Links

The World-Wide Work. — Ethan Marcotte

Here’s the transcript of Ethan’s magnificent closing talk from New Adventures. I’m pretty sure this is the best conference talk I’ve ever had the honour of seeing.

The rise of research ops — a view from the inside | Clearleft

I moderated this panel in London last week, all about the growing field of research ops—I genuinely love moderating panels. Here, Richard recounts some of the thought nuggets I prised from the mind casings of the panelists.

Paris Web 2019 - 10 octobre après-midi - Amphithéâtre - YouTube

Here’s the livestream of the talk I gave at Paris Web—Going Offline, complete with French live-captioning and simultaneous interpretation in .

Ne vous laissez plus déPOSSEder de vos contenus !

I saw Nicholas give this great talk at Paris Web on site deaths, the indie web, and publishing on your own site. That talk was in French, but these slides are (mostly) in English—I was able to follow along surprisingy easily!

100 words in a 100 days – Monique Dubbelman

I was chatting with Monique after her Paris Web talk on doing 100 days of code. I told her about my 100 days project and now she’s doing it too!

The “P” in Progressive Enhancement stands for “Pragmatism” - Andy Bell

With a Progressive Enhancement mindset, support actually means support. We’re not trying to create an identical experience: we’re creating a viable experience instead.

Also with Progressive Enhancement, it’s incredibly likely that your IE11 user, or your user on a low-powered device, or even your user on a poor connection won’t notice that they’re experiencing a “minor” experience because it’ll just work for them. This is the magic, right there. Everyone’s a winner.

You really don’t need all that JavaScript, I promise

The transcript of a fantastic talk by Stuart. The latter half is a demo of Portals, but in the early part of the talk, he absolutely nails the rise in popularity of complex front-end frameworks:

I think the reason people started inventing client-side frameworks is this: that you lose control when you load another page. You click on a link, you say to the browser: navigate to here. And that’s it; it’s now out of your hands and in the browser’s hands. And then the browser gives you back control when the new page loads.

Southern Mosaic

A beautiful audio and visual history of the Lomax’s journey across:

On March 31 1939, when John and Ruby Lomax left their vacation home on Port Aransas, Texas, they already had some idea of what they would encounter on their three-month, 6,502 mile journey through the southern United States collecting folk songs.

How to be a more productive developer | Go Make Things

Like Michael Pollan’s food rules, but for JavaScript:

1. Plan your scripts out on paper.
2. Stop obsessing over tools.
3. Focus on solving problems.
4. Maintain a library of snippets that you can reuse.

do you know your tags?

Test your knowledge of the original version of HTML—how many elements can you name?

Designing a focus style | Zell Liew

A deep dive info focus styles with this conclusion:

The default focus ring works. There are problems with it, but it can be good enough, especially if you can’t dedicate time and energy to create a custom focus ring.

Why Progressive Web Apps Are The Future of Mobile Web [2019 Research]

PWAs just work better than your typical mobile site. Period.

But bear in mind:

Maybe simply because the “A” in PWA stands for “app,” too much discussion around PWAs focuses on comparing and contrasting to native mobile applications. We believe this comparison (and the accompanying discussion) is misguided.

A Modern CSS Reset - Andy Bell

Some very smart ideas in here for resetting default browser styles, like only resetting lists that have classes applied to them:

ul[class],
ol[class] {
  padding: 0;
}

I select only lists that do have a class attribute because if a plain ol’ <ul> or <ol> gets used, I want it to look like a list. A lot of resets, including my previous ones, aggressively remove that.

Blog service workers and the chicken and the egg

This is a great little technique from Remy: when a service worker is being installed, you make sure that the page(s) the user is first visiting get added to a cache.

Photopea | Online Photo Editor

I found myself needing to open some old Photoshop files recently, but I haven’t had Photoshop installed on my computer for years (not since Adobe moved to the Mafia pricing model). It turns out there’s an online recreation of Photoshop!

I remember when this was literally the example people would give for the limitations of the web: “Well, you can’t build something like Photoshop in the browser…”

The perfect responsive menu (2019) | Polypane responsive browser

I don’t know about “perfect” but this pretty much matches how I go about implementing responsive navigation (but only if there are too many links to show—visible navigation is almost always preferable).

Same-Site Cookies By Default | text/plain

This is good news. I have third-party cookies disabled in my browser, and I’m very happy that it will become the default.

It’s hard to believe that we ever allowed third-party cookies and scripts in the first place. Between them, they’re responsible for the worst ills of the World Wide Web.

What Makes a Mid-Level Developer? | Amber’s Website

I love the way that Amber is documenting her journey—I think this is so useful for others making the progression from junior to mid-level developer.

Brighton Bloggers 2019 meet-up – orbific.com

Some reminiscing at a recent Homebrew Website Club prompted James to organise a Brighton bloggers meetup …ten years on from the last one!

Mark your calendar: October 21st.

While you’re making your calendar, be sure to put in the dates for Indie Web Camp Brighton: October 19th and 20th. It would be lovely see some Brighton bloggers there!

alex-jeremy

Some photos from a lively discussion between Alex Russell and me at View Source in Amsterdam led Remy to create this meme generator.

You can see some results here and here.

This is not to be confused with a certain other photo which has led to its own memification here and here.