Link archive: August, 2015

Lightning Design System

A nice combination of style guide and pattern library, with plenty of documentation.

The Slow Web | words from Cole Henley, @cole007

We become obsessed with tools and methods, very rarely looking at how these relate to the fundamental basics of web standards, accessibility and progressive enhancement. We obsess about a right way to do things as if there was one right way rather than looking at the goal; how things fit into the broader philosophy of what we do on the web and how what we write contributes to us being better at what we do.

A fictional conversation about progressive enhancement

So a web app is defined as a system that requires the JavaScript excesses for it to work. And the argument for the JavaScript excesses is that we need it to build web apps. That sounds a teeny bit circular to me.

The West Pier, Brighton England on Vimeo

For almost a century and a half the West Pier has been Britain’s most iconic pier. Renowned for its wonderful architectural style, it has been visited and enjoyed by millions. Even today with its sculptural remains casting an eerie beauty over the seafront, the West Pier is still the most photographed building in Brighton.

Thinking Responsively: A Framework for Future Learning · An A List Apart Article

Very thoughtful and sensible thinking from Paul.

180: Panel on “Inline Styles” - ShopTalk on Huffduffer

Shop Talk Show is trying a new panel format. They got me on to join in the discussion about adding inline styles with JavaScript instead of using Cascading Style Sheets.

Climate Futures on Matter

A collection of cli-fi and cli-fact.

Doing Science On The Web – Infrequently Noted

Alex recounts the sordid history of vendor prefixes and looks to new ways of allowing browsers to ship experimental features without causing long-term harm.

Jeremy Keith – Enhance! – Beyond Tellerrand Düsseldorf 2015 on Vimeo

The video of my talk at this year’s Beyond Tellerrand. I was pleased with how this went, except for the bit 16 minutes in when I suddenly lost the ability to speak.

NASA Graphics Standards Manual on Flickr

An old-school styleguide.

Making Charts with CSS | CSS-Tricks

What a lovely bit of progressive enhancement—styling data tables to display as charts.

CSS element() function - Vincent De Oliveira

Fire up Firefox and try out these demos: the CSS element value is pretty impressive (although there are currently some serious performance issues).

To put it simply, this function renders any part of a website as a live image. A. Live. Image!

How to fix a bad user interface - Scott Hurff

A lesson on the importance of handling each state of an interface:

• the blank state,
• the loading state,
• the partial state,
• the error state,
• and the ideal state

…instead of just focusing on that last one.

Crafting A Bridge Between Storytelling & UX Design

I kind of want to link to every one of John’s post chronicling his 90 days at Clearleft, but this one is particular good, I think: how narrative ideas from the world of storytelling can help unlock some design problems.

Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Distributed Web | Brewster Kahle’s Blog

I like a lot of Brewster Kahle’s ideas here for a more distributed peer-to-peer architecture for the web, but I’m very wary of relying on JavaScript: I’d much prefer a simpler declarative format.

How future-safe are your ideas?

Will the Big Think piece you just posted to Medium be there in 2035? That may sound like it’s very far off in the future, and who could possibly care, but if there’s any value to your writing, you should care. Having good records is how knowledge builds.

CSS counter property By Charlotte Jackson

This is nifty little piece of CSS for numbering nested lists. I don’t think I’ve come across the counter value or the counter-reset and counter-increment properties before (or if I did, I’ve completely forgotten about it).

The Hamburger Menu Doesn’t Work - Deep Design

Building on Luke’s research, James outlines the problems with hiding navigation behind a hamburger icon. So, to be clear, the problem isn’t with the icon, so much as the way it is used as a cupboard to shovel all our messy navigation issues into.

Confidence and Overwhelm

Following on from her great conversation with Jen on The Web Ahead podcast, Rachel outlines a strategy to avoid feeling overwhelmed by the deluge of tools, frameworks, libraries, and techniques inundating front-end developers every day:

Learn your core skills well. Understand HTML and CSS, be able to build a layout without leaning on a framework. Get a solid understanding of how a website actually gets from the server to a browser, an understanding of security and accessibility. These are the basics, the constants. These things change slowly. These things sit underneath all the complexity and the tooling, the CMSs and the noise of thousands of people all trying to make their mark on this industry.

She also makes this important point:

As you are doing this don’t forget to share what you know.

Cameron’s World

A wonderful collection of treasures excavated from GeoCities. Explore, enjoy, and remember what a crime it is that Yahoo wiped out so much creativity and expression.

Growing your business

I enjoyed chatting with Marcus and Paul on the Boagworld podcast …mostly because I managed to avoid the topic at hand by discussing sci-fi for half an hour before we settled to the boring stuff about work, business, and all that guff.

Dave Shea – – beyond tellerrand DÜSSELDORF 2015 on Vimeo

A wonderful, wonderful history of the web from Dave at this year’s Beyond Tellerrand conference. I didn’t get to see this at the time—I was already on the way back home—so I got Dave to give me the gist of it over lunch. He undersold it. This is a fascinating story, wonderfully told.

So gather round the computer, kids, and listen to Uncle Dave tell you about times gone by.

Performance update #2: Electric Boogaloo | Vox Product Blog

It’s really great to see the performance improvements being made by the Vox team. This is the one that I think will make the most difference:

Our Revenue Team is increasing focus on the impact our advertising has on user experience and overall performance. One of their biggest initiatives has been to change the way ads load from synchronous to asynchronous, which has been underway for several months and is nearing deployment.

The Infinite Trad Session

Okay, this is kind of nuts: some researchers have seeded a neural network with all the tunes from The Session. Some of the results are surprisingly okay. It’s certainly a fascinating project.

An Alphabet of IndieWeb Building Blocks: Article to Z - Tantek

Twenty-six letters of independent publishing building blocks.

Benjamin Parry @benjaminparry ~ Homebrewing - First Drop

Benjamin documents his experience at the first Brighton Homebrew Website Club: a most pleasant evening.

The ethics of modern web ad-blocking – Marco.org

Yes! Yes! YES!

Marco makes the same comparison I did between the dark days of pop-up windows and the current abysmal state of bloated ads and tracking on today’s web.

This won’t be a clean, easy transition. Blocking pop-ups was much more incisive: it was easy for legitimate publishers to avoid one narrowly-useful Javascript function to open new windows. But it’s completely reasonable for today’s web readers to be so fed up that they disable all ads, or even all Javascript. Web developers and standards bodies couldn’t be more out of touch with this issue, racing ahead to give browsers and Javascript even more capabilities without adequately addressing the fundamental problems that will drive many people to disable huge chunks of their browser’s functionality.

Amen!

I have one more thing to add to this list…

But publishers, advertisers, and browser vendors are all partly responsible for the situation we’re all in.

…developers. Somebody put those harm-causing script elements on those pages. Like I said: “What will you be apologising for in decades to come?”

In a few years, after the dust has settled, we’re all going to look back at today’s web’s excesses and abuses as an almost unbelievable embarrassment.

A Good Writer Is a Good Thinker

The web – by its very nature – foregrounds the connections between different clusters of knowledge. Links link. One article leads to another. As you make the journey from destination to destination, all inevitably connected by that trail of links, you begin to tease out understanding.

It’s this drawing together, this weaving together of knowledge, that is the important part. Your journey is unique. The chances of another pursuing the same path, link by link (or book by book), is – statistically – impossible. Your journey leads you to discovery and, through reflection, comprehension. You see the connections others haven’t, because your journey is your own.

The web is awesome - blog.lmorchard.com

The death of the web has been greatly exaggerated.

There’s nothing else like it. It’s constantly improving. It’s up to you what you do with it.

The Language of Modular Design · An A List Apart Article

Alla has taken the ideas she presented in her superb talk at Responsive Day Out and published them as a great article in A List Apart.

Use the words normal people use

When you’re struggling to write something that sounds clear and sounds human (two of the essential basics of a good blog post, I’d argue), just use the words normal people would use. The best way to find out what those words are is to try talking the thing through to someone who doesn’t know anything about it. Remember what you just said, then write that.

Scribblit

This is so nifty! Mikey has made a site where you can order his interactive artwork.

Interactive? That’s right! Each framed picture comes with a pen so you can doodle over the picture (and wipe it clean again).

Check out The Fett and The Falcon!

Occasional blog of Tobias Revell: Haunted Machines an Origin Story (Long)

Any sufficiently advanced hacking is indistinguishable from a haunting. In the same way that many Internet of Things objects are referred to as ‘enchanting’ or ‘magical,’ with an intervention, they can very quickly become haunted.

Jam Preserves - The Jam Journal

It’s a real shame that Hannah and Matt are shutting down This Is My Jam—it’s such a lovely little service—but their reliance on ever-changing third-party APIs sounds like no fun, and the way they’re handling the shutdown is exemplary: the site is going into read-only mode, and of course all of your data is exportable.

Yahoo, Google, and other destroyers could learn a thing or two from this—things like “dignity” and “respect”.

Responsive Day Out 3 | codebar

Rosa has written an account of the third and final Responsive Day Out for the Codebar blog (I gave free passes to Codebar students).

As codebar is an event aimed at encouraging diversity in tech we were pleased that there were so many inspiring female speakers on the bill. To us it signifies women holding strong presence in this industry. It is encouraging for other women either starting out or further into careers, when it is actively projected that women should be present, seen, heard and their knowledge shared.

90 Days

John is joining us at Clearleft for three months and he’s documenting every single day—in quite some detail!

If you’ve ever wanted to be a fly on the wall at Clearleft, well, this is pretty close.

Richard on Vimeo

The video of Richard’s great talk on responsive typography at the Up Front conference.

iTunes - Podcasts - dConstruct : dconstruct2015 on Huffduffer

You can now subscribe to my dConstruct 2015 podcast directly in iTunes so you can have my natterings with the lovely speakers delivered straight to your ocular orifices.

PDF: Designing For Deep Time: How Art History Is Used To Mark Nuclear Waste

Kelli Anderson’s thesis on the Human Interference Task Force project set up to mark nuclear waste sites for future generations (a project I’ve referenced in some of my talks).

Bytes Conference Brighton - A mini-conference on 29th October

This looks like it’s going to be a great evening event. Charlotte and Rosa are both speaking at it, which makes it unmissable in my book.

The very affordable tickets go on sale on Friday, and all the proceeds go to charity.

Designing for Performance by Lara Callender Hogan

Lara’s fantastic book is now available online in HTML for free. Have a read and then order a copy of the print book for your library.

Explaining graphic design to four-year-olds — Medium

Sounds like a good exercise for explaining just about anything. Smart.