Links

CSS Frameworks Or CSS Grid: What Should I Use For My Project? — Smashing Magazine

Rachel does some research to find out why people use CSS frameworks like Bootstrap—it can’t just be about grids, right?

It turns out there are plenty of reasons that people give for using frameworks—whether it’s CSS or JavaScript—but Rachel shares some of my misgivings on this:

In our race to get our site built quickly, our desire to make things as good as possible for ourselves as the designers and developers of the site, do we forget who we are doing this for? Do the decisions made by the framework developer match up with the needs of the users of the site you are building?

Not for the first time, I’m reminded of Rachel’s excellent post from a few years ago: Stop solving problems you don’t yet have.

Redesigning your product and website for dark mode — Stuff & Nonsense

Some advice from Andy on creating a dark theme for your website. It’s not just about the colours—there are typography implications too.

CSS and Network Performance – CSS Wizardry

Harry takes a look at the performance implications of loading CSS. To be clear, this is not about the performance of CSS selectors or ordering (which really doesn’t make any difference at this point), but rather it’s about the different ways of getting rid of as much render-blocking CSS as possible.

…a good rule of thumb to remember is that your page will only render as quickly as your slowest stylesheet.

Resources about Front-end Architecture and Design Systems, etc. | Lara Schenck

A great selection of links about design systems, collected and categorised.

Editorial Layouts, Floats, and CSS Grid | Rob Weychert

I remember a couple of years back when Jen came to visit Clearleft to chat to us about CSS grid, this use-case that Rob describes here came up almost immediately.

But despair not—Rachel points to a potential solution. I saw potential solution, because if we want to see this implemented in browsers, we need to make some noise.

A Book Apart, Front-End Next Steps

If you buy this bundle of books, you get Going Offline in some very, very good company.

Designing, laws, and attitudes. — Ethan Marcotte

Ethan ponders what the web might be like if the kind of legal sticks that exist for accessibility in some countries also existed for performance.

Concise Media Queries with CSS Grid

‘Sfunny, this exact use-case (styling a profile component) came up on a project recently and I figured that CSS grid would be the right tool for the job.

What do you want to do when you grow up, kid? • Robin Rendle

Publishing on the web really is quite marvellous:

…an endless thrill, a sort of everlasting, punk-rock feeling and I hope it will never really go away.

The Commons: The Past Is 100% Part of Our Future | Flickr Blog

This is very, very good news. Following on from the recent announcement that a huge swathe of Flickr photos would soon be deleted, there’s now an update: any photos that are Creative Commons licensed won’t be deleted after all. Phew!

I wonder if I can get a refund for that pro account I just bought last week to keep my Creative Commons licensed Flickr pictures online.

How to get on the #indieweb!

As well as graciously hosting Indie Web Camp Berlin on the weekend at Mozilla’s offices, Yulia has also drawn this super-cute comic.

When your design system fails — HeyDesigner

You could create components that strike the perfect balance between reuse and context sensitivity. But defining the components of your design system is just the first step. It has to make its way into the product. If it doesn’t, a design system is like a language with no extant literature or seminal texts.

Marissa Christy outlines the reasons why your design system might struggle:

1. The redesign isn’t prioritized
2. The tech stack is changing
3. Maintenance takes discipline

But she also offers advice for counteracting these forces:

1. Get buy-in from the whole team
2. Prioritize a lightweight re-skin on older parts of the product
3. Treat a design system like any other product project: start small
4. Don’t wait for others. Lead by example.
5. Finally, don’t compare yourself to others on the internet

Why we’re changing Flickr free accounts | Flickr Blog

I’ve got a lot of photos on Flickr (even though I don’t use it directly much these days) and I’ve paid up for a pro account to protect those photos, but I’m very worried about this:

Beginning January 8, 2019, Free accounts will be limited to 1,000 photos and videos.

That in itself is fine, but any existing non-pro accounts with more than 1000 photos will have older photos deleted until the total comes down to 1000. This means that anyone linking to those photos (or embedding them in blog posts or articles) will have broken links and images.

Tears in the rain.

2018-11-03, 21:54 - sonniesedge.co.uk

Day one of Indie Web Camp Berlin is done, and it was great! Here’s Charlie’s recap of the sessions she attended.

Bruce Lawson’s personal site  : Screenreader support for text-level semantics

Bruce reveals that the theory and the reality are somewhat different when it comes to the accessibility of inline elements like em and strong.

Google Walkout Organizers Explain Their Demands

This instance of collective action from inside a tech company is important, not just for the specifics of Google, but in acting as an example to workers in other companies.

And of all the demands, this is the one that could have the biggest effect in the US tech world:

An end to Forced Arbitration.

The International Flag of Planet Earth

A proposed flag for the planet.

The CSS Working Group At TPAC: What’s New In CSS? — Smashing Magazine

Rachel gives us the run-down on what’s coming soon to Cascading Style Sheets near you, including an aspect-ratio unit and a matches selector (as originally proposed by Lea).

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us - YouTube

Looking back on this classic explainer video from eleven years ago, I know exactly what’s meant by this comment:

its weird that when i first saw this video it made me think of the future, and now i watch it and it reminds me of the past..

Programming Sucks

There’s a theory that you can cure this by following standards, except there are more “standards” than there are things computers can actually do, and these standards are all variously improved and maligned by the personal preferences of the people coding them, so no collection of code has ever made it into the real world without doing a few dozen identical things a few dozen not even remotely similar ways. The first few weeks of any job are just figuring out how a program works even if you’re familiar with every single language, framework, and standard that’s involved, because standards are unicorns.