You see, diversity of rendering engines isn’t actually in itself the point. What’s really important is diversity of influence: who has the ability to make decisions which shape the web in particular ways, and do they make those decisions for good reasons or not so good?
Stuart responds to a post from Brian that was riffing off a post of mine from a while back. I like this kind of social network.
This is a lovely little interview with Cassie—it really is an honour and a privilege to work with her!
You can send me messages using the form below. If I go 24 hours without receiving a message, I’ll permanently self-destruct, and everything will be wiped from my database.
This is a damning and all-too typical example of what it’s like for someone to trying to get to grips with the current state of the JavaScript ecosystem:
Note that John is a computer scientist that knows a fair bit about the Web: He had Node & npm installed, he knew what MIME types are, he could start a localhost when needed. What hope do actual novices have?
I think it’s even worse than that. Not only are potential new devs being put off ever getting started, I know plenty of devs with experience who have pushed out by the overwhelming and needless complexity of the modern web’s toolchain. It’s like a constant gaslighting where any expression of unease is summarily dismissed as being the whinings of “the old guard” who just won’t get with the programme.
John gives up. Concludes never to touch Node, npm, or ES6 modules with a barge pole.
The End.
(Just watch as Lea’s post gets written off as an edge case.)
It went unnamed by Doris Lessing and Cormac McCarthy. William Gibson called it The Jackpot:
On the one hand, naming the crisis allows one to apprehend it, grasp it, fight back against it. On the other hand, no word can fully encompass it, and any term is necessarily a reduction—the essence of “it” or “change” is not any singular instance but rather their constancy.
Memoirs Of A Survivor, The Peripheral, Parable Of The Sower, New York 2140, The Road, Children Of Men, Station Eleven, Severance, The Rapture, Ridley Walker:
Fiction can portray ecologies, timescales, catastrophes, and forms of violence that may be otherwise invisible, or more to the point, unnameable. We will never grasp the pandemic in its entirety, just like we will never see the microbe responsible for it with the naked eye. But we can try to articulate how it has changed us—is changing us.
2010 was quite a year:
And exactly three weeks after Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers was first published, “Responsive Web Design” went live in A List Apart.
Nothing’s been quite the same since.
I remember being at that An Event Apart in Seattle where Ethan first unveiled the phrase and marvelling at how well everything just clicked into place, perfectly capturing the zeitgeist. I was in. 100%.
Eight sci-fi stories gathered together by the European Astrobiology Institute. This free book is also available as .mobi and .epub.
I must admit I’ve been wincing a little every time I see a graph with a logarithmic scale in a news article about COVID-19. It takes quite a bit of cognitive work to translate to a linear scale and get the real story.
Scott is brilliant, therefore by the transitive property, his course on web performance must also be brilliant.
I’ll be speaking at this online version of An Event Apart on July 20th, giving a brand new talk called Design Principles For The Web—’twould be lovely to see you then!
Designing and developing on the web can feel like a never-ending crusade against the unknown. Design principles are one way of unifying your team to better fight this battle. But as well as the design principles specific to your product or service, there are core principles underpinning the very fabric of the World Wide Web itself. Together, we’ll dive into applying these design principles to build websites that are resilient, performant, accessible, and beautiful.
Five moments in the lifecycle of a design system. They grow up so fast!
- Formation of the Design System Team
- First Page Shipped
- Consumable Outside the Main Product
- First Non-System Team Consumer
- First Breaking Change
Dave makes the observation that design systems are less like open source software and more like enterprise software—software you didn’t choose to use:
Often, in my experience, for an internal Design System to have widespread adoption it requires a literal executive mandate from the top floor of the building.
Also: apparently design systems have achieved personhood now and we’re capitalising them as proper names. First name Design, last name System.
“Please, call me Design. Mr. System was my father.”
- Opted out experiences are ~35% faster
- Opting in downloads 2.5MB of additional JavaScript
- Opted in repeat views are twice as slow as opted out
Looking at COVID-19 through the lens of pace layers.
…a citizen could actually play a part that was as important as a vaccine, but instead of preventing transmission of the virus into another cell at the ACE receptor level, it’s preventing transmission of the virus at the social network level. So we’re actually adopting a kind of behavioral vaccine policy, by voluntarily or otherwise self-isolating.
This is a very clear description of the differences between libraries and frameworks, along with the strengths and weaknesses of both.
A library is a set of building blocks that may share a common theme or work well together, but are largely independent.
A framework is a context in which someone writes their own code.
I very much agree with the conclusion:
If your framework can be a library without losing much, it probably should be.
I think this one single feature is going to get me to switch to iA Writer:
For starters, we added Micropub support. This means you can publish to Micro.blog and other IndieWeb tools.
Ultimately, however, our decision to switch was driven by our difficulty in hiring new talent for $UNREMARKABLE_LANGUAGE, despite it being taught in dozens of universities across the United States. Our blog posts on $PRACTICAL_OPEN_SOURCE_FRAMEWORK seemed to get fewer upvotes when posted on Reddit as well, cementing our conviction that our technology stack was now legacy code.
This is all just mwah—chef’s kiss!—perfect:
Every metric that matters to us has increased substantially from the rewrite, and we even identified some that were no longer relevant to us, such as number of bugs, user frustration, and maintenance cost.
Some good writing advice in here:
- Spell out your acronyms.
- Use active voice, not passive voice.
- Fewer commas. More periods.
This micro libarary does DOM diffing in native JavaScript:
Reef is an anti-framework.
It does a lot less than the big guys like React and Vue. It doesn’t have a Virtual DOM. It doesn’t require you to learn a custom templating syntax. It doesn’t provide a bunch of custom methods.
Reef does just one thing: render UI.
We don’t give people a website any more: something that already works, just HTML and CSS and JavaScript ready to show them what they want. Instead, we give them the bits from which a website is made and then have them compile it.
Spot-on description of “modern” web development. When did this become tolerable, much less normal?
Web developers: maybe stop insisting that your users compile your apps for you? Or admit that you’ll put them through an experience that you certainly don’t tolerate on your own desktops, where you expect to download an app, not to be forced to compile it every time you run it?