Link archive: April 20th, 2017

There are maps for these territories | Clearleft

A great piece from Danielle on the different mental models needed for different languages. When someone describes a language—like CSS—as “broken”, it may well be that there’s a mismatch in mental models.

CSS isn’t a programming language. It’s a stylesheet language. We shouldn’t expect it to behave like a programming language. It has its own unique landscape and structures, ones that people with programming language mental maps might not expect.

I believe that this mismatch of expectation is what has led to the current explosion of CSS-in-JS solutions. Confronted with a language that seems arbitrary and illogical, and having spent little or no time exposed to the landscape, developers dismiss CSS as ‘broken’ and use systems that either sweep it under the rug, or attempt to force it into alignment with the landscape of a programming language — often sacrificing some of the most powerful features of CSS.

The work I like. — Ethan Marcotte

Ethan’s been thinking about the trends he’s noticed in the work he’s doing:

  • prototypes over mockups,
  • preserving patterns at scale, and
  • thinking about a design’s layers.

On that last point…

The web’s evolution has never been charted along a straight line: it’s simultaneously getting slower and faster, with devices new and old coming online every day.

That’s why I’ve realized just how much I like designing in layers. I love looking at the design of a page, a pattern, whatever, and thinking about how it’ll change if, say, fonts aren’t available, or JavaScript doesn’t work, or if someone doesn’t see the design as you and I might, and is having the page read aloud to them.