Archive: July, 2020

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Friday, July 31st, 2020

British & Exotic Mineralogy

A really lovely unmonetisable enthusiasm:

All 2,242 illustrations from James Sowerby’s compendium of knowledge about mineralogy in Great Britain and beyond, drawn 1802–1817 and arranged by color.

You can dive in and explore or read more about the project and how it was made.

It reminds me of Paul’s project, Bradshaw’s Guide: the both take a beloved artifact of the past and bring it online with care, love, and respect.

Pinboard is Eleven (Pinboard Blog)

I probably need to upgrade the Huffduffer server but Maciej nails why that’s an intimidating prospect:

Doing this on a live system is like performing kidney transplants on a playing mariachi band. The best case is that no one notices a change in the music; you chloroform the players one at a time and try to keep a steady hand while the band plays on. The worst case scenario is that the music stops and there is no way to unfix what you broke, just an angry mob. It is very scary.

How would I improve RSS? Three ideas (Interconnected)

Matt has thoughts on RSS:

My sense is that RSS is having a mini resurgence. People are getting wary of the social media platforms and their rapacious appetite for data. We’re getting fatigued from notifications; our inboxes are overflowing. And people are saying that maybe, just maybe, RSS can help. So I’m seeing RSS being discussed more in 2020 than I have done for years. There are signs of life in the ecosystem.

ongoing by Tim Bray · Meta Blog

But aren’t blogs dead? · Um, nope. For every discipline-with-depth that I care about (software/Internet, politics, energy economics, physics), if you want to find out what’s happening and you want to find out from first-person practitioners, you end up reading a blog.

Dense information from real experts, delivered fast. Why would you want any other kind?

Smashing Podcast Episode 21 With Chris Ferdinandi: Are Modern Best Practices Bad For The Web? — Smashing Magazine

I really enjoyed this interview between Drew and Chris. I love that there’s a transcript so you can read the whole thing if you don’t feel like huffduffing it.

Recreating Wildlife Photographer of the Year online – part 1 – Introduction and technical approach – Blogs from the Natural History Museum

You’ve seen the Wildlife Photographer Of The Year project from Clearleft’s viewpoint …and you’ve listened to the podcast episode, right?

Now here’s the story from the team that made the website. It’s a great walkthrough of thoughtfully evaluating technologies to figure out the best approach.

Checked in at Pelicano. Iced latte — with Jessica map

Checked in at Pelicano. Iced latte — with Jessica

Why Medium is Not the Home for Your Ideas – The Hulry

Some good blogging advice.

Building a blog for the long run? Avoid Medium.

On the origin of cascades

This is a great talk by Hidde, looking at the history and evolution of cascading style sheets. Right up my alley!

Replying to a tweet from @briansuda

I think that was dConstruct 2015.

Thursday, July 30th, 2020

Lateral Thinking With Withered Technology · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

What web development can learn from the Nintendo Game and Watch.

The Web now consists of an ever-growing number of different frameworks, methodologies, screen sizes, devices, browsers, and connection speeds. “Lateral thinking with withered technology” – progressively enhanced – might actually be an ideal philosophy for building accessible, performant, resilient, and original experiences for a wide audience of users on the Web.

Replying to a tweet from @SaraSoueidan

Eid Mubarak, Sara!

TheirTube

Theirtube is a Youtube filter bubble simulator that provides a look into how videos are recommended on other people’s YouTube. Users can experience how the YouTube home page would look for six different personas.

The source code is freely available.

Wednesday, July 29th, 2020

Playing The Blarney Pilgrim (jig) on mandolin:

https://thesession.org/tunes/5

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ypb9LWQmFPc

The Blarney Pilgrim (jig) on mandolin

Replying to a post on adactio.com

There’s also the ongoing pitch drop experiments:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitchdropexperiment

Replying to a tweet from @mrbarnabyb

Looking forward to an excellent evening’s entertainment from @CassieCodes, @HankChizlJaw, @CarieFisher, @HolaSoyMilk, @MicheBarks, and @MxBck:

https://webclerks.at/vienna-calling/

It’s Vienna. But this means nothing to me.

Design ops on the Clearleft podcast

The latest episode of the Clearleft podcast is out. If you’re a subscriber, it will magically appear in your podcast software of choice using the power of RSS. If you’re not a subscriber, it isn’t too late to change that.

This week’s episode is all about design ops. I began contructing the episode by gathering raw material from talks at Leading Design. There’s good stuff from Kim Fellman, Jacqui Frey, Courtney Kaplan, and Meredith Black.

But as I was putting the snippets together, I felt like the episode was missing something. It needed a bit of oomph. So I harangued Andy for some of his time. I wasn’t just fishing for spicy hot takes—something that Andy is known for. Andy is also the right person to explain design ops. If you search for that term, one of the first results you’ll get is a post he wrote on the Clearleft blog a few years back called Design Ops — A New Discipline.

I remember helping Andy edit that post and I distinctly recall my feedback. The initial post didn’t have a definition of the term, and I felt that a definition was necessary (and Andy added one to the post).

My cluenessness about the meaning of terms like “design ops” or “service design” isn’t some schtick I’m putting on for the benefit of the podcast. I’m genuinely trying to understand these terms better. I don’t like the feeling of hearing a term being used a lot without a clear understanding of what that term means. All too often my understanding feels more like “I think I know it means, but I’m not sure I could describe it.” I’m not comfortable with that.

Making podcast episodes on these topics—which are outside my comfort zone—has been really helpful. I now feel like I have a much better understanding of service design, design ops and other topical terms. I hope that the podcast will be just as helpful for listeners who feel as bamboozled as I do.

Ben Holliday recently said:

The secret of design being useful in many places is not talking about design too much and just getting on with it. I sometimes think we create significant language barriers with job titles, design theory and making people learn a new language for the privilege of working with us.

I think there’s some truth to that. Andy disagrees. Strongly.

In our chat, Andy and I had what politicians would describe as “a robust discussion.” I certainly got some great material for the podcast (though some of the more contentious bits remain on the cutting room floor).

Calling on Andy for this episode was definitely the right call. I definitely got the added oomph I was looking for. In fact, this ended up being one of my favourite episodes.

There’s a lot of snappy editing, all in service of crafting a compelling narrative. First, there’s the origin story of design ops. Then there’s an explanation of what it entails. From around the 13 minute mark, there’s a pivot—via design systems—into asking whether introducing a new term is exclusionary. That’s when the sparks start to fly. Finally, I pull it back to talking about how Clearleft can help in providing design ops as a service.

The whole episode comes out at 21 minutes, which feels just right to me.

I’m really pleased with how this episode turned out, and I hope you’ll like it too. Have a listen and decide for yourself.

The latest episode of the Clearleft podcast is out!

It’s all about design ops …no, wait! Come back! It’s more interesting than it sounds, honest!

https://podcast.clearleft.com/season01/episode04/

Replying to a tweet from @torahwilcox

I just stumbled across this recording from a band I sometimes played with in Germany in the 90s doing a cover of Eisbär (I’m on bouzouki):

https://soundcloud.com/user-52736705/lunar-ride-eisbar-grauzone-cover-live-zmf-1999

Tuesday, July 28th, 2020

Replying to a tweet from @slightlylate

I concur that impact is more important than motive.

That’s why I was surprised that you ascribed motive in your blog post (a motive that contradicts Apple’s stated motive).

Replying to a tweet from @slightlylate

I’m trying to make of it what you will, but you won’t tell me. 🙂

They claim one motive (privacy). You claim another (not wishing to expand the web platform).

Which one is true and which one is false?

Replying to a tweet from @slightlylate

Nowhere in published policy documents do Apple or Mozilla say that they do not wish to expand the web platform.

You wrote a blog post stating that Apple and Mozilla do not wish to expand the web platform.

Replying to a tweet from @slightlylate

So you’re not accusing them of lying?

You claim that they do not wish to expand the web platform.

What they have written published in policy documents is that they have privacy concerns.

Is what they are saying true?

Replying to a tweet from @slightlylate

You should be a politician.

It’s a “yes” or “no” question.

Are they lying?

Replying to a tweet from @slightlylate

Are they lying about their motives?

You say their motivation is that they do not wish to expand the web platform.

They say their motivation is privacy.

Is that a lie?

Replying to a tweet from @slightlylate

So you think they’re lying?

Replying to a tweet from @slightlylate

They also gave their reasoning (privacy concerns). You’re claiming their stated reasons aren’t their real motives.

Someone at Google, of all places, should know better than to ascribe shadowy motives to a company’s actions.

Replying to a tweet from @slightlylate

I agree. Competition is good. What isn’t good is talking about the competition using the language of conspiracy theories:

There is a contingent of browser vendors today who do not wish to expand the web platform…

Replying to a tweet from @stshank

I wrote about the differences in priorities here:

https://adactio.com/journal/17114

Google’s Top Search Result? Surprise! It’s Google – The Markup

I’ve been using Duck Duck Go for ages so I didn’t realise quite how much of a walled garden Google search has become.

41% of the first page of Google search results is taken up by Google products.

This is some excellent reporting. The data and methodology are entirely falsifiable so feel free to grab the code and replicate the results.

Note the fear with which publishers talk about Google (anonymously). It’s the same fear that app developers exhibit when talking about Apple (anonymously).

Ain’t centralisation something?

Monday, July 27th, 2020

Is my host fast yet?

This is an interesting project to try to rank web hosts by performance:

Real-world server response (Time to First Byte) latencies, as experienced by real-world users navigating the web.

the Web at a crossroads - Web Directions

John weighs in on the clashing priorities of browser vendors.

Imagine if the web never got CSS. Never got a way to style content in sophisticated ways. It’s hard to imagine its rise to prominence in the early 2000s. I’d not be alone in arguing a similar lack of access to the sort of features inherent to the mobile experience that WebKit and the folks at Mozilla have expressed concern about would (not might) largely consign the Web to an increasingly marginal role.

Sunday, July 26th, 2020

Playing The Hills Of Coore (hornpipe) by Junior Crehan on mandolin:

https://thesession.org/tunes/2157

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKDvHYI1k5w

The Hills Of Coore (hornpipe) on mandolin

Replying to a post on adactio.com

Checking out the charts for my websites/PWAs on the Lighthouse hit parade…

Checking out the charts for my websites/PWAs on the Lighthouse hit parade…

Saturday, July 25th, 2020

Playing Behind The Haystack (jig) on mandolin:

https://thesession.org/tunes/358

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5FmP22FU34

Behind The Haystack (jig) on mandolin

Friday, July 24th, 2020

Replying to a tweet from @Amy_Hupe

I have an SEO joke, skit, humour, funny, laughing, story, anecdote, gag.

Picture 1 Picture 2

Celebrating.

Pausing a GIF with details/summary | CSS-Tricks

This is such a clever and useful technique! It’s HTML+CSS only, and it’s a far less annoying way to display animated GIFs.

(Does anybody even qualify the word GIF with the adjective “animated” anymore? Does anyone know that there used to be such a thing as non-animated GIFs and that they were everywhere?)

Make me think! – Ralph Ammer

This is about seamful design.

We need to know things better if we want to be better.

It’s also about progressive enhancement.

Highly sophisticated systems work flawlessly, as long as things go as expected.

When a problem occurs which hasn’t been anticipated by the designers, those systems are prone to fail. The more complex the systems are, the higher are the chances that things go wrong. They are less resilient.

Progressive · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

Progressive enhancement is not yet another technology or passing fad. It is a lasting strategy, a principle, to deal with complexity because it lets you build inclusive, resilient experiences that work across different contexts and that will continue to work, once the next fancy JavaScript framework enters the scene – and vanishes again.

But why don’t more people practice progressive enhancement? Is it only because they don’t know better? This might, in fact, be the primary reason. On top of that, especially many JavaScript developers seem to believe that it is not possible or necessary to build modern websites and applications that way.

A heartfelt look at progressive enhancement:

Some look at progressive enhancement like a thing from the past of which the old guard just can’t let go. But to me, progressive enhancement is the future of the Web. It is the basis for building resilient, performant, interoperable, secure, usable, accessible, and thus inclusive experiences. Not only for the Web of today but for the ever-growing complexity of an ever-changing and ever-evolving Web.

MSEdgeExplainers/explainer.md at main · MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers

This is great! Ideas for allowing more styling of form controls. I agree with the goals 100% and I like the look of the proposed solutions too.

The team behind this are looking for feedback so be sure to share your thoughts (I’ll probably formulate mine into a blog post).

Custom Property Coverup | Amber’s Website

This is a great bit of detective work by Amber! It’s the puzzling case of The Browser Dev Tools and the Missing Computed Values from Custom Properties.

Who do I know working on dev tools for Chrome, Firefox, or Safari that can help Amber find an answer to this mystery?

Thursday, July 23rd, 2020

Replying to a tweet from @iamashley

Bella the Beagle is the best co-worker!

Had a lovely evening stroll with fellow Clearlefties—so nice to see them in a non-screen context!

Had a lovely evening stroll with fellow Clearlefties—so nice to see them in a non-screen context!

4 Design Patterns That Violate “Back” Button Expectations – 59% of Sites Get It Wrong - Articles - Baymard Institute

Some interesting research in here around user expecations with the back button:

Generally, we’ve observed that if a new view is sufficiently different visually, or if a new view conceptually feels like a new page, it will be perceived as one — regardless of whether it technically is a new page or not. This has consequences for how a site should handle common product-finding and -exploration elements like overlays, filtering, and sorting. For example, if users click a link and 70% of the view changes to something new, most will perceive this to be a new page, even if it’s technically still the same page, just with a new view loaded in.

CSS Vocabulary

This is a nifty visual interactive explainer for the language of CSS—could be very handy for Codebar students.

@LadyAdaKing Great work on the W3C Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct—I love the way it applies Postel’s Law!

https://www.w3.org/Consortium/cepc/cepc-20200716/

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2020

Playing The Maids Of Mount Kisco (reel) on mandolin:

https://thesession.org/tunes/432

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALTo9_0eJC8

The Maids Of Mount Kisco (reel) on mandolin

Replying to a tweet from @jensimmons

For a moment there, I thought this was a tweet from @MagicRealismBot. 🙂

Replying to a tweet from @jaffathecake

I tried to grok AMP 5 years ago:

https://adactio.com/journal/9646

Apple has Apple News. Facebook has Instant Articles. Now Google has AMP: Accelerated Mobile Pages.

The big players sure are going to a lot of effort to reinvent RSS.

Wildlife Photographer Of The Year on the Clearleft podcast

Episode three of the Clearleft podcast is here!

This one is a bit different. Whereas previous episodes focused on specific topics—design systems, service design—this one is a case study. And, wow, what a case study! The whole time I was putting the episode together, I kept thinking “The team really did some excellent work here.”

I’m not sure what makes more sense: listen to the podcast episode first and then visit the site in question …or the other way around? Maybe the other way around. In which case, be sure to visit the website for Wildlife Photographer Of The Year.

That’s right—Clearleft got to work with London’s Natural History Museum! A real treat.

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

This episode of the podcast ended up being half an hour long. It should probably be shorter but I just couldn’t bring myself to cut any of the insights that Helen, James, Chris, and Trys were sharing. I’m probably too close to the subject matter to be objective about it. I’m hoping that others will find it equally fascinating to hear about the process of the project. Research! Design! Dev! This has got it all.

I had a lot of fun with the opening of the episode. I wanted to create a montage effect like the scene-setting opening of a film that has overlapping news reports. I probably spent far too long doing it but I’m really happy with the final result.

And with this episode, we’re halfway through the first season of the podcast already! I figured a nice short run of six episodes is enough to cover a fair bit of ground and give a taste of what the podcast is aiming for, without it turning into an overwhelming number of episodes in a backlog for you to catch up with. Three down and three to go. Seems manageable, right?

Anyway, enough of the backstory. If you haven’t already subscribed to the Clearleft podcast, you should do that. Then do these three things in whichever order you think works best:

It’s here! The latest episode of the @Clearleft podcast is all about the fantastic work the team did with @NHM_London on the website for the Wildlife Photographer Of The Year competition:

https://podcast.clearleft.com/season01/episode03/

Tuesday, July 21st, 2020

If you watch that new Tom Hanks film Greyhound, you might hear a reference to huffduffing…

Playing The Jig Of Life on mandolin:

https://thesession.org/tunes/7575

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtYg5G70wY8

(From The Hounds Of Love by Kate Bush, 1985)

The Jig Of Life on mandolin

I hope you’re subscribed to the @Clearleft podcast …’cause you won’t want to miss the episode that’s coming tomorrow!

https://podcast.clearleft.com/

Monday, July 20th, 2020

Always at Your Service · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

Thoughts on user experience design and service design, prompted by the Clearleft podcast:

I especially enjoyed the latest episode about a topic that has become a bit of a hyped buzzword over the last few years: Service design.

Rich with anecdotes and stories, the episode started with an investigation: What is service design, anyway?

Sunday, July 19th, 2020

Replying to a tweet from @philiprenich

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

90s Festival Generator

I spent far too long hitting refresh and then clicking on the names of some of the Irish bands down near the bottom of the line-up.

Coldwater.Science

The World Ocean is as close as you can get to outer space without leaving Earth. It’s an entirely different universe, nothing like the life we have on land.

Saturday, July 18th, 2020

Watching Selma (2014).

Replying to a tweet from @hankchizljaw

I wrote a little something about that…

https://adactio.com/journal/17140

Playing The New Mown Meadows (reel) on mandolin:

https://thesession.org/tunes/2706

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15cuzPTOypE

The New Mown Meadows (reel) on mandolin
Reading Purple People by Kate Bulpitt.

Reading Purple People by Kate Bulpitt.

Buy this book

Just finished reading Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini; a superbly researched and written book that had me thoroughly gripped. Highly recommended!

https://www.angelasaini.co.uk/superior

CSS photo effects - a Collection by Lynn Fisher on CodePen

These wonderfully realistic photo effects from Lynn are quite lovely!

Indexing your offline-capable pages with the Content Indexing API

A Chrome-only API for adding offline content to an index that can be exposed in Android’s “downloads” list. It just shipped in the lastest version of Chrome.

I’m not a fan of browser-specific non-standards but you can treat this as an enhancement—implementing it doesn’t harm non-supporting browsers and you can use feature detection to test for it.

Works offline

How do we tell our visitors our sites work offline? How do we tell our visitors that they don’t need an app because it’s no more capable than the URL they’re on right now?

Remy expands on his call for ideas on branding websites that work offline with a universal symbol, along the lines of what we had with RSS.

What I’d personally like to see as an outcome: some simple iconography that I can use on my own site and other projects that can offer ambient badging to reassure my visitor that the URL they’re visiting will work offline.

An Introduction To Stimulus.js — Smashing Magazine

An intro to Stimulus, the lightweight JavaScript library from Basecamp that takes a progressive enhancement approach, as seen with HEY.

One aspect I really like about the approach Stimulus encourages, is I can focus on sending HTML down the wire to my users, which is then jazzed up a little with JavaScript.

I’ve always been a fan of using the first few milliseconds of a user’s attention getting what I have to share with them — in front of them. Then worrying setting up the interaction layer while the user can start processing what they’re seeing.

Furthermore, if the JavaScript were to fail for whatever reason, the user can still see the content and interact with it without JavaScript.

Your blog doesn’t need a JavaScript framework /// Iain Bean

If the browser needs to parse 296kb of JavaScript to show a list of blog posts, that’s not Progressive Enhancement, it’s using the wrong tool for the job.

A good explanation of the hydration problem in tools like Gatsby.

JavaScript is a powerful language that can do some incredible things, but it’s incredibly easy to jump to using it too early in development, when you could be using HTML and CSS instead.

Replying to a tweet from @pipsmithe

Beautiful!

Friday, July 17th, 2020

The last time I saw a comet was Hale-Bopp (or was it Hyakutake?) in ’97 …before that it was Halley’s in ’86.

Comet vintages.

Went outside to watch the ISS fly right overhead, very bright! Saw comet NEOWISE too—what a beauty!

Go outside and take a look. Trace a path from the two stars at the base of the plough towards the horizon. Use binoculars if you have them.

Checked in at Pelicano. Iced latte — with Jessica map

Checked in at Pelicano. Iced latte — with Jessica

Having an iced latte in the sun.

Having an iced latte in the sun.

WindowSwap

Look out someone else’s window somewhere in the world.

There’s something indescribably lovely about this. It’s like a kind of positive voyeurism.

I lost a lot of time to this.

Why you should have a blog (and write in it) | Leticia Portella

Having your independent blog is an excellent way to share what you think in a decentralized way, independent of any major company that may add a paywall to it (Medium, I am looking at you).

Thursday, July 16th, 2020

Hey now

Progressive enhancement is at the heart of everything I do on the web. It’s the bedrock of my speaking and writing too. Whether I’m writing about JavaScript, Ajax, HTML, or service workers, it’s always through the lens of progressive enhancement. Sometimes I explicitly bang the drum, like with Resilient Web Design. Other times I don’t mention it by name at all, and instead talk only about its benefits.

I sometimes get asked to name some examples of sites that still offer their core functionality even when JavaScript fails. I usually mention Amazon.com, although that has other issues. But quite often I find that a lot of the examples I might mention are dismissed as not being “web apps” (whatever that means).

The pushback I get usually takes the form of “Well, that approach is fine for websites, but it wouldn’t work something like Gmail.”

It’s always Gmail. Which is odd. Because if you really wanted to flummox me with a product or service that defies progressive enhancement, I’d have a hard time with something like, say, a game (although it would be pretty cool to build a text adventure that’s progressively enhanced into a first-person shooter). But an email client? That would work.

Identify core functionality.

Read emails. Write emails.

Make that functionality available using the simplest possible technology.

HTML for showing a list of emails, HTML for displaying the contents of the HTML, HTML for the form you write the response in.

Enhance!

Now add all the enhancements that improve the experience—keyboard shortcuts; Ajax instead of full-page refreshes; local storage, all that stuff.

Can you build something that works just like Gmail without using any JavaScript? No. But that’s not what progressive enhancement is about. It’s about providing the core functionality (reading and writing emails) with the simplest possible technology (HTML) and then enhancing using more powerful technologies (like JavaScript).

Progressive enhancement isn’t about making a choice between using simpler more robust technologies or using more advanced features; it’s about using simpler more robust technologies and then using more advanced features. Have your cake and eat it.

Fortunately I no longer need to run this thought experiment to imagine what it would be like if something like Gmail were built with a progressive enhancement approach. That’s what HEY is.

Sam Stephenson describes the approach they took:

HEY’s UI is 100% HTML over the wire. We render plain-old HTML pages on the server and send them to your browser encoded as text/html. No JSON APIs, no GraphQL, no React—just form submissions and links.

If you think that sounds like the web of 25 years ago, you’re right! Except the HEY front-end stack progressively enhances the “classic web” to work like the “2020 web,” with all the fidelity you’d expect from a well-built SPA.

See? It’s not either resilient or modern—it’s resilient and modern. Have your cake and eat it.

And yet this supremely sensible approach is not considered “modern” web development:

The architecture astronauts who, for the past decade, have been selling us on the necessity of React, Redux, and megabytes of JS, cannot comprehend the possibility of building an email app in 2020 with server-rendered HTML.

HEY isn’t perfect by any means—they’ve got a lot of work to do on their accessibility. But it’s good to have a nice short answer to the question “But what about something like Gmail?”

It reminds me of responsive web design:

When Ethan Marcotte demonstrated the power of responsive design, it was met with resistance. “Sure, a responsive design might work for a simple personal site but there’s no way it could scale to a large complex project.”

Then the Boston Globe launched its responsive site. Microsoft made their homepage responsive. The floodgates opened again.

It’s a similar story today. “Sure, progressive enhancement might work for a simple personal site, but there’s no way it could scale to a large complex project.”

The floodgates are ready to open. We just need you to create the poster child for resilient web design.

It looks like HEY might be that poster child.

I have to wonder if its coincidence or connected that this is a service that’s also tackling ethical issues like tracking? Their focus is very much on people above technology. They’ve taken a human-centric approach to their product and a human-centric approach to web development …because ultimately, that’s what progressive enhancement is.

Wednesday, July 15th, 2020

The Shape Of The Machine « blarg?

On AMP:

Google could have approached the “be better on mobile” problem, search optimization and revenue sharing any number of ways, obviously, but the one they’ve chosen and built out is the one that guarantees that either you let them middleman all of your traffic or they cut off your oxygen.

There’s also this observation, which is spot-on:

Google has managed to structure this surveillance-and-value-extraction machine entirely out of people who are convinced that they, personally, are doing good for the world. The stuff they’re working on isn’t that bad – we’ve got such beautiful intentions!

Playing The Walls Of Liscarroll (jig) on bouzouki:

https://thesession.org/tunes/9601

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJtmMP6yl4A

The Walls Of Liscarroll (jig) on bouzouki

Round 1: post your ideas / designs · Issue #1 · works-offline/logo

This is an interesting push by Remy to try to figure out a way we can collectively indicate to users that a site works offline.

Well, seeing as browsers have completely dropped the ball on any kind of ambient badging, it’s fair enough that we take matters into our own hands.

The second episode of the @Clearleft podcast is out!

https://podcast.clearleft.com/season01/episode02/

It’s all about service design and features @UXLondon talks from @KerryBodine, @Jamin, and @LouiseDowne (and a story from @Clagnut).

Service design on the Clearleft podcast

If you’re subscribed to the Clearleft podcast there’s a new episode winging its way across the airwaves to alight in your podcast software of choice.

This episode is all about service design. More precisely, it’s about me trying to understand what service design is. I don’t think I’m alone in being unsure of its meaning.

So in some ways, this is similar to the first episode, which involved a lot me asking “What exactly is a design system anyway?” But for the service design episode, rather than using interviews as my source material, I’ve dug into the archives of UX London. There are past talks on Clearleft’s Vimeo channel. I made plenty of use of presentations by Kerry Bodine, Jamin Hegeman, and Lou Downe.

That worked out well, but I felt there was still something missing from the episode. It needed a good story to wrap things up. So I cornered Rich for a chat about a project Clearleft worked on for Brighton council. That did the trick!

Again, there’s not much of me in this one. I’m there to thread the narrative together but my voice is not the one doing the explaining or the story-telling.

The episode ended up being almost half an hour long. Like I said before, rather than trying to squeeze each episode into a predefined timeslot, each episode will be as long as needs to be. And this one needed the time for Rich to tell his story.

Ooh, and I even tried adding in some sound effects during that part! It probably just sounds cheesy, but I’m still trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Anyway, have a listen to this episode and see what you think. It’s got dead badgers, Downton Abbey, icebergs, and airplanes. Service design really does encompass a lot!

Tuesday, July 14th, 2020

Playing Maudabawn Chapel (reel) by Ed Reavy on mandolin:

https://thesession.org/tunes/302

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdA_gMJHtkM

Maudabawn Chapel (reel) on mandolin

Replying to a tweet from @jina

Hear, hear!

I mean…

Read, read!

Accessibility

There’s a new project from Igalia called Open Prioritization:

An experiment in crowd-funding prioritization of new feature implementations for web browsers.

There is some precedent for this. There was a crowd-funding campaign for Yoav Weiss to implement responsive images in Blink a while back. The difference with the Open Prioritization initiative is that it’s also a kind of marketplace for which web standards will get the funding.

Examples include implementing the CSS lab() colour function in Firefox or implementing the :not() pseudo-class in Chrome. There are also some accessibility features like the :focus-visible pseudo-class and the inert HTML attribute.

I must admit, it makes me queasy to see accessibility features go head to head with other web standards. I don’t think a marketplace is the right arena for prioritising accessibility.

I get a similar feeling of discomfort when a presentation or article on accessibility spends a fair bit of time describing the money that can be made by ensuring your website is accessible. I mean, I get it: you’re literally leaving money on the table if you turn people away. But that’s not the reason to ensure your website is accessible. The reason to ensure that your website is accessible is that it’s the right thing to do.

I know that people are uncomfortable with moral arguments, but in this case, I believe it’s important that we keep sight of that.

I understand how it’s useful to have the stats and numbers to hand should you need to convince a sociopath in your organisation, but when numbers are used as the justification, you’re playing the numbers game from then on. You’ll probably have to field questions like “Well, how many screen reader users are visiting our site anyway?” (To which the correct answer is “I don’t know and I don’t care”—even if the number is 1, the website should still be accessible because it’s the right thing to do.)

It reminds of when I was having a discussion with a god-bothering friend of mine about the existence or not of a deity. They made the mistake of trying to argue the case for God based on logic and reason. Those arguments didn’t hold up. But had they made their case based on the real reason for their belief—which is faith—then their position would have been unassailable. I literally couldn’t argue against faith. But instead, by engaging in the rules of logic and reason, they were applying the wrong justification to their stance.

Okay, that’s a bit abstract. How about this…

In a similar vein to talks or articles about accessibility, talks or articles about diversity often begin by pointing out the monetary gain to be had. It’s true. The data shows that companies that are more diverse are also more profitable. But again, that’s not the reason for having a diverse group of people in your company. The reason for having a diverse group of people in your company is that it’s the right thing to do. If you tie the justification for diversity to data, then what happens should the data change? If a new study showed that diverse companies were less profitable, is that a reason to abandon diversity? Absolutely not! If your justification isn’t tied to numbers, then it hardly matters what the numbers say (though it does admitedly feel good to have your stance backed up).

By the way, this is also why I don’t think it’s a good idea to “sell” design systems on the basis of efficiency and cost-savings if the real reason you’re building one is to foster better collaboration and creativity. The fundamental purpose of a design system needs to be shared, not swapped out based on who’s doing the talking.

Anyway, back to accessibility…

A marketplace, to me, feels like exactly the wrong kind of place for accessibility to defend its existence. By its nature, accessibility isn’t a mainstream issue. I mean, think about it: it’s good that accessibility issues affect a minority of people. The fewer, the better. But even if the number of people affected by accessibility were to trend downwards and dwindle, the importance of accessibility should remain unchanged. Accessibility is important regardless of the numbers.

Look, if I make a website for a client, I don’t offer accessibility as a line item with a price tag attached. I build in accessibility by default because it’s the right thing to do. The only way to ensure that accessibility doesn’t get negotiated away is to make sure it’s not up for negotiation.

So that’s why I feel uncomfortable seeing accessibility features in a popularity contest.

I think that markets are great. I think competition is great. But I don’t think it works for everything (like, could you imagine applying marketplace economics to healthcare or prisons? Nightmare!). I concur with Iain M. Banks:

The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what- -works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources.

If Igalia or Mozilla or Google or Apple implement an accessibility feature because they believe that accessibility is important and deserves prioritisation, that’s good. If they implement the same feature just because it received a lot of votes …that doesn’t strike me as a good thing.

I guess it doesn’t matter what the reason is as long as the end result is the same, right? But I suspect that what we’ll see is that the accessibility features up for bidding on Open Prioritization won’t be the winners.

Ariel Waldman: The colorful critter world of microbes in Antarctica | TED Talk

Ariel gave a TED talk and it’s mind-blowingly good!

If you haven’t yet subscribed to the @Clearleft podcast, you can rectify that oversight:

https://podcast.clearleft.com/

There’s a new episode coming tomorrow—’sgonna be goooood!

Open Prioritization by Igalia

An experiment to crowdfund the implementation of web standards in browsers.

I’m not sure how I feel about this.

Monday, July 13th, 2020

A walkthrough of our design system and how we got here | Kyan

It all started at Patterns Day…

(Note: you’ll probably need to use Reader mode to avoid taxing your eyes reading this—the colour contrast …doesn’t.)

Putting design principles into action

I was really looking forward to speaking at An Event Apart this year. I was going to be on the line-up for Seattle, Boston, and Minneapolis; three cities I really like.

At the start of the year, I decided to get a head-start on my new talk so I wouldn’t be too stressed out when the first event approached. I spent most of January and February going through the chaotic process of assembling a semi-coherent presentation out of a katamari of vague thoughts.

I was making good progress. Then The Situation happened. One by one, the in-person editions of An Event Apart were cancelled (quite rightly). But my talk preparation hasn’t been in vain. I’ll be presenting my talk at an online edition of An Event Apart on Monday, August 17th.

You should attend. Not for my talk, but for Ire’s talk on Future-Proof CSS which sounds like it was made for me:

In this talk, we’ll cover how to write CSS that stands the test of time. From progressive enhancement techniques to accessibility considerations, we’ll learn how to write CSS for 100 years in the future (and, of course, today).

My talk will be about design principles …kinda. As usual, it will be quite a rambling affair. At this point I almost take pride in evoking a reaction of “where’s he going with this?” during the first ten minutes of a talk.

When I do actually get around to the point of the talk—design principles—I ask whether it’s possible to have such a thing as universal principles. After all, the whole point of design principles is that they’re specific to an endeavour, whether that’s a company, an organisation, or a product.

I think that some principles are, if not universal, then at least very widely applicable. I’ve written before about two of my favourites: the robustness principle and the principle of least power:

There’s no shortage of principles, laws, and rules out there, and I find many of them very useful, but if I had to pick just two that are particularly applicable to my work, they would be the robustness principle and the rule of least of power.

What’s interesting about both of those principles is that they are imperative. They tell you how to act:

Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept.

Choose the least powerful language suitable for a given purpose.

Other princples are imperative, but they tell you what not to do. Take the razors of Occam and Hanlon, for example:

Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

But these imperative principles are exceptions. The vast majority of “universal” principles take the form of laws that are observations. They describe the state of the world without providing any actions to take.

There’s Hofstadter’s Law, for example:

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

Or Clarke’s third law:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

By themselves, these observational laws are interesting but they leave it up to you to decide on a course of action. On the other hand, imperative principles tell you what to do but don’t tell you why.

It strikes me that it could be fun (and useful) to pair up observational and imperative principles:

Because of observation A, apply action B.

For example:

Because of Murphy’s Law, apply the principle of least power.

Or in its full form:

Because anything that can go wrong will go wrong, choose the least powerful language suitable for a given purpose.

I feel like the Jevons paradox is another observational principle that should inform our work on the web:

The Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, but the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand.

For example, even though devices, browsers, and networks are much, much better now than they were, say, ten years ago, that doesn’t mean that websites have become better or faster. Instead, it’s precisely because there’s more power available that people think nothing of throwing megabytes of JavaScript at users. See Scott’s theory that 5G Will Definitely Make the Web Slower, Maybe:

JavaScript size has ballooned as networks have improved.

This problem would be addressed if web developers were more conservative in what they sent. The robustness principle in action.

Because of the Jevons paradox, apply the robustness principle.

Admittedly, the expanded version of that is far too verbose:

Because technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, but the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand, be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept.

I’m sure there are more and better pairings to be made: an observational principle to tell you why you should take action, and an imperative principle to tell you what action you should take.

Sunday, July 12th, 2020

Playing The Sailor’s Bonnet (reel) on mandolin:

https://thesession.org/tunes/570

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcvZyQaa0r8

The Sailor’s Bonnet (reel) on mandolin
Checked in at Fox On the Downs. Sunday roast and a pint in the sun — with Jessica map

Checked in at Fox On the Downs. Sunday roast and a pint in the sun — with Jessica

Saturday, July 11th, 2020

Using grilled chicken to recreate the opening credits of Dark.

Using grilled chicken to recreate the opening credits of Dark.

Playing The Ships In Full Sail (jig) on mandolin:

https://thesession.org/tunes/261

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQiftGz_GeE

The Ships In Full Sail (jig) on mandolin

A little bit of plain Javascript can do a lot

I decided to implement almost all of the UI by just adding & removing CSS classes, and using CSS transitions if I want to animate a transition.

Yup. It’s remarkable how much can be accomplished with that one DOM scripting pattern.

I was pretty surprised by how much I could get done with just plain JS. I ended up writing about 50 lines of JS to do everything I wanted to do.

Friday, July 10th, 2020

What is CSS Specificity? Sarah Chima - Front-End Developer

An excellent and clear explanation of specificity in CSS.

Picture 1 Picture 2

Out and about in Brighton.

Thursday, July 9th, 2020

Playing The Hag At The Churn (jig) on bouzouki:

https://thesession.org/tunes/829

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jzUUPgzaIU

The Hag At The Churn (jig) on bouzouki

Replying to a tweet from @brad_frost

Mr. Show’s pre-taped call-in show. Gets better every time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhVbLJvYP8s

Mr. Show - Pre-Taped Call-in Show

Implementors

The latest newsletter from The History Of The Web is a good one: The Browser Engine That Could. It’s all about the history of browsers and more specifically, rendering engines.

Jay quotes from a 1992 email by Tim Berners-Lee when there was real concern about having too many different browsers. But as history played out, the concern shifted to having too few different browsers.

I wrote about this—back when Edge switched to using Chromium—in a post called Unity where I compared it to political parties:

If you have hundreds of different political parties, that’s not ideal. But if you only have one political party, that’s very bad indeed!

I talked about this some more with Brian and Stuart on the Igalia Chats podcast: Web Ecosystem Health (here’s the mp3 file).

In the discussion we dive deeper into the naunces of browser engine diversity; how it’s not the numbers that matter, but representation. The danger with one dominant rendering engine is that it would reflect one dominant set of priorities.

I think we’re starting to see this kind of battle between different sets of priorities playing out in the browser rendering engine landscape.

Webkit published a list of APIs they won’t be implementing in their current form because of security concerns around fingerprinting. Mozilla is taking the same stand. Google is much more gung-ho about implementing those APIs.

I think it’s safe to say that every implementor wants to ship powerful APIs and ensure security and privacy. The issue is with which gets priority. Using the language of principles and priorities, you could crudely encapsulate Apple and Mozilla’s position as:

Privacy, even over capability.

That design principle would pass the reversibility test. In fact, Google’s position might be represented as:

Capability, even over privacy.

I’m not saying Apple and Mozilla don’t value powerful APIs. I’m not saying Google doesn’t value privacy. I’m saying that Google’s priorities are different to Apple’s and Mozilla’s.

Alas, Alex is saying that Apple and Mozilla don’t value capability:

There is a contingent of browser vendors today who do not wish to expand the web platform to cover adjacent use-cases or meaningfully close the relevance gap that the shift to mobile has opened.

That’s very disappointing. It’s a cheap shot. As cheap as saying that, given Google’s business model, Chrome wouldn’t want to expand the web platform to provide better privacy and security.

Wednesday, July 8th, 2020

A tale of three skeuomorphs

A trashcan, a tyepface, and a tactile keyboard. Marcin gets obsessive (as usual).

Replying to a tweet from @gavynmckenzie

Yes! I can absolutely imagine writing a stylesheet where the only declarations inside media queries are updating custom properties.

Simultaneously nervous and excited as I put the first episode of the @Clearleft podcast live!

https://podcast.clearleft.com/season01/episode01/

It’s about design systems and features @LotteJackson, @PaulRobertLloyd, and @Amy_Hupe.

Design systems on the Clearleft podcast

If you’ve already subscribed to the Clearleft podcast, thank you! The first episode is sliding into your podcast player of choice.

This episode is all about …design systems!

I’m pretty happy with how this one turned out, although as it’s the first one, I’m sure I’ll learn how to do this better. I may end up looking back at this first foray with embarrassment. Still, it’s fairly representative of what you can expect from the rest of the season.

This episode is fairly short. Just under eighteen minutes. That doesn’t mean that other episodes will be the same length. Each episode will be as long (or as short) as it needs to be. Form follows function, or in this case, episode length follows content. Other episodes will be longer. Some might be shorter. It all depends on the narrative.

This flies in the face of accepted wisdom when it comes to podcasting. The watchword that’s repeated again and again for aspiring podcasters is consistency. Release on a consistent schedule and have a consistent length for episodes. I kind of want to go against that advice just out of sheer obstinancy. If I end up releasing episodes on a regular schedule, treat it as coincidence rather than consistency.

There’s not much of me in this episode. And there won’t be much of me in most episodes. I’m just there to thread together the smart soundbites coming from other people. In this episode, the talking heads are my colleagues Jon and James, along with my friends and peers Charlotte, Paul, and Amy (although there’s a Clearleft connection with all of them: Charlotte and Paul used to be Clearlefties, and Amy spoke at Patterns Day and Sofa Conf).

I spoke to each of them for about an hour, but like I said, the entire episode is less than eighteen minutes long. The majority of our conversations ended up on the cutting room floor (possibly to be used in future episodes).

Most of my time was spent on editing. It was painstaking, but rewarding. There’s a real pleasure to be had in juxtaposing two snippets of audio, either because they echo one another or because they completely contradict one another. This episode has a few examples of contradictions, and I think those are my favourite moments.

Needless to say, eighteen minutes was not enough time to cover everything about design systems. Quite the opposite. It’s barely an introduction. This is definitely a topic that I’ll be returning to. Maybe there could even be a whole season on design systems. Let me know what you think.

Oh, and you’ll notice that there’s a transcript for the episode. That’s a no-brainer. I’m a big fan of the spoken word, but it really comes alive when it’s combined with searchable, linkable, accessible text.

Anyway, have a listen and if you’re not already subscribed, pop the RSS feed into your podcast player.

Tuesday, July 7th, 2020

Custom properties

I made the website for the Clearleft podcast last week. The design is mostly lifted straight from the rest of the Clearleft website. The main difference is the masthead. If the browser window is wide enough, there’s a background image on the right hand side.

I mostly added that because I felt like the design was a bit imbalanced without something there. On the home page, it’s a picture of me. Kind of cheesy. But the image can be swapped out. On other pages, there are different photos. All it takes is a different class name on that masthead.

I thought about having the image be completely random (and I still might end up doing this). I’d need to use a bit of JavaScript to choose a class name at random from a list of possible values. Something like this:

var names = ['jeremy','katie','rich','helen','trys','chris'];
var name = names[Math.floor(Math.random() * names.length)];
document.querySelector('.masthead').classList.add(name);

(You could paste that into the dev tools console to see it in action on the podcast site.)

Then I read something completely unrelated. Cassie wrote a fantastic article on her site called Making lil’ me - part 1. In it, she describes how she made the mouse-triggered animation of her avatar in the footer of her home page.

It’s such a well-written technical article. She explains the logic of what she’s doing, and translates that logic into code. Then, after walking you through the native code, she shows how you could use the Greeksock library to achieve the same effect. That’s the way to do it! Instead of saying, “Here’s a library that will save you time—don’t worry about how it works!”, she’s saying “Here’s it works without a library; here’s how it works with a library; now you can make an informed choice about what to use.” It’s a very empowering approach.

Anyway, in the article, Cassie demonstrates how you can use custom properties as a bridge between JavaScript and CSS. JavaScript reads the mouse position and updates some custom properties accordingly. Those same custom properties are used in CSS for positioning. Voila! Now you’ve got the position of an element responding to mouse movements.

That’s what made me think of the code snippet I wrote above to update a class name from JavaScript. I automatically thought of updating a class name because, frankly, that’s how I’ve always done it. I’d say about 90% of the DOM scripting I’ve ever done involves toggling the presence of class values: accordions, fly-out menus, tool-tips, and other progressive disclosure patterns.

That’s fine. But really, I should try to avoid touching the DOM at all. It can have performance implications, possibly triggering unnecessary repaints and reflows.

Now with custom properties, there’s a direct line of communication between JavaScript and CSS. No need to use the HTML as a courier.

This made me realise that I need to be aware of automatically reaching for a solution just because that’s the way I’ve done something in the past. I should step back and think about the more efficient solutions that are possible now.

It also made me realise that “CSS variables” is a very limiting way of thinking about custom properties. The fact that they can be updated in real time—in CSS or JavaScript—makes them much more powerful than, say, Sass variables (which are more like constants).

But I too have been guilty of underselling them. I almost always refer to them as “CSS custom properties” …but a lot of their potential comes from the fact that they’re not confined to CSS. From now on, I’m going to try calling them custom properties, without any qualification.

We need more inclusive web performance metrics | Filament Group, Inc.

Good point. When we talk about perceived performance, the perception in question is almost always visual. We should think more inclusively than that.

Monday, July 6th, 2020

Replying to a tweet from @SaraSoueidan

Yay! Thank you, Sara!

I’ve been working on this for a while…

May I present …The Clearleft Podcast!

https://podcast.clearleft.com/

Subscribe today—the first episode drops later this week.

It’s going to be a bit different. Hope you like it!

Announcing the Clearleft podcast

I’ve been working on something new for the past few months and now I’d like to share it with you…

The Clearleft Podcast.

Now I know what you’re thinking: aren’t there enough podcasts in the world already? Well, frankly, no. Unless you also concede that there are enough books and records and films in the world already too (to be fair, this is a reasonable thought to have when you’re navigating Amazon, Spotify, and Netflix).

In any case, this podcast is going to be a bit different.

In our field, the usual podcast format is in the form of a conversation: a host or hosts interviewing a guest or guests. Those are great. I’ve certainly enjoyed being the guest on many a great podcast. But I wanted to do something a bit more like an audio documentary.

If you’ve seen a lot of documentaries you’ll know that there are two key factors to getting a great story:

  1. the source material and
  2. the editing.

That’s what makes the Clearleft podcast different.

For the source material, I’ve interviewed my colleagues at Clearleft as well as our peers in other companies. I’ve also gathered great material from conference talks—we’ve got a wealth of wonderful insights from multiple editions of events like UX London, Leading Design, Ampersand, Responsive Day Out, Patterns Day, and dConstruct.

A lot of work has gone into the editing. It probably works out at about an hour of work per minute of podcast. I know that seems excessive, but I really wanted to get a snappy feel for each episode, juxtaposing multiple viewpoints.

The focus of the episode will be around a particular topic rather than a person and will feature lots of different voices woven together. The really challenging part is threading a good narrative. It’s kind of like preparing a conference talk in that respect—I’ve always found the narrative thread to be the hardest but most rewarding part of putting a talk together.

It’s simultaneously exciting and nerve-wracking to put this out into the world. But I think you’re going to enjoy it.

Visit the website for the podcast and choose your preferred method of subscribing. There’s the RSS feed, but the Clearleft podcast is also available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Deezer, TuneIn, Castro, and Overcast.

The first episode will go live later this week. In the meantime, there’s a short trailer to give you a taste of what’s to come.

The episodes will be grouped together into seasons. I reckon a season will around six episodes long. So you can expect the first season to be released over the next six weeks.

Hope you like it!

podcast.clearleft.com

Spatial Awareness

Robin Hawkes has made a lovely website to go with his newsletter all about maps and spatial goodies.

Replying to a tweet from @alexandtheweb

Retweeted.

Did you see this article on A List Apart from last year? https://alistapart.com/article/accessibility-for-vestibular/

Sunday, July 5th, 2020

Dark Ages of the Web

Notes on the old internet, its design and frontend.

Saturday, July 4th, 2020

Replying to a post on matthiasott.com

Sometimes, one egg is enough.

In France, one egg is un oeuf.

Feeds

A little while back, Marcus Herrmann wrote about making RSS more visible again with a /feeds page. Here’s his feeds page. Here’s Remy’s.

Seems like a good idea to me. I’ve made mine:

adactio.com/feeds

As well as linking to the usual RSS feeds (blog posts, links, notes), it’s also got an explanation of how you can subscribe to a customised RSS feed using tags.

Then, earlier today, I was chatting with Matt on Twitter and he asked:

btw do you share your blogroll anywhere?

So now I’ve added another URL:

adactio.com/feeds/subscriptions

That’s got a link to my OPML file, exported from my feed reader, and a list of the (current) RSS feeds that I’m subscribed to.

I like the idea of blogrolls making a comeback. And webrings.

Reading Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini.

Buy this book

Replying to a tweet from @genmon

Replying to a tweet from @genmon

No, I have a bedroll (people who’ve stayed in my house), but I should really publish my OPML file somewhere.

Replying to a tweet from @genmon

’Sfunny, I just wrote a thing about machinery breaking down during lockdown:

The Machines Stop: https://adactio.com/journal/17089

The Machines Stop

The Situation feels like it’s changing. It’s not over, not by a long shot. But it feels like it’s entering a different, looser phase.

Throughout the lockdown, there’s been a strange symmetry between the outside world and the inside of our home. As the outside world slowed to a halt, so too did half the machinery in our flat. Our dishwasher broke shortly before the official lockdown began. So did our washing machine.

We had made plans for repairs and replacements, but as events in the world outside escalated, those plans had to be put on hold. Plumbers and engineers weren’t making any house calls, and rightly so.

We even had the gas to our stovetop cut off for a while—you can read Jessica’s account of that whole affair. All the breakdowns just added to the entropic Ballardian mood.

But the gas stovetop was fixed. And so too was the dishwasher, eventually. Just last week, we got our new washing machine installed. Piece by piece, the machinery of our interier world revived in lockstep with the resucitation of the world outside.

As of today, pubs will be open. I won’t be crossing their thresholds just yet. We know so much more about the spread of the virus now, and gatherings of people in indoor spaces are pretty much the worst environments for transmission.

I’m feeling more sanguine about outdoor spaces. Yesterday, Jessica and I went into town for Street Diner. It was the first time since March that we walked in that direction—our other excursions have been in the direction of the countryside.

It was perfectly fine. We wore masks, and while we were certainly in the minority, we were not alone. People were generally behaving responsibly.

Brighton hasn’t done too badly throughout The Situation. But still, like I said, I have no plans to head to the pub on a Saturday night. The British drinking culture is very much concentrated on weekends. Stay in all week and then on the weekend, lassen die Sau raus!, as the Germans would say.

After months of lockdown, reopening pubs on a Saturday seems like a terrible idea. Over in Ireland, pubs have been open since Monday—a sensible day to soft-launch. With plenty of precautions in place, things are going well there.

I’ve been watching The Situation in Ireland throughout. It’s where my mother lives, so I was understandably concerned. But they’ve handled everything really well. It’s not New Zealand, but it’s also not the disaster that is the UK.

It really has been like watching an A/B test run at the country level. Two very similar populations confronted with exactly the same crisis. Ireland took action early, cancelling the St. Patrick’s Day parade(!) while the UK was still merrily letting Cheltenham go ahead. Ireland had clear guidance. The UK had dilly-dallying and waffling. And when the shit really hit the fan, the Irish taoiseach rolled up his sleeves and returned to medical work. Meanwhile the UK had Dominic Cummings making a complete mockery of the sacrifices that everyone was told to endure.

What’s strange is that people here in the UK don’t seem to realise how the rest of the world, especially other European countries, have watched the response here with shock and horror. The narrative here seems to be that we all faced this thing together, and with our collective effort, we averted the worst. But the numbers tell a very different story. Comparing the numbers here with the numbers in Ireland—or pretty much any other country in Europe—is sobering.

So even though the timelines for reopenings here converge with Ireland’s, The Situation is far from over.

Even without any trips to pubs, restaurants, or other indoor spaces, I’m looking forward to making some more excursions into town. Not that it’s been bad staying at home. I’ve really quite enjoyed staying put, playing music, reading books, and watching television.

I was furloughed from work for a while in June. Normally, my work at this time of year would involve plenty of speaking at conferences. Seeing as that wasn’t happening, it made sense to take advantage of the government scheme to go into work hibernation for a bit.

I was worried I might feel at a bit of a loose end, but I actually really enjoyed it. The weather was good so I spent quite a bit of time just sitting in the back garden, reading (I am very, very grateful to have even a small garden). I listened to music. I watched movies. I surfed the web. Yes, properly surfed the web, going from link to link, get lost down rabbit holes. I tell you, this World Wide Web thing is pretty remarkable. Some days I used it to read up on science or philosophy. I spent a week immersed in Napoleonic history. I have no idea how or why. But it was great.

I’m back at work now, and have been for a couple of weeks. But I wouldn’t mind getting furloughed again. It felt kind of like being retired. I’m quite okay with the propsect of retirement now, as long as we have music and sunshine and the World Wide Web.

That’s the future. For now, The Situation continues, albeit in looser form.

I’ve really enjoyed reading other people’s accounts throughout. My RSS reader is getting a good workout. I always look forward to weeknotes from Alice, Nat, and Phil (this piece from Phil has really stuck with me). Jessica has written fifteen installments—and counting—of A Journal of the Plague Week. I know I’m biased, but I think it’s some mighty fine writing. Start here.

Replying to a tweet from @kissane

Its beauty is unpresidented.

(Sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry! …but do pass it on to @meetar; I think he’d be proud of me.)

Friday, July 3rd, 2020

Dark mode revisited

I added a dark mode to my website a while back. It was a fun thing to do during Indie Web Camp Amsterdam last year.

I tied the colour scheme to the operating system level. If you choose a dark mode in your OS, my website will adjust automatically thanks to the prefers-color-scheme: dark media query.

But I’ve seen notes from a few friends, not about my site specifically, but about how they like having an explicit toggle for dark mode (as well as the media query). Whenever I read those remarks, I’d think “I’m really not sure I’ve got time to deal with adding that kind of toggle to my site.”

But then I realised, “Jeremy, you absolute muffin! You’ve had a theme switcher on your website for almost two decades now!”

Doh! I had forgotten about that theme switcher. It dates back to the early days of CSS. I wanted my site to be a demonstration of how you could apply different styles to the same underlying markup (this was before the CSS Zen Garden came along). Those themes are very dated now, but if you like you can view my site with a Zeldman theme or a sci-fi theme.

To offer a dark-mode theme for my site, all I had to do was take the default stylesheet, pull out the custom properties from the prefers-color-scheme: dark media query, and done. It took less than five minutes.

So if you want to view my site in dark mode, it’s one of the options in the “Customise” dropdown on every page of the website.

Replying to a tweet from @andybudd

A novel.

Uncommon CSS Properties

I count at least three clever CSS techniques I didn’t know about.

Thursday, July 2nd, 2020

Replying to a tweet from @jina

Strong same! 😢

Replying to a tweet from @paul_melero

Thank you very much, Paul—that’s very kind of you.

It feels like everything is falling to pieces outside, but remember that fundamentally, most people are actually nice to each other and when people aren’t nice to each other, it’s generally out of fear and hurt.

— Dan Hon

Wednesday, July 1st, 2020

Fussy Web, True Meaning. · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

Websites are primarily seen as functional software, built to fulfill a business objective and to reach quantifiable goals. The field of user experience is obsessed with KPIs, jobs-to-be-done, optimized user flows, and conversion rates. And in quest of ever more efficient processes – and in the spirit of true modernists –, design and development teams try to standardize solutions into reusable templates and components, streamlined pattern libraries, and scalable design systems.

Playing The Friendly Visit (hornpipe) on mandolin:

https://thesession.org/tunes/32

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1RK57ISXiE

The Friendly Visit (hornpipe) on mandolin

The design systems between us. — Ethan Marcotte

Smart thoughts from Ethan on how design systems can cement your existing ways of working, but can’t magically change how collaboration works at your organisation.

Modern digital teams rarely discuss decisions in terms of the collaborative costs they incur. It’s tempting—and natural!—to see design- or engineering-related decisions in isolation: that selecting Vue as a front-end framework only impacts the engineering team, or that migrating to Figma only impacts designers. But each of these changes the way that team works, which impacts how other teams will work and collaborate with them.