Link archive: November, 2013

Building for the device agnostic web | Talks | Decade City

Some excellent practical advice on progressive enhancement.

The lie of the API by Ruben Verborgh

I agree completely with the sentiment of this article (although the title is perhaps a bit overblown): you shouldn’t need a separate API—that’s what you’re existing URL structure should be.

I’m not entirely sure that content negotiation is the best way to go when it comes to serving up different representations: there’s a real value in being able to paste a URL into a browser window to get back a JSON or XML representation of a resource.

But this is spot-on about the ludicrous over-engineered complexity of most APIs. It’s ridiculous that I can enter a URL into a browser window to get an HTML representation of my latest tweets, but I have to sign up for an API key and jump through OAuth hoops, and agree to display the results in a specific way if I want to get a JSON representation of the same content. Ludicrous!

Tab Closed; Didn’t Read

Usually I find these kinds of name-and-shame collections to be unnecessarily mean-spirited. In this case, the sites being named and shamed are themselves guilty of far worse rudeness.

Unify – Unicode support on browsers and devices

Some excellent research for web developers: find out which unicode characters have the widest support—release useful for choosing icons.

asciidisco/grunt-patternprimer

This is handy: a version of my pattern primer that can be run with Grunt.

Proto HTML

A nice bit of markup archeology, tracing the early development of HTML from its unspecced roots to the first drafts.

I recognise some of the extinct elements from the line-mode browser hack days at CERN e.g. HP1, HP2, ISINDEX, etc.

Responsive scrollable tables | 456 Berea Street

I like this CSS solution to sideways-scrolling tables for small viewports. It’s not going to be right for every situation but it’s a handy trick to keep up your sleeve.

Against the Balkanization of the Web

A fascinating snapshot from 1995, arguing for the growing power of HTML instead of the siren song of proprietary formats.

I’m very happy that this is still available to read online 18 years later.

Jeremy Keith – The Power Of Simplicity – border:none

This is the talk I gave at the border:none event in Nuremberg last month. I really enjoyed it. This was a chance to gather together some thoughts I’ve been mulling over for a while about how we approach front-end development today …and tomorrow.

Warning: it does get quite ranty towards the end.

Also: it is only now that the video is released that I see I spent the entire talk looking like a dork with a loop of wire sticking out of the back of my head.

Responsive Design Won’t Fix Your Content Problem ∙ An A List Apart Column

The title is a bit sensationalist but I agree completely with what Karen is saying:

It’s time we acknowledged that every responsive web design project is also a content strategy project.

What Screens Want by Frank Chimero

Frank’s fantastic closing talk from this year’s Build. There’s a lot of great stuff in here about interaction design, and even more great stuff about what’s been happening to the web:

We used to have a map of a frontier that could be anything. The web isn’t young anymore, though. It’s settled. It’s been prospected and picked through. Increasingly, it feels like we decided to pave the wilderness, turn it into a suburb, and build a mall. And I hate this map of the web, because it only describes a fraction of what it is and what’s possible. We’ve taken an opportunity for connection and distorted it to commodify attention. That’s one of the sleaziest things you can do.

Grade components, not browsers—Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA

I really like Scott’s approach to defining what “support” means in terms of browsers—it makes a lot sense to break things down to the component level.

Laying The Groundwork For Extensibility—Smashing Coding

The authors of the Extensible Web Manifesto explain the thinking behind their …uh… thinking.

There’s a lot to like here, with some practical examples of where we’ve seen a disconnect between JavaScript APIs and declarative HTML (looking at you, Geolocation).

Star Axis is a profound meditation on the sky – Ross Andersen – Aeon

A beautiful exploration of the Star Axis sculpture—an artwork of the Long Now.

The ancients had pyramids to tame the sky’s mystery. We have Star Axis, a masterpiece forty years in the making.

Long Term Web Semantics on Infrequently Noted

Alex starts with a bit of a rant about the phrase “semantic HTML”, which should really just be “well-written HTML, but there then follows some excellent thoughts on the emergence of meaning and the process of standardising on vocabularies.

Prerender - AngularJS SEO, BackboneJS SEO, or EmberJS SEO

I despair sometimes.

Here’s a ridiculous Heath-Robinsonesque convoluted way of getting the mighty all-powerful Googlebot to read the web thangs you’ve built using the new shiny client-side frameworks like Angular, Ember, Backbone…

Here’s another idea: output your HTML in HTML.

That solution works for machines and humans. As a bonus, outputting your HTML in HTML avoids turning JavaScript into a single point of failure.

isMobileDevice and the death of innocence

A nice bit of sleuthing to trace the provenance of one piece of ill-advised user-agent sniffing JavaScript code.

Good luck getting that script updated for the thousands of sites and applications, you say to yourself, where it’s laying dormant just waiting to send devices the wrong content based on a UA substring.

A Book Apart, New store discounts and bundle options

This is a great idea from A Book Apart—the more different books you buy at the same time, the more of a discount you get.

Got to get ‘em all!

Styleguide | MapBox

Hot on the heels of the Mailchimp styleguide, here’s the collection of patterns used by Mapbox. I’m not keen on some of their markup choices, but again, it’s great to see organisations publicly documenting this stuff.

Pattern Library | MailChimp

The markup for the patterns that Mailchimp use on their products. I love getting a glimpse of how companies handle this kind of stuff internally.

Chloe Weil — Our Ragged History

In describing her approach to building the wonderful Julius Cards project, Chloe touches on history, digital preservation, and the future of the web. There are uncomfortable questions here, but they are questions we should all be asking ourselves.

cite and blockquote – reloaded | HTML5 Doctor

The definition of the cite element (and the blockquote element) has been changed for the better in HTML5 …at least in the W3C version anyway.

PixelPyros - Free digital fireworks in Brighton

Brightonians, get yourselves along to the Corn Exchange on Monday evening for some fun with Seb’s digital fireworks.

Deskbeers

This looks like something that Clearleft would use. A lot.

I don’t think they deliver to Brighton though.

Wallop Slider

I hate carousels, but if you’re going to have one, this progressively enhanced approach looks pretty good.

Responsive design, screens, and shearing layers — Unstoppable Robot Ninja

A wonderful piece by Ethan taking issue what the criticism that responsive design is over-reliant on screen size. Instead, he says, it begins with screen size, but there’s no limit to where we can go from there.

Responsive design might begin with the screen, but it doesn’t end there.

NSA files decoded: Edward Snowden’s surveillance revelations explained

A superb piece of hypertext from The Guardian.