Links

Limitation Breeds Creativity - Cassie Evans [Bytes Conf 2019] - YouTube

Cassie’s terrific talk from Bytes Conf, featuring some wild CSS experiments.

(Conference organisers—you want Cassie on your stage!)

A Webring Kit | Max Böck - Frontend Web Developer

Inspired by Charlie, here’s a straightforward bit of code for starting or joining your own webring.

HTML Includes That Work Today | Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA

Scott writes up that super smart transclusion trick of his.

James Bridle / New Ways of Seeing

James has a new four part series on Radio 4. Episodes will be available for huffduffing shortly after broadcast.

New Ways of Seeing considers the impact of digital technologies on the way we see, understand, and interact with the world. Building on John Berger’s seminal Ways of Seeing from 1972, the show explores network infrastructures, digital images, systemic bias, education and the environment, in conversation with a number of contemporary art practitioners.

Screening Surveillance

Three short films set in the near future from the suitably ominous-sounding Surveillance Studies Centre. The Black Mirrorlets are:

• Blaxites,
• A Model Employee, and
• Frames.

Offline fallback page with service worker - Modern Web Development: Tales of a Developer Advocate by Paul Kinlan

Paul describes a fairly straightforward service worker recipe: a custom offline page for failed requests.

Goodbye Google Analytics, Hello Fathom - daverupert.com

Dave stops feeding his site’s visitors data to Google. I wish more people (and companies) would join him.

There’s also an empowering #indieweb feeling about owning your analytics too. I pay for the server my analytics collector runs on. It’s on my own subdomain. It’s mine.

Inline an SVG file in HTML, declaratively & asynchronously!

Woah! This is one smart hack!

Scott has figured out a way to get all the benefits of pointing to an external SVG file …that then gets embedded. This means you can get all the styling and scripting benefits that only apply to embedded SVGs (like using fill).

The fallback is very graceful indeed: you still get the SVG (just not embedded).

Now imagine using this technique for chunks of HTML too …transclusion, baby!

Sergey | the little SSG

Trys has made YASSG—Yet Another Static Site Generator. It’s called Sergey (like SSG, see?) and it does just one thing: it allows you to include chunks of markup. It’s Apache Server Side Includes all over again!

Kick the tyres and see what you think.

Webrings | sonniesedge

Charlie muses on ol’ fashioned web rings …and the cultural needs they fulfilled.

We suffer from homogenous dirge in most of our contemporary web presences. Having a personal website has become a rarer and rarer thing in this time of social media profile pages.

However, recent months have seen a surge in personal websites and blogging amongst some members of the web tech community. This is something that we urgently need to encourage!

Google AMP lowered our page speed, and there’s no choice but to use it - unlike kinds

What happens when you’re AMP pages are slower than your regular pages …but you’re forced to use AMP anyway if you want to appear in the top stories carousel.

AMP isn’t about speed. It’s about control.

The elephant in the room here is pre-rendering: that’s why Google aren’t using page speed alone as a determining factor for what goes in the carousel.

Disenchantment - Tim Novis

I would urge front-end developers to take a step back, breathe, and reassess. Let’s stop over engineering for the sake of it. Let’s think what we can do with the basic tools, progressive enhancement and a simpler approach to building websites. There are absolutely valid usecases for SPAs, React, et al. and I’ll continue to use these tools reguarly and when it’s necessary, I’m just not sure that’s 100% of the time.

Accessibility Events | CSS-Tricks

If you’re using Apple’s VoiceOver, both your phone and your computer will broadcast your assumed disability to the entire internet, unless and until you specifically tell it to stop.

Nothing Fails Like Success – A List Apart

On an individual and small collective basis, the IndieWeb already works. But does an IndieWeb approach scale to the general public? If it doesn’t scale yet, can we, who envision and design and build, create a new generation of tools that will help give birth to a flourishing, independent web? One that is as accessible to ordinary internet users as Twitter and Facebook and Instagram?

Improving accessibility with accessibility acceptance criteria — Paul Hayes

Wouldn’t it be great if every component in your design system had accessibility acceptance criteria? Paul has some good advice for putting those together:

• Start with accessibility needs
• Don’t be too generic
• Don’t define the solution
• Iterate criteria

Web Components will replace your frontend framework

I’ve often said that the goal of a good library should be to make itself redundant. jQuery is the poster child for that, and this article points to web components as the way to standardise what’s already happening in JavaScript frameworks:

Remember when document.querySelector first got wide browser support and started to end jQuery’s ubiquity? It finally gave us a way to do natively what jQuery had been providing for years: easy selection of DOM elements. I believe the same is about to happen to frontend frameworks like Angular and React.

The article goes on to give a good technical overview of custom elements, templates, and the Shadow DOM, but I was surprised to see it making reference to the is syntax for extending existing HTML elements—I’m pretty sure that that is, sadly, dead in the water.

The Technical Debt Myth

In some cases, it’s entirely valid to explore new products and technologies, but in others, our striving for novelty becomes the driving factor for abandoning perfectly suitable solutions under the umbrella of technical debt.

Just because a technology is a few years old and possibly frustrating in some cases doesn’t mean you’re in technical debt. We need to stop projecting our annoyances as pitfalls of technological or design choices.

Some Unsolicited Blogging Advice - daverupert.com

When you greet a stranger, look at his shoes.

Keep your money in your shoes.

Put your trouble behind.

When you greet a stranger, look at her hands.

Keep your money in your hands.

Put your travel behind.

Defining Productivity — Jeremy Wagner

We have a tendency in our line of work to assume that what benefits us as developers translates to a benefit for those who use what we make. This is an unsafe assumption.

Public Sans

A free and open source neutral sans-serif typeface, released as part of version two of the design system for the US federal government.