Links

Dark Ages of the Web

Notes on the old internet, its design and frontend.

Uncommon CSS Properties

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

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.

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.

Weird Wide Webring

More of the whimsical web!

The Whimsical Web

A collection of truly personal sites.

This site is meant to showcase how a more personal web could look like, and hopefully give you some inspiration to make your own corner of the web a bit weirder.

Of course Cassie’s site is included!

The Gentle Sadness of Things

There is a gentle sadness to being present in a moment so precious that you know you’ll never forget it, and will revisit it as a memory time and time again. It will be a shadow, many details missing, the moment bittersweet.

Takin’ five. — Ethan Marcotte

I linked to the first of Ethan’s short videos on accessibility last week, but it’s well worth checking out all five:

1. Introduction to using VoiceOver on macOS
2. Designing beautiful focus states
3. Flexible and accessible typesetting
4. Responsively designing with viewport units
5. Designing beautiful and accessible drop caps

Grid Cheatsheet

A useful resource for CSS grid. It’s basically the spec annoted with interactive examples.

Why BaseCamp & Hey.com are Wrong About the Apple App Store

I feel for BaseCamp, I do. But give up on the native app path. Make sure your existing web interface is a good progressive web app and you can end-run around Apple.

We Are As Gods

A forthcoming documentary about Stewart Brand (with music by Brian Eno).

Top 10 books about remaking the future | Peter F Hamilton | Books | The Guardian

Here then are 10 stories of remaking the future that contain hope — or at least stability.

1. The City and the Stars by Arthur C Clarke
2. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
3. Revenger by Alastair Reynolds
4. Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
5. Do You Dream of Terra-Two? by Temi Oh
6. Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks
7. Natural History by Justina Robson
8. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
9. Way Station by Clifford D Simak
10. News from Gardenia by Robert Llewellyn

Cassie Evans’s Blog

Cassie’s redesign is gorgeous—so much attention to detail! (And performant too)

On dependency | RobWeychert.com V7

I’m very selective about how I depend on other people’s work in my personal projects. Here are the factors I consider when evaluating dependencies.

• Complexity How complex is it, who absorbs the cost of that complexity, and is that acceptable?
• Comprehensibility Do I understand how it works, and if not, does that matter?
• Reliability How consistently and for how long can I expect it to work?

I really like Rob’s approach to choosing a particular kind of dependency when working on the web:

When I’m making things, that’s how I prefer to depend on others and have them depend on me: by sharing strong, simple ideas as a collective, and recombining them in novel ways with rigorous specificity as individuals.

Accessible to some - Manuel Matuzović

A score of 100 in Lighthouse or 0 errors in axe doesn’t mean that you’re done, it means that you’re ready to start manual testing and testing with real users, if possible.

CSS folded poster effect

This is a very nifty use of CSS gradients!

Introduction to Screen Readers Using Voiceover | Gymnasium

This is a great short introduction to using VoiceOver with Safari by the one and only Ethan Marcotte.

Always bet on HTML | Go Make Things

I teach JS for a living. I’m obviously not saying “never use of JS” or “JavaScript has no place on the web.” Hell, their are even times where building a JS-first app makes sense.

But if I were going to bet on a web technology, it’s HTML. Always bet on HTML.

The Return of the 90s Web | Max Böck

Everything old is new again (thank goodness!):

• Serverside Rendering
• No-Code Tools
• Personal Websites
• Curated Feeds and Discovery
• Smaller Communities and Web Monetization

Quotebacks and hypertexts (Interconnected)

What I love about the web is that it’s a hypertext. (Though in recent years it has mostly been used as a janky app delivery platform.)

I am very much enjoying Matt’s thoughts on linking, quoting, transclusion, and associative trails.

My blog is my laboratory workbench where I go through the ideas and paragraphs I’ve picked up along my way, and I twist them and turn them and I see if they fit together. I do that by narrating my way between them. And if they do fit, I try to add another piece, and then another. Writing a post is a process of experimental construction.

And then I follow the trail, and see where it takes me.