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This strikes me as an eminently sensible idea by Emil: using the picture element to begin providing WebP alternatives to JPG.
Of course, picture-supporting browsers will have to adjust their decision-making algorithm to support this pattern.
Oh, Jeremy, you silly billy. It turns out that this works right out of the box. Nice!
A vision of humanity’s exploration of our solar system.
A lovely little science hack: listen to whatever radio station is broadcasting below the position of the International Space Station.
We’re going back to the moon. With a robot. So we can take sublunarean samples.
You can help fund it on Kickstarter.
Language death and digital preservation.
4 million songs on Spotify have never been played. Not even once. Let’s change that.
This could come in useful for updating the Clearleft website.
A great presentation on web components by Marcy, with an emphasis on keeping them accessible.
Paul Ford’s potted history of web standards, delivered in his own inimitable style.
Reading through the standards, which are dry as can be, you might imagine that standardization is a polite, almost academic process, where wonks calmly debate topics like semicolon placement. This is not the case.
A deathwatch for Google products.
See also Charles Arthur’s historical data on Google shutdowns.
Aaron documents the process of adding webmention support to a static site. He came with an ingenious three-tiered approach:
It’s been a pretty fun mini-project. In the end, I created a useful bit of kit that provides three distinct experiences:
- Static webmentions collected when the site was generated form the baseline experience;
- JavaScript-enabled browsers get any webmentions that were published since I last generated the site; and
- JavaScript-enabled browsers with WebSockets support get real-time updates with any webmentions that are published after the page loads.
A collection of performance resources: articles, tools, talks, and books.
This is a great development! The EFF are working on a creating a new certificate authority that will issue certs for free.
I am so happy that the certificate authority racket is getting this shake-up.
Steve Albini’s barnstorming keynote address at Melbourne’s Face the Music conference.
Some good practical advice from Tim on setting a performance budget.
Use rule-based metrics to make sure you haven’t overlooked simple optimizations.
Use quantity-based metrics as guides to help designers and developers make better decisions about what goes onto a page.
I’m an advocate for progressive enhancement. Tom Dale is not. But even though we may disagree on that, there’s a lot to like in his sensible, balanced answers to some sensationalist linkbaity questions.
It’s not that the pace of innovation on the Web is slower, it’s just solving a problem that is an order of magnitude more challenging than how to build and distribute trusted apps for a single platform. As we saw on the desktop, it may take a few years to catch up to all of the capabilities of a native, proprietary platform, but in terms of the impact it will have on humanity, forgive me for not losing sleep if we have to wait a few years for it to arrive.
Aaron raises a point that I’ve discussed before in regards to the indie web (and indeed, the web in general): we don’t buy domain names; we rent them.
It strikes me that all the good things about the web are decentralised (one-way linking, no central authority required to add a node), but all the sticking points are centralised: ICANN, DNS.
Aaron also points out that we are beholden to our hosting companies, although—having moved hosts a number of times myself—that’s an issue that DNS (and URLs in general) helps alleviate. And there’s now some interesting work going on in literally owning your own website: a web server in the home.
This isn’t a scientific data sample, but Jonathan’s anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that most web designers and developers are still thinking with a desktop-first mentality. Which is crazy.
A very handy collection from Anna: articles, books, talks, podcasts, and examples of front-end style guides. If something’s missing, feel free to add it.
Here’s a fun little interview I did recently, mostly about work stuff. It’s available for your huffduffing pleasure.
One thing that really bothers me is the way I repeatedly said “guys” to refer to my colleagues at Clearleft. I must stop doing that.
A friendly challenge from The Grey Lady for news sites to enable TLS.
Make a commitment to have your site fully on HTTPS by the end of 2015 and pledge your support with the hashtag #https2015.
I mentioned this a little while back, but it’s worth remembering just how many people are using Opera Mini …and how many more are about to join them.
Bring it on!
The UK Space Agency has a magazine called “space:uk” and you can download PDFs of back issues.
Dave’s great slides from a presentation on performance and responsive design.
Web developers overwhelmingly rejected the draconian error-handing of XML …and yet today, web developers are embracing that very same error-handling model by rendering everything with JavaScript.
I don’t think it’s the way of the web to have your site fail and show a blank screen because some third-party dependency doesn’t load, JavaScript is turned off or because your developer left a trailing comma in a JavaScript object and didn’t test in Internet Explorer.
Continuous partial City And The City, courtesy of James.
Those of us who reside on the “right” side of fixed, physical borders seem to cross the electromagnetic border every day, whether overtly, by entering the right passwords and credit card numbers, or covertly, as when using VPNs to watch TV programs viewable only in other territories. Those on the “wrong” side are subjected to a different but analogous battery of tests, intensifying at the physical border but often carried out far from it, in networked enclaves or foreign transit zones or aboard floating teleconference platforms in international waters.
When your email client pre-fetches capability URLs, you’re going to have a bad time.
An epic braindump by Dan, covering connected devices, product design, co-creation, DIY, and knopening stuff up. That’s right: knopening.
Knopen, a fairly obvious portmanteau of know and open, can be a verb (to knopen something) or an adjective (e.g. a knopen tool).
The transcript of Owen’s talk at The Web Is. It’s a wonderful, thoughtful meditation on writing, web design, and long-term thinking.
One of the promises of the web is to act as a record, a repository for everything we put there. Yet the web forgets constantly, despite that somewhat empty promise of digital preservation: articles and data are sacrificed to expediency, profit and apathy; online attention, acknowledgement and interest wax and wane in days, hours even.
James walks the site of London’s old wall, documenting the instruments of London’s new wall.
He wrote about his experience in “All Cameras Are Police Cameras.” It is a history lesson, a present lesson, and a future lesson, all in one.
A cute videolette on web standards.
Focus on what you want to learn; not what you think you should learn.
There is a lot of pressure out there: to learn new things, to spend all your time coding, to be the super developer. I now believe that to be impossible and unhealthy. It means you aren’t living a balanced life and it also means that you’re living under constant stress and pressure.
A nice little collection from Erin and Ben: how to export your data from various services.
I should fork this on Github and add instructions for exporting your Huffduffer data.
The magnificent Brid.gy has 1000 accounts. Mazel tov!
This is probably single most important piece of software I’ve used this year: it has allowed me to turbo-charge my site, and feel truly independent. Thank you, Ryan (and Kyle), sincerely.
A great primer on using srcset and picture. I think I’ll be referring back to this a lot.
High-level design principles for JavaScript on the web.
Looks like Phil’s talk at The Web Is in Cardiff was terrific.
Yesterday, Aaron gave a great talk at BD Conf about forms. In one example, he was using aria-describedby. I was a bit confused by the differences between aria-describedby and aria-labelledby, so Aaron has very helpfully clarified the distinction.
A heartwarming profile of Metafilter.
A modest proposal: respect.
Netflix are going full 927 on TLS.
Progressive enhancement with isomorphic JavaScript, as practiced at Government Digital Services.
This fracturing of context is, I suspect, peculiar to these early decades of online writing. It’s possible that, in the future, webmentions and the like may heal that up to some extent. But everything from the 90s to today is going to remain mostly broken in that respect. Most of what we said and did had ephemerality long before apps started selling us ephemeral nature as a positive advertising point. Possibly no other generation threw so many words at such velocity into a deep dark well of ghosts.
Queen of science fiction.
Angry, but true.
Don’t lock yourself into a comprehensive technology that may just die within the next few months and leave you stranded. With progressive enhancement you’ll never go wrong. Progressive enhancement means your code will always work, because you’ll always focus on providing a minimal experience first, and then adding features, functionality, and behavior on top of the content.
