This great post by Mandy ticks all my boxes! It’s a look at the combinatorial possibilities of some of the lesser-known HTML elements: abbr, cite, code, dfn, figure, figcaption, kbd, samp, and var.
I’m heartened to see that Google’s moving to make the AMP format more open. But this new governance model doesn’t change the underlying, more fundamental issues: specifically, Google’s use of its market dominance to broaden AMP’s adoption, and to influence the direction of a more decentralized and open web.
The incentives that Google technology created were very important in the evolution of this current stage of the web. I think we should be skeptical of AMP because once again a single company’s technology – the same single company – is creating the incentives for where we go next.
A thorough examination of the incentives that led to AMP, and the dangers of what could happen next:
I’m not sure I am yet willing to cede the web to a single monopolized company.
Fuck yeah, libraries!
Even more radically, your time at the library comes with absolutely no expectation that you buy anything. Or even that you transact at all. And there’s certainly no implication that your data or your rights are being surrendered in return for the services you partake in.
This rare openness and neutrality imbues libraries with a distinct sense of community, of us, of everyone having come together to fund and build and participate in this collective sharing of knowledge and space. All of that seems exceedingly rare in this increasingly commercial, exposed world of ours. In a way it’s quite amazing that the concept continues to persist at all.
And when we look at it this way, as a startlingly, almost defiantly civilized institution, it seems even more urgent that we make sure it not only continues to survive, but that it should also thrive, too.
Colour palettes throughout the ages that you can copy and use.
As a community, we love to talk about meritocracy while perpetuating privilege.
This is playing out in full force in the front-end development community today.
Front-end development is a part of the field that has historically been at least slightly more accessible to women.
Shockingly, (not!) this also led to a salary and prestige gap, with back-end developers making on average almost $30,000 more than front-end.
(Don’t read the comments.)
Yes! Yes! Yes!
Our efforts to measure and improve UX are packed with tragically ironic attempts to love our users: we try to find ways to improve our app experiences by bloating them with analytics, split testing, behavioral analysis, and Net Promoter Score popovers. We stack plugins on top of third-party libraries on top of frameworks in the name of making websites “better”—whether it’s something misguided, like adding a carousel to appease some executive’s burning desire to get everything “above the fold,” or something truly intended to help people, like a support chat overlay. Often the net result is a slower page load, a frustrating experience, and/or (usually “and”) a ton of extra code and assets transferred to the browser.
Even tools that are supposed to help measure performance in order to make improvements—like, say, Real User Monitoring—require you to add a script to your web pages …thereby increasing the file size and degrading performance! It’s ironic, in that Alanis Morissette sense of not understanding what irony is.
Stacking tools upon tools may solve our problems, but it’s creating a Jenga tower of problems for our users.
This is a great article about evaluating technology.
Weighing up the pros and cons of adding tracking scripts to a website, from a business perspective and from a user perspective.
When looking at the costs versus the benefits it is hard to believe that almost every website is using tracking scripts.
The next time, you implement a tracking script it would be great if you could rethink it and ask yourself if it is really worth it.
This is something I struggle to articulate to friends who are suffering because they feel tied to silos like Facebook and Twitter:
What self-publishing does is provide me a choice, which makes me feel good. I feel like I can step away from platforms at will and I don’t feel as shackled as I have done previously.
While a geographical map is helpful if you want to find your way around the world, a population cartogram is the representation that we need if we want to know where our fellow humans are at home.
This is very timely. I’ve been doing some consulting at a company where they are perhaps a little over-reliant on automated accessibility tests.
Automated accessibility tests are a great resource to have, but they can’t automatically make your site accessible. Use them as one step of a larger testing process.
What we get from the pattern library is time and freedom to be creative. I’ve seen people claim pattern libraries are the death of creativity and innovation in design. For us, it’s the opposite of that.
Feedbin has removed third-party iframes and JavaScript (oEmbed provides a nice alternative), as well as stripping out Google Analytics, and even web fonts that aren’t self-hosted. This is excellent!
JavaScript is the web’s CO2. We need some of it, but too much puts the entire ecosystem at risk. Those who emit the most are furthest from suffering the consequences — until the ecosystem collapses. The web will not succeed in the markets and form-factors where computing is headed unless we get JS emissions under control.
Damn, that’s a fine opening! And the rest of this post by Alex is pretty darn great too. He’s absolutely right in calling out the fetishisation of developer experience at the expense of user needs:
The swap is executed by implying that by making things better for developers, users will eventually benefit equivalently. The unstated agreement is that developers share all of the same goals with the same intensity as end users and even managers. This is not true.
I have a feeling that this will be a very bitter pill for many developers to swallow:
If one views the web as a way to address a fixed market of existing, wealthy web users, then it’s reasonable to bias towards richness and lower production costs. If, on the other hand, our primary challenge is in growing the web along with the growth of computing overall, the ability to reasonably access content bumps up in priority. If you believe the web’s future to be at risk due to the unusability of most web experiences for most users, then discussion of developer comfort that isn’t tied to demonstrable gains for marginalized users is at best misguided.
Oh,captain, my captain!
Tools that cost the poorest users to pay wealthy developers are bunk.
A font made of corporate logos.
You really don’t need jQuery any more …and that’s thanks to jQuery.
Here, the Github team talk through their process of swapping out jQuery for vanilla JavaScript, as well as their forays into web components (or at least the custom elements bit).
Videos for the whole first season of James Burke’s brilliant Connections TV series.
Internet Archive and chill.
It turns out that a whole lot of The So-Called Cloud is relying on magnetic tape for its backups.
URLs are the single greatest feature of the web.
The latest version of Chrome is removing seams by messing with the display of the URL.
This is a bug.