Links

Removing the White Bars in Safari on iPhone X

You could add a bunch of proprietary CSS that Apple just pulled out of their ass.

Or you could make sure to set a background colour on your body element.

I recommend the latter. Because reasons.

Fix Twitter by Jonathan Suh

Make Twitter Great Again:

Fix Twitter is a browser extension to always show “replying to” in replies and threads along with an option to restore the old-school @-mentions.

Web truths: CSS is not real programming | Christian Heilmann

A lot of “CSS is not real programming” arguments are a basic misunderstanding what CSS is there to achieve. If you want full control over and interface and strive for pixel perfection – don’t use it. If you want to build an interface for an inclusive and diverse web, CSS is a great tool.

Christian does a good job of describing the much-misunderstood declarative nature of CSS.

Also:

In any case, belittling people who write CSS and considering them not real developers is arrogant nonsense.

Killing Old Service Workers for the Greater Good – Hackages Blog

Ooh, this is a tricky scenario. If you decide to redirect all URLs (from, say, a www subdomain to no subdomain) and you have a service worker running, you’re going to have a bad time. But there’s a solution here to get the service worker to remove itself.

The server-side specifics are for NGINX but this is also doable with Apache.

Chrome to force .dev domains to HTTPS via preloaded HSTS

Well, I guess it’s time to change all my locally-hosted sites from .dev domains to .test. Thanks, Google.

Mozilla Developer Roadshow - Singapore - YouTube

I had the honour of being invited along to kick off the first leg of Mozilla’s Developer Roadshow in Singapore.

Infusion: An Inclusive Documentation Builder

Two of my favourite things together at last: pattern libraries and service workers. Infusion is a tool for generating pattern libraries that also work offline.

Thinking about it, it makes total sense that a pattern library should be a progressive web app.

Tame your Service Worker before your Progressive Web App go into the wild by Maxim Salnikov

There are some great service worker optimisation tips in these slides.

Basic grid layout with fallbacks using feature queries

A really nice example of progressive enhancement: creating a layout with inline-block, then flexbox, then Grid.

Brighton CodePen Meetup / Wednesday, October 4 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM

There’s going to be a CodePen meetup in Brighton as part of the Brighton Digital Festival. Should be fun! See you there.

Deploying ES2015+ Code in Production Today — Philip Walton

The reality is transpiling and including polyfills is quickly becoming the new norm. What’s unfortunate is this means billions of users are getting trillions of bytes sent over the wire unnecessarily to browsers that would have been perfectly capable of running the untranspiled code natively.

Phil has a solution: serve up your modern JavaScript using script type="module" and put your transpiled fallback in script nomodule.

Most developers think of <script type="module"> as way to load ES modules (and of course this is true), but <script type="module"> also has a more immediate and practical use-case—loading regular JavaScript files with ES2015+ features and knowing the browser can handle it!

Full-Stack Developers | Brad Frost

In my experience, “full-stack developers” always translates to “programmers who can do frontend code because they have to and it’s ‘easy’.” It’s never the other way around. The term “full-stack developer” implies that a developer is equally adept at both frontend code and backend code, but I’ve never in my personal experience witnessed anyone who truly fits that description.

Is there any value in people who cannot write JavaScript?

When every new website on the internet has perfect, semantic, accessible HTML and exceptionally executed, accessible CSS that works on every device and browser, then you can tell me that these languages are not valuable on their own. Until then we need to stop devaluing CSS and HTML.

I couldn’t agree more.

Jeremy Keith - Closing Keynote: Evaluating Technology on Vimeo

Here’s the closing keynote I gave at Frontend Conference in Zurich a couple of weeks back.

We work with technology every day. And every day it seems like there’s more and more technology to understand: graphic design tools, build tools, frameworks and libraries, not to mention new HTML, CSS and JavaScript features landing in browsers. How should we best choose which technologies to invest our time in? When we decide to weigh up the technology choices that confront us, what are the best criteria for doing that? This talk will help you evaluate tools and technologies in a way that best benefits the people who use the websites that we are designing and developing. Let’s take a look at some of the hottest new web technologies like service workers and web components. Together we will dig beneath the hype to find out whether they will really change life on the web for the better.

The Human World of the Upper Paleolithic

Perhaps the most permanent action that any human being has accomplished in the history of our species is when one of our ancestors placed this cave bear skull on a rock, where still it sits, tens of thousands of years later.

An astonishing dose of perspective delivered via a lovely bit of hypertext by Matt.

Party Discipline | Tor.com

There are some delightfully dark touches to this Cory Doctorow coming-of-age near-future short story of high school students seizing the means of production.

Teaching and Brainstorming Inclusive Technical Metaphors - Features - Source: An OpenNews project

Some great ideas here about using metaphors when explaining technical topics.

I really like these four guidelines for good metaphors:

• Complete
• Memorable
• Inclusive
• Accessible

V6: The Archive | Rob Weychert

Rob has redesigned his site and it’s looking lovely. Here’s the first part of a three-part series on the rationale behind the relaunch:

I don’t pretend everything I do or say online is worthy of preservation. But while I’m still breathing, I want to be the one who decides what gets preserved and what doesn’t. And I want it all to be available in one place. Owning and operating my own site is the only way.

Hell, yeah!

So You Want To Be a Senior Developer? | CSS-Tricks

I like Chris’s list of criteria for the nebulous role of senior developer:

• A senior front end developer has experience.
• A senior front-end developer has a track record of good judgment.
• A senior developer has positive impact beyond the code.
• A senior developer is helpful, not all-knowing.
• A senior front-end developer is a force multiplier.

Web Matters

An organisation has formed here in the UK as a response to the increasing threats to the web:

We are called to come together in response to growing political and social uncertainty, direct threats to the profession, and a lack of vocal and proactive representation to organise as a representative, independent, and politically responsible industry body.

The inaugural AGM is happening in Edinburgh tomorrow. Get along to that if you can. Otherwise, there’s always Slack.

I like their manifesto; let’s put it to the test-o.