experience it is.

The idea is that subsequent navigations—which will happen with Ajax—should be snappy. But the price has already been paid by then. The initial loading experience is jagged and frustrating.

Don’t get me wrong: server-side rendering is great …if what you’re sending from the server is functional. It’s the combination of hollow HTML sent from the server, followed by a huge browser-freezing dump of JavaScript that is an anti-pattern.

This use of server-side rendering followed by hydration feels like progressive enhancement, because it separates out the delivery of markup and scripts. But it’s missing the mindset.

The layered approach of progressive enhancement echoes the separation of concerns in the front-end stack: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—each layer expressing more power. But while these concepts are related, they’re not interchangable. Separating out the layers of your tech stack isn’t necessarily progressive enhancement. If you have some HTML that relies on JavaScript to be useful, then there’s no benefit in separating that HTML into a separate payload. The HTML that you initially send down the wire needs to be functional (at least at a basic level) before the JavaScript arrives.

I was a little disappointed to see Kyle Simpson—who I admire greatly—conflate separation of concerns with progressive enhancement in his talk from JSCamp 2019:

This content is here. I can see it, and it’s even styled. But I can’t click on the damn button because nothing has loaded in the JavaScript layer yet.

Anybody experienced that where you’ve been on a web page and it’s not really fully functional yet? I can see something but I can’t actually make any usage of it yet.

These are all things that cropped out of our thought process that said: “Let’s build the web in layers. Let’s deliver it progressively in layers. Because that’s morally right. We call this progressive enhancement. And let’s not worry too much about all these potential user experience flaws that may happen.”

That’s a spot-on description of server-side rendering and hydration, but it’s a gross mischaracterisation of progressive enhancement.

That button that requires JavaScript to work? That should’ve been generated with JavaScript. (For example, if you’re building a complex web app, consider sending a read-only view down the wire in HTML—then add any interactive interface elements with JavaScript in the browser.)

If people are equating progressive enhancement with thoughtless server-side rendering and hydration, then I can see why they’d be hostile towards it.

Users would be better served with unprogressive non-enhancement:

You take some structured content, which follows the vertical flow of the document in a way that everyone understands.

Which people traverse easily by either dragging their scroll bar with their mouse, or operating the keyboard using the up and down keys, or using the spacebar.

Or if they’re using a touch device, simply flicking backwards and forwards in that easy way that we’ve all become used to. What you do is you take that, and you fucking well leave it alone.

Alas, that’s not what tools like Gatsby offer. The latest post on their blog is called Why Gatsby is better with JavaScript:

But what about sites or pages where there is no client-side interactivity? Even for those pages, Gatsby offers performance benefits by including JavaScript.

I beg to differ.

(By the way, that same blog post also initially tried to equate the performance hit of client-side JavaScript with the performance hit of images. Andy explains why that’s disingenuous.)

Hope is on the horizon for React in the form of partial hydration. I sincerely hope that it will become the default way of balancing server-side rendering with just-in-time client-side interaction.

The situation we have now is the worst of both worlds: server-side rendering followed by a tsunami of hydration. It has a whiff of progressive enhancement to it (because there’s a cosmetic separation of concerns) but it has none of the user benefits.

Switching to Firefox | Brad Frost

Like Brad, I switched to Firefox for web browsing and Duck Duck Go for searching quite a while back. I highly recommend it.

Replying to a tweet from @atrvrs

Doh! Sorry about that—should be all fixed now.

Checked in at Jolly Brewer. Session 🎻🎶 — with Jessica map

Checked in at Jolly Brewer. Session 🎻🎶 — with Jessica

Wednesday, February 5th, 2020

Design systems roundup

When I started writing a post about architects, gardeners, and design systems, it was going to be a quick follow-up to my post about web standards, dictionaries, and design systems. I had spotted an interesting metaphor in one of Frank’s posts, and I thought it was worth jotting it down.

But after making that connection, I kept writing. I wanted to point out the fetishism we have for creation over curation; building over maintenance.

Then the post took a bit of a dark turn. I wrote about how the most commonly cited reasons for creating a design system—efficiency and consistency—are the same processes that have led to automation and dehumanisation in the past.

That’s where I left things. Others have picked up the baton.

Dave wrote a post called The Web is Industrialized and I helped industrialize it. What I said resonated with him:

This kills me, but it’s true. We’ve industrialized design and are relegated to squeezing efficiencies out of it through our design systems. All CSS changes must now have a business value and user story ticket attached to it. We operate more like Taylor and his stopwatch and Gantt and his charts, maximizing effort and impact rather than focusing on the human aspects of product development.

But he also points out the many benefits of systemetising:

At the same time, I have seen first hand how design systems can yield improvements in accessibility, performance, and shared knowledge across a willing team. I’ve seen them illuminate problems in design and code. I’ve seen them speed up design and development allowing teams to build, share, and validate prototypes or A/B tests before undergoing costly guesswork in production. There’s value in these tools, these processes.

Emphasis mine. I think that’s a key phrase: “a willing team.”

Ethan tackles this in his post The design systems we swim in:

A design system that optimizes for consistency relies on compliance: specifically, the people using the system have to comply with the system’s rules, in order to deliver on that promised consistency. And this is why that, as a way of doing something, a design system can be pretty dehumanizing.

But a design system need not be a constraining straitjacket—a means of enforcing consistency by keeping creators from colouring outside the lines. Used well, a design system can be a tool to give creators more freedom:

Does the system you work with allow you to control the process of your work, to make situational decisions? Or is it simply a set of rules you have to follow?

This is key. A design system is the product of an organisation’s culture. That’s something that Brad digs into his post, Design Systems, Agile, and Industrialization:

I definitely share Jeremy’s concern, but also think it’s important to stress that this isn’t an intrinsic issue with design systems, but rather the organizational culture that exists or gets built up around the design system. There’s a big difference between having smart, reusable patterns at your disposal and creating a dictatorial culture designed to enforce conformity and swat down anyone coloring outside the lines.

Brad makes a very apt comparison with Agile:

Not Agile the idea, but the actual Agile reality so many have to suffer through.

Agile can be a liberating empowering process, when done well. But all too often it’s a quagmire of requirements, burn rates, and story points. We need to make sure that design systems don’t suffer the same fate.

Jeremy’s thoughts on industrialization definitely struck a nerve. Sure, design systems have the ability to dehumanize and that’s something to actively watch out for. But I’d also say to pay close attention to the processes and organizational culture we take part in and contribute to.

Matthew Ström weighed in with a beautifully-written piece called Breaking looms. He provides historical context to the question of automation by relaying the story of the Luddite uprising. Automation may indeed be inevitable, according to his post, but he also provides advice on how to approach design systems today:

We can create ethical systems based in detailed user research. We can insist on environmental impact statements, diversity and inclusion initiatives, and human rights reports. We can write design principles, document dark patterns, and educate our colleagues about accessibility.

Finally, the ouroboros was complete when Frank wrote down his thoughts in a post called Who cares?. For him, the issue of maintenance and care is crucial:

Care applies to the built environment, and especially to digital technology, as social media becomes the weather and the tools we create determine the expectations of work to be done and the economic value of the people who use those tools. A well-made design system created for the right reasons is reparative. One created for the wrong reasons becomes a weapon for displacement. Tools are always beholden to values. This is well-trodden territory.

Well-trodden territory indeed. Back in 2015, Travis Gertz wrote about Design Machines:

Designing better systems and treating our content with respect are two wonderful ideals to strive for, but they can’t happen without institutional change. If we want to design with more expression and variation, we need to change how we work together, build design teams, and forge our tools.

Also on the topic of automation, in 2018 Cameron wrote about Design systems and technological disruption:

Design systems are certainly a new way of thinking about product development, and introduce a different set of tools to the design process, but design systems are not going to lessen the need for designers. They will instead increase the number of products that can be created, and hence increase the demand for designers.

And in 2019, Kaelig wrote:

In order to be fulfilled at work, Marx wrote that workers need “to see themselves in the objects they have created”.

When “improving productivity”, design systems tooling must be mindful of not turning their users’ craft into commodities, alienating them, like cogs in a machine.

All of this is reminding me of Kranzberg’s first law:

Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.

I worry that sometimes the messaging around design systems paints them as an inherently positive thing. But design systems won’t fix your problems:

Just stay away from folks who try to convince you that having a design system alone will solve something.

It won’t.

It’s just the beginning.

At the same time, a design system need not be the gateway drug to some kind of post-singularity future where our jobs have been automated away.

As always, it depends.

Remember what Frank said:

A well-made design system created for the right reasons is reparative. One created for the wrong reasons becomes a weapon for displacement.

The reasons for creating a design system matter. Those reasons will probably reflect the values of the company creating the system. At the level of reasons and values, we’ve gone beyond the bounds of the hyperobject of design systems. We’re dealing in the area of design ops—the whys of systemising design.

This is why I’m so wary of selling the benefits of design systems in terms of consistency and efficiency. Those are obviously tempting money-saving benefits, but followed to their conclusion, they lead down the dark path of enforced compliance and eventually, automation.

But if the reason you create a design system is to empower people to be more creative, then say that loud and proud! I know that creativity, autonomy and empowerment is a tougher package to sell than consistency and efficiency, but I think it’s a battle worth fighting.

Design systems are neither good nor bad (nor are they neutral).

Addendum: I’d just like to say how invigorating it’s been to read the responses from Dave, Ethan, Brad, Matthew, and Frank …all of them writing on their own websites. Rumours of the demise of blogging may have been greatly exaggerated.

Design System Won’t Fix Your Problems | Viljami Salminen

This is something we’ve learned at Clearleft—you can’t create a design system for an organisation, hand it over to them, and expect it to be maintained.

You can’t just hire an agency to create a design system and expect that the system alone will solve something. It won’t do much before the people in the organization align on this idea as well, believe in it, invest in it, and create a culture of collaboration around it.

The people who will be living with the design system must be (co-)creators of it. That’s very much the area we work in now.

Frank Chimero · Who cares?

Aaaaaand the circle is now complete.

Frank—whose post on architects and gardeners inspired my post on design systems and automation—has now written his follow-on post about all of this. His position?

It is a crisis of care.

As with anything, it’s not about the technology itself:

A well-made design system created for the right reasons is reparative. One created for the wrong reasons becomes a weapon for displacement. Tools are always beholden to values. This is well-trodden territory.

Breaking looms by Matthew Ström

Another follow-on to my post about design systems and automation. Here, Matthew invokes the spirit of the much-misunderstood Luddite martyrs. It’s good stuff.

Design systems are used by greedy software companies to fatten their bottom line. UI kits replace skilled designers with cheap commoditized labor.

Agile practices pressure teams to deliver more and faster. Scrum underscores soulless feature factories that suck the joy from the craft of software development.

But progress requires more than breaking looms.

Tuesday, February 4th, 2020

Replying to a tweet from @benward

Eddie Rode The Orphan Train by Jim Roll.

Replying to a tweet from @benward

Somebody Might Wave Back by The Waterboys.

Picture 1 Picture 2

Screenshots of @JaffaTheCake’s idea for separating out the eTLD+1 part of a URL in a browser’s address bar.

Design Systems, Agile, and Industrialization | Brad Frost

Brad weighs in on what I wrote about design systems and automation. He rightly points out that the issue isn’t with any particular tool—and a design system is, after all, a tool—but rather with the culture and processes of the organisation.

Sure, design systems have the ability to dehumanize and that’s something to actively watch out for. But I’d also say to pay close attention to the processes and organizational culture we take part in and contribute to.

There’s a full-on rant here about the dehumanising effects of what’s called “agile” at scale:

I’ve come to the conclusion that “enterprise web development” is just regular web development, only stripped of any joy or creativity or autonomy. It’s plugging a bunch of smart people into the matrix and forcing them to crank out widgets and move the little cards to the right.

The design systems we swim in. — Ethan Marcotte

But a design system that optimizes for consistency relies on compliance: specifically, the people using the system have to comply with the system’s rules, in order to deliver on that promised consistency. And this is why that, as a way of doing something, a design system can be pretty dehumanizing.

Ethan shares his thoughts on what I wrote about design systems and automation. He offers this test on whether a design system is empowering or disempowering:

Does the system you work with allow you to control the process of your work, to make situational decisions? Or is it simply a set of rules you have to follow?

iHateRegex - regex cheatsheet for haters

Piece together your own regular expression or choose from a pre-made selection.

(Like the creator if this site, I’m not a fan of regular expressions …or they’re not a fan of me. The logic just doesn’t stick in my brain.)

Could browsers fix more accessibility problems automatically?

Some really interesting ideas here from Hidde on how browsers could provide optional settings for users to override developers when it comes to accessibility issues like colour contrast, focus styles, and autoplaying videos.

Monday, February 3rd, 2020

Three books

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil will be published on February 25th.

In Lurking, Joanne McNeil digs deep and identifies the primary (if sometimes contradictory) concerns of people online: searching, safety, privacy, identity, community, anonymity, and visibility. She charts what it is that brought people online and what keeps us here even as the social equations of digital life—what we’re made to trade, knowingly or otherwise, for the benefits of the internet—have shifted radically beneath us. It is a story we are accustomed to hearing as tales of entrepreneurs and visionaries and dynamic and powerful corporations, but there is a more profound, intimate story that hasn’t yet been told.

Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History’s First Global Manhunt by Steven Johnson will be published on May 12th:

Henry Every was the seventeenth century’s most notorious pirate. The press published wildly popular—and wildly inaccurate—reports of his nefarious adventures. The British government offered enormous bounties for his capture, alive or (preferably) dead. But Steven Johnson argues that Every’s most lasting legacy was his inadvertent triggering of a major shift in the global economy. Enemy of All Mankind focuses on one key event—the attack on an Indian treasure ship by Every and his crew—and its surprising repercussions across time and space. It’s the gripping tale one of the most lucrative crimes in history, the first international manhunt, and the trial of the seventeenth century.

How To Future: Leading and Sense-Making in an Age of Hyperchange by Scott Smith with Madeline Ashby will be published on July 3rd:

Successfully designing for a future requires a picture of that future—a useful map of the horizons ahead that can be used for wayfinding, identifying emerging opportunities or risks. Accurately developing this map means investing in better awareness of signals about the future, understanding trends in context, developing rich insights about what those signals indicate—relative to companies, people, citizens or stakeholders. It also means cultivating ways to share these future insights through tangible yet provocative scenarios or stories, turn these into prototypes, or connect them to strategies.

Schwerkraftprojektionsgerät

Tetris four directions.

Good luck.

The Web is Industrialized and I helped industrialize it - daverupert.com

We’ve industrialized design and are relegated to squeezing efficiencies out of it through our design systems. All CSS changes must now have a business value and user story ticket attached to it.

Dave follows on from my post about design systems and automation.

At the same time, I have seen first hand how design systems can yield improvements in accessibility, performance, and shared knowledge across a willing team. I’ve seen them illuminate problems in design and code. I’ve seen them speed up design and development allowing teams to build, share, and validate prototypes or A/B tests before undergoing costly guesswork in production. There’s value in these tools, these processes.

Progressive enhancement doesn’t have to be hard - Levi McGranahan

It’s wild because in engineering terms this question, how does it fail?, should be the first one we ask, but oftentimes it is never even considered in front-end development. A good example is most client-side JS frameworks that render the entire UI in the browser, how would your app or site fail in that situation?

N26 and lack of JavaScript | Kitty Giraudel

JavaScript is fickle. It can fail to load. It can be disabled. It can be blocked. It can fail to run. It probably is fine most of the time, but when it fails, everything tends to go bad. And having such a hard point of failure is not ideal.

This is a very important point:

It’s important not to try making the no-JS experience work like the full one. The interface has to be revisited. Some features might even have to be removed, or dramatically reduced in scope. That’s also okay. As long as the main features are there and things work nicely, it should be fine that the experience is not as polished.

Old CSS, new CSS / fuzzy notepad

I absolutely love this in-depth history of the web, written in a snappy, snarky tone.

In the beginning, there was no CSS.

This was very bad.

Even if you—like me—lived through all this stuff, I guarantee there’ll still be something in here you didn’t know.

We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.

— The Human Use Of Human Beings

s08e05: There’s only one rule that I know of, babies - Things That Have Caught My Attention

A global communications network now exists that’s cheap enough or in some cases even free to access, offering a pseudonymous way for people to feel safe enough to share a private experience with complete strangers? I give Facebook and Twitter a bunch of shit for their rhetoric about a global community (no, Facebook’s billions of users are no more a community than the television-watching global community) and creating authentic connection, but I will very happily admit that this, this particular example with people sharing what it is like to be me and learning what is it like to be you is the good.

This is the thing that makes free, open, networked communication brilliant. This is the thing that brings down silos and creates common understanding and humanizes us all, that creates empathy and the first steps towards compassion.

That someone can read about this insight and have a way to react to it and share their perspective and not even know who else might read it, but feel safe in doing so and maybe even with the expectation that this sharing is a net good? That is good. That is what we should strive for.

Google Maps Hacks, Performance and Installation, 2020 By Simon Weckert

I can’t decide if this is industrial sabotage or political protest. Either way, I like it.

99 second hand smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps.Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic

Sunday, February 2nd, 2020

map

Checked in at Duke of York’s Picturehouse. A screening of The Proposition followed by Q&A with Nick Cave — with Jessica

Saturday, February 1st, 2020

Replying to a tweet from @wormmmoon

Is it Remain In Light by Talking Heads? 😀

Checked in at Jolly Brewer. Learning a tune — with Jessica map

Checked in at Jolly Brewer. Learning a tune — with Jessica