Links

Geri Reid - Forms best practice

This is a terrific collection of guidelines for form design.

Russell Davies: Writing for snobs

They came for the writers of car brochures, but I wasn’t a writer of car brochures, so I said nothing.

When you browse Instagram and find former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s passport number

This was an absolute delight to read! Usually when you read security-related write-ups, the fun comes from the cleverness of the techniques …but this involved nothing cleverer than dev tools. In this instance, the fun is in the telling of the tale.

Sophie Zhang and The Social Dilemma | Revue

I watched The Social Dilemma last night and to say it’s uneven would be like saying the Himalayas are a little bumpy.

I’m shocked at how appealing so many people find the idea that social networks are uniquely responsible for all of society’s ills.

This cartoon super villain view of the world strikes me as a kind of mirror image of the right-wing conspiracy theories which hold that a cabal of elites are manipulating every world event in secret. It is more than a little ironic that a film that warns incessantly about platforms using misinformation to stoke fear and outrage seems to exist only to stoke fear and outrage — while promoting a distorted view of how those platforms work along the way.

Schedule / Inclusive Design 24 (#id24) 17 September 2020

No matter what time zone you’re in, you can tune in to some excellent-sounding talks tomorrow.

No sign-up. No registration. All sessions are streamed live and publicly on the Inclusive Design 24 YouTube channel.

Why Do We Interface?

A short web book on the past, present and future of interfaces, written in a snappy, chatty style.

From oral communication and storytelling 500,000 years ago to virtual reality today, the purpose of information interfaces has always been to communicate more quickly, more deeply, to foster relationships, to explore, to measure, to learn, to build knowledge, to entertain, and to create.

We interface precisely because we are human. Because we are intelligent, because we are social, because we are inquisitive and creative.

We design our interfaces and they in turn redefine what it means to be human.

The tangled webs we weave - daverupert.com

So my little mashup, which was supposed to be just 3 technologies ended up exposing me to ~20 different technologies and had me digging into nth-level dependency source code after midnight.

The technologies within technologies that Dave lists here is like emptying a bag of scrabble pieces.

The “modern” web stack really is quite something—we’ve done an amazing job of taking relatively straightforward tasks and making them complicated, over-engineered, and guaranteed to be out of date in no time at all.

The plumbing and glue code are not my favorite parts of the job. And often, you don’t truly know the limitations of any given dependency until you’re five thousand lines of code into a project. Massive sunk costs and the promise of rapid application development can come screeching to a halt when you run out of short cuts.

Tolerance | Trys Mudford

Trys ponders home repair projects and Postel’s Law.

As we build our pages, components, and business logic, establish where tolerance should be granted. Consider how flexible each entity should be, and on what axis. Determine which items need to be fixed and less tolerant. There will be areas where the data or presentation being accurate is more important than being flexible - document these decisions.

15 years of blogging (and 3 reasons I keep going) - Austin Kleon

Why keep blogging? For me, there are at least 3 good reasons:

1. To leave a trace.
2. To figure out what I have to say.
3. Because I like it.

AVIF has landed - JakeArchibald.com

There’s a new image format on the browser block and it’s very performant indeed. Jake has all the details you didn’t ask for.

Kokorobot — leanerweb

The problem is that most websites will adapt to the ever faster connections, which makes them gradually inaccessible for people with slower connections. Today, most websites are impossible to download with a dial-up connection, because they have become too corpulent.

This speaks to me:

Everything we do to make it harder to create a website or edit a web page, and harder to learn to code by viewing source, promotes that consumerist vision of the web.

Pretending that one needs a team of professionals to put simple articles online will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Overcomplicating the web means lifting up the ladder that used to make it possible for people to teach themselves and surprise everyone with unexpected new ideas.

There’s a list of links at the end of this piece to help you reach this goal:

It is vital that the web stay participatory. That means not just making sites small enough so the whole world can visit them, but small enough so that people can learn to build their own, by example. Bloat makes the web inaccessible.

What is the Value of Browser Diversity? - daverupert.com

I’ve thought about these questions for over a year and narrowed my feelings of browser diversity down to two major value propositions:

1. Browser diversity keeps the Web deliberately slow
2. Browser diversity fosters consensus and cooperation over corporate rule

Daring Fireball: Online Privacy Should Be Modeled on Real-World Privacy

Just because there is now a multi-billion-dollar industry based on the abject betrayal of our privacy doesn’t mean the sociopaths who built it have any right whatsoever to continue getting away with it. They talk in circles but their argument boils down to entitlement: they think our privacy is theirs for the taking because they’ve been getting away with taking it without our knowledge, and it is valuable.

Mapping a World of Cities

A timeline of city maps, from 1524 to 1930.

100words — 🐙 woohooctopus

Well, this is impressive (and brave)—competing a 100 words for 100 days during lockdown …with a baby.

And remember, this isn’t writing and publishing at least 100 words every day; it’s writing and publishing exactly 100 words (that’s the hard part).

The land before modern APIs – Increment: APIs

This is a wonderful tale of spelunking into standards from Darius Kazemi—I had no idea that HTTP status codes have their origin in a hastily made decision in the days of ARPANET.

20 people got together at MIT in 1972 for a weekend workshop. On the second day, a handful of people in a breakout session decided it would be a good idea to standardize error messages between two services for transferring data, even though those two services had not necessarily planned to speak to one another. One thing led to another, and now 404 is synonymous with “I can’t find the thing.”

This story is exactly the kind of layering of technologies that I was getting at in the first chapter of Resilient Web Design.

HTTP status codes are largely an accident of history. The people who came up with them didn’t plan on defining a numerical namespace that would last half a century or work its way into popular culture. You see this pattern over and over in the history of technology.

mnot’s blog: RFC8890: The Internet is for End Users

RFC 8890 maybe the closest thing we’ve got to a Hippocratic oath right now.

A community that agrees to principles that are informed by shared values can use them to navigate hard decisions.

Also worth noting:

Many discussions influenced this document, both inside and outside of the IETF and IAB. In particular, Edward Snowden’s comments regarding the priority of end users at IETF 93 and the HTML5 Priority of Constituencies were both influential.

The radium craze | Eric Bailey

The radioactive properties of React.

The Thing With Leading in CSS · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

An excellent explanation of the new leading-trim and text-edge properties in CSS, complete with an in-depth history of leading in typography.

(I’m very happy to finally have a permanent link to point to about this, rather than a post on Ev’s blog.)

Why you should hire a frontend developer - Technology in government

This is a really good description of the role of a front-end developer.

That’s front end, not full stack.