Link archive: March, 2017

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Friday, March 31st, 2017

Thursday, March 30th, 2017

The Analog Web | Jim Nielsen’s Blog

This is wonderful meditation on the history of older technologies that degrade in varied conditions versus newer formats that fall of a “digital cliff”, all tied in to working on the web.

When digital TV fails, it fails completely. Analog TV, to use parlance of the web, degrades gracefully. The web could be similar, if we choose to make it so. It could be “the analog” web in contrast to “the digital” platforms. Perhaps in our hurry to replicate and mirror native platforms, we’re forgetting the killer strength of the web: universal accessibility.

Sunday, March 26th, 2017

LA Times and ads | Nelson’s log

A lot has been written about the future of journalism, the importance of businesses like the LA Times being profitable as a way to protect American democracy. I agree with that in theory. But this sort of incompetence and contempt for readers makes me completely uninterested in helping their business.

Like Craig says…

Friday, March 24th, 2017

Scrolling on the web: A primer - Microsoft Edge Dev BlogMicrosoft Edge Dev Blog

A ludicrously deep dive by Nolan into how scrolling works in web browsers. No, wait, come back! It’s more interesting than it sounds …and it certainly isn’t as simple as you might think.

For instance, do you know the difference between the following scenarios?

  • User scrolls with two fingers on a touch pad
  • User scrolls with one finger on a touch screen
  • User scrolls with a mouse wheel on a physical mouse
  • User clicks the sidebar and drags it up and down
  • User presses up, down, PageUp, PageDown, or spacebar keys on a keyboard

If you ask the average web user (or even the average web developer!) they might tell you that these interactions are all equivalent. The truth is far more interesting.

This comes complete with lovely animated illustrations by Rachel.

Thursday, March 23rd, 2017

“What have they done to my library?” - Caitlin Moran

That library was a Pandorica of fabulous, interwoven randomness, as rich as plum cake. Push a seed of curiosity in between any two books and it would grow, overnight, into a rainforest hot with monkeys and jaguars and blowpipes and clouds. The room was full, and my head was full. What a magical system to place around a penniless girl.

The Road To Resilient Web Design – Smashing Magazine

Chapter 3 of Resilient Web Design, republished in Smashing Magazine:

In the world of web design, we tend to become preoccupied with the here and now. In “Resilient Web Design“, Jeremy Keith emphasizes the importance of learning from the past in order to better prepare ourselves for the future. So, perhaps we should stop and think more beyond our present moment? The following is an excerpt from Jeremy’s web book.

Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers

Speaking as an ancient web developer myself, this account by Gina of her journey into Node.js is really insightful. But I can’t help but get exhausted just contemplating the yak-shaving involved in the tooling set-up:

The sheer number of tools and plugins and packages and dependencies and editor setup and build configurations required to do it “the right way” is enough to stall you before you even get started.

Wednesday, March 22nd, 2017

Tuesday, March 21st, 2017

Lisbon Azulejos

When I was in Porto a few weeks back, I took lots of pictures of the beautiful tiles. They reminded me of the ubiquitous repeating background images that were so popular on the early web. I was thinking about abstracting them into a collection of reusable patterns but now it looks like I’ve been beaten to it!

Monday, March 20th, 2017

Untitled Sans & Serif Design Information · Klim Type Foundry

Two new typefaces, designed to be deliberately lacking in expression.

The write-up of the making of the typefaces is as open and honest as the finished output. This insight into the design process rings very, very true:

Post rationalisation is an open secret in the design industry. Only when a project is finished can it be written up, the messy process is delineated and everything seems to follow a logical sequence up until the final thing is unveiled, spotless and perfect.

However, I suspect the process is largely irrational for most designers. There is a point where all the input has been processed, all the shit drawings, tenuous concepts and small ideas have been thrown away and you just work towards the finish, too exhausted and distracted to even know if it’s worth anything or not. And, if you’re lucky, someone or something will come along and validate the work.

1917. Free history.

Time-shifted reports from the Russian revolution, 100 years on.

All the texts used are taken from genuine documents written by historical figures: letters, memoirs, diaries and other documents of the period.

Every day, when you go onto the site, you will find out what happened exactly one hundred years ago: what various people were thinking about and what happened to each of them in this eventful year. You may not fast-forward into the future, but must follow events as they happen in real time.

Designing Systems, Part 3: Components and Composition / Paul Robert Lloyd

Paul finishes up his excellent three part series by getting down to the brass tacks of designing and building components on the web …and in cities. His closing provocation has echoes of Heydon’s rallying cry.

If you missed the other parts of this series, they are:

  1. Theory, Practice, and the Unfortunate In-between,
  2. Layers of Longevity, and
  3. Components and Composition

World Wide Web, Not Wealthy Western Web (Part 2) – Smashing Magazine

The second part of Bruce’s excellent series begins by focusing on the usage of proxy browsers around the world:

Therefore, to make websites work in Opera Mini’s extreme mode, treat JavaScript as an enhancement, and ensure that your core functionality works without it. Of course, it will probably be clunkier without scripts, but if your website works and your competitors’ don’t work for Opera Mini’s quarter of a billion users, you’ll get the business.

But how!? Well, Bruce has the answer:

The best way to ensure that everyone gets your content is to write real, semantic HTML, to style it with CSS and ensure sensible fallbacks for CSS gradients, to use SVG for icons, and to treat JavaScript as an enhancement, ensuring that core functionality works without scripts. Package up your website with a manifest file and associated icons, add a service worker, and you’ll have a progressive web app in conforming browsers and a normal website everywhere else.

I call this amazing new technique “progressive enhancement.”

You heard it here first, folks!

The future of the open internet — and our way of life — is in your hands

We’ve gone through the invention step. The infrastructure came out of DARPA and the World Wide Web itself came out of CERN.

We’ve gone through the hobbyist step. Everyone now knows what the internet is, and some of the amazing things it’s capable of.

We’ve gone through the commercialization step. Monopolies have emerged, refined, and scaled the internet.

But the question remains: can we break with the tragic history that has befallen all prior information empires? Can this time be different?

The first part of this article is a great history lesson in the style of Tim Wu’s The Master Switch. The second part is a great explanation of net neutrality, why it matters, and how we can fight for it.

If you do nothing, we will lose the war for the open internet. The greatest tool for communication and creativity in human history will fall into the hands of a few powerful corporations and governments.

Sunday, March 19th, 2017

Frameworks without the framework: why didn’t we think of this sooner? • Svelte

Interesting ideas around front-end frameworks:

The common view is that frameworks make it easier to manage the complexity of your code: the framework abstracts away all the fussy implementation details with techniques like virtual DOM diffing. But that’s not really true. At best, frameworks move the complexity around, away from code that you had to write and into code you didn’t.

Instead, the reason that ideas like React are so wildly and deservedly successful is that they make it easier to manage the complexity of your concepts. Frameworks are primarily a tool for structuring your thoughts, not your code.

The proposed alternative here is to transpile from the idiom of the framework into vanilla JavaScript as part of the build process, which should result in better performance and interoperability.

Saturday, March 18th, 2017

Apple has given my son a hand! – the surprised pessimist

One of the accessibility features built into OS X:

Using Switch Control, and tapping a small switch with his head, my son tweets, texts, types emails, makes FaceTime calls, operates the TV, studies at university online, runs a video-editing business using Final Cut Pro on his Mac, plays games, listens to music, turns on lights and air-conditioners in the house and even pilots a drone!

Protest and persist: why giving up hope is not an option | World news | The Guardian

Hope is a belief that what we do might matter, an understanding that the future is not yet written.

Rebecca Solnit’s piece reminded me of something I mentioned a couple of year’s back when I referred to Margaret Atwood’s phrase “judicious hope”:

Hope sounds like such a wishy-washy word, like “faith” or “belief”, but it carries with it a seed of resistance. Hope, faith, and belief all carry connotations of optimism, but where faith and belief sound passive, even downright complacent, hope carries the promise of action.

Friday, March 17th, 2017

A Little Surprise Is Waiting For You Here — Meet The Next Smashing Magazine

An open beta of Smashing Magazine’s redesign, which looks like it could be a real poster child for progressive enhancement:

We do our best to ensure that content is accessible and enhanced progressively, with performance in mind. If JavaScript isn’t available or if the network is slow, then we deliver content via static fallbacks (for example, by linking directly to Google search), as well as a service worker that persistently stores CSS, JavaScripts, SVGs, font files and other assets in its cache.

Should you learn [insert shiny new tool]? | Zell Liew

This ties in nicely with the new talk I’m doing on evaluating technology. Zell proposes a five-step process:

  1. Figure out what [insert tool] does.
  2. Figure out what sucks right now
  3. Determine if it’s worth the investment
  4. Learn it (if it’s worth it)
  5. Differentiate opinions from facts

Most of the examples he gives are tools used before deployment—I have a feeling that different criteria should apply when weighing up technologies written directly in user-facing code (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript).

Wednesday, March 15th, 2017

Tuesday, March 14th, 2017

Take a closer look at the patterns in our language. | Clearleft

Ellen goes through the principles behind the tone of voice on the new Clearleft site:

  1. Our clients are the heroes and heroines, we facilitate their journey.
  2. Speak as an individual doing whatever it is you love. Expose lovable details.
  3. Use the imperative, kill the “-ing”.
  4. Be evocative and paint the picture. Show don’t tell.
  5. Be a practical friend.
  6. Be inquisitive. Ask smart questions that need solving.

Sunday, March 12th, 2017

Saturday, March 11th, 2017

Friday, March 10th, 2017

Wednesday, March 8th, 2017

Tuesday, March 7th, 2017

Monday, March 6th, 2017

World Wide Web, Not Wealthy Western Web (Part 1) – Smashing Magazine

Bruce widens our horizons with this in-depth look at where and how people are accessing the web around the world.

In this article, we’ve explored where the next 4 billion connected people will come from, as well as some of the innovations that the standards community has made to better serve them. In the next part, we’ll look at some of the demand-side problems that prevent people from accessing the web easily and what can be done to overcome them.

What should you think about when using Facebook? – Vicki Boykis

To be clear, every company currently does some form of this tracking of users. There would simply be no other way to measure operations. But Facebook has quite clearly been tiptoeing outside the bounds of what is ethically acceptable data business practices for a while.

A thorough round-up of Facebook’s current data collection practices and what you can do about it.

How To Ask for the Truth » Mike Industries

Absolute gold dust from Mike!

I think that having regular 1:1s is really important, but I’m sure I’m not doing them as effectively as I could—the advice in here is going to be invaluable.

There are three types of employees in the world when it comes to disclosing issues:

  1. Those who will always tell you about problems.
  2. Those who will never tell you about problems.
  3. Those who will tell you about problems when asked in the right way.

I love my ones and am frustrated by my twos, but I feel like at least 9 out of 10 people are actually threes.

W3C and EME: it isn’t about preventing DRM but saving the W3C – Baldur Bjarnason

A damning assessment of Tim Berners-Lee’s defeatist portrayal of the W3C:

No matter which side is right, the W3C faces an existential crisis.

Either:

  1. The W3C is a shepherd of the web for all, the web on everything, and a web of trust. But now it is fundamentally compromising its own principles in the name of maintaining industry relevance.
  2. Or, the W3C is merely an industry body for browser vendors to collaborate and its mission statement is nothing more than PR to increase buy-in from the smaller, largely powerless, members.

Both can’t be true. Neither is good news for the organisation.

I swore I wouldn’t write another book - Web Designer Notebook

Thinking of writing a book? Here’s some excellent advice and insights from Yaili, who only went and wrote another one.

Let me say this first: writing a book is hard work. It eats up all of your free time and mental space. It makes you feel like you are forever procrastinating and producing very little. It makes you not enjoy any free time. It’s like having a dark cloud hanging over your head at all times. At. All. Times.

Sunday, March 5th, 2017

Saturday, March 4th, 2017

Most of the time, innovators don’t move fast and break things | Aeon Essays

An alternative history of technology, emphasising curation over innovation:

We start to see the intangibles – the standards and ideologies that help to create and order technology systems, making them work at least most of the time. We start to see that technological change does not demand that we move fast and break things. Understanding the role that standards, ideologies, institutions – the non-thing aspects of technology – play, makes it possible to see how technological change actually happens, and who makes it happen.

Friday, March 3rd, 2017

On EME in HTML5 | W3C Blog

Much as I respect Tim Berners-Lee, his logic here is completely flawed. First of all, treating DRM as though it’s an implacable force of nature is a category error. Secondly, EME doesn’t in any provide a standardised solution: it provides a sandbox for each DRM vendor to inject their own proprietary solution.

Thursday, March 2nd, 2017

The benefits of learning how to code layouts with CSS | Jen Simmons

A really inspiring post by Jen outlining all the benefits of the new CSS layout features …and the problems with thinking framework-first.

I know a lot of people will think the “best” way to use CSS Grid will be to download the new version of Bootstrap (version 5! now with Grid!), or to use any one of a number of CSS Grid layout frameworks that people are inevitably going to make later this year (despite Rachel Andrew and I begging everyone not to). But I don’t. The more I use CSS Grid, the more convinced I am that there is no benefit to be had by adding a layer of abstraction over it. CSS Grid is the layout framework. Baked right into the browser.

On container queries. — Ethan Marcotte

Unsurprisingly, I completely and utterly agree with Ethan’s assessment here:

I’ve written some code that’s saying, “Once the screen is this size and the element appears in a different, smaller container, use a narrower layout on this element.”

But, well, that’s weird. Why can’t we apply styles based on the space available to the module we’re designing, rather than looking at the shape of the viewport?

I also share his frustration with the “math is hard; let’s go shopping” response from browser vendors:

There’s an incredible clamor for container queries, with folks from every corner of the responsive community asking for something that solves this problem. So personally, I’d love to see at least one browser vendor partner with the RICG, and get properly fired up about this.

We had to drag browser makers kicking and screaming to responsive images (to this day, Hixie maintains it’s not a problem that needs solving) and I suspect even more activism is going to be needed to get them to tackle container queries.

Wednesday, March 1st, 2017

All You Need is Link | Rhizome

A lovely piece of early web history—Olia Lialina describes the early Net Art scene in 2000.

The address bar is the author’s signature. It’s where action takes place, and it’s the action itself. The real action on the web doesn’t happen on the page with its animated GIFs or funny scripts, it’s concentrated in the address bar.

And how wonderful that this piece is now published on Rhizome, an online institution so committed to its mission that it’s mentioned in this seventeen year old article.