Link archive: May, 2017

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Wednesday, May 31st, 2017

HN PWA - Hacker News readers as Progressive Web Apps

Of all the sites to pick to demo progressive web apps, we get the cesspit that is Hacker News …I guess it is possible to polish a turd.

Anyway, here are some examples of using frameworks to create alternative Hacker News readers. So the challenge here is to display some text to read..

Four of them render absolutely no content without JavaScript.

In the Hall of Shame we have React, Preact, Angular, and Polymer.

In the Hall of Fame, we have the ones doing it right: React, Vue, and Viper.

That’s right: React appears in both. See, it’s not about the tools; it’s about how you use ‘em.

Tuesday, May 30th, 2017

Micropub is a W3C Recommendation • Aaron Parecki

I was just talking about micropub …and now it’s officially a W3C spec. Great work!

If you’re building a blogging platform, you can allow your users choose from a wide variety of posting clients by implementing the Micropub spec.

If you’re building a posting client and want it to work with many different server backends instead of hard-coding it to Twitter or other proprietary APIs, implement the Micropub spec and you’ll quickly have people eager to start using the app!

100 words, 100 days.

When I did my 100 days project, I found it really challenging. I’m so impressed that Amber has managed to do this: she wrote exactly 100 words every day for 100 days.

10,000 words, 10 megawords, 100 h-entries of hand-written HTML:

I can’t believe I have written ten thousand words. If I were to read everything out it would take me almost an hour. Yet, one hundred words seems like such a small amount. An amount that only takes a few minutes to write.

Friday, May 26th, 2017

traintimes.org.uk performance notes

I love, love, *love, traintimes.org.uk—partly because it’s so useful, but also because it’s so fast. I know public transport is the clichéd use-case when it comes to talking about web performance, but in this case it’s genuine: I use the site on trains and in airports.

Matthew gives a blow-by-blow account of the performance optimisations he’s made for the site, including a service worker. The whole thing is a masterclass in performance and progressive enhancement. I’m so glad he took the time to share this!

Wednesday, May 24th, 2017

The Apophenic Machine — Real Life

To navigate the web is to beat a path through a labyrinth of links left by others, and to thereby create associative links yourself, unspooling them like a guiding thread onto a floor already carpeted with such connections. Each thread of connection is unique, individualized: everyone draws their own map of the network as they navigate it.

Tuesday, May 23rd, 2017

Monday, May 22nd, 2017

Are we making the web too complicated? | Seldo.Com Blog

Laurie Voss on the trade-off between new powerful web dev tools, and the messiness that abusing those tools can bring:

Is modern web development fearsomely, intimidatingly complicated? Yes, and that’s a problem. Will we make it simpler? Definitely, but probably not as soon as you’d like. Is all this new complexity worthwhile? Absolutely.

I agree that there’s bound to be inappropriate use of technologies, but I don’t agree that we should just accept it:

Are there some people using a huge pile of JavaScript and a monstrous build chain to throw together a single-pager web site with one box that collects an email address? For sure. And that’s silly and unnecessary. But so what? The misuse of technology does not invalidate it.

I think we can raise our standards. Inappropriate use of technology might have been forgivable ten years ago, but if we want web development to be taken seriously as a discipline, I think we should endeavour to use our tools and technologies appropriately.

But we can all agree that the web is a wonderful thing:

Nobody but nobody loves the web more than I do. It’s my baby. And like a child, it’s frustrating to watch it struggle and make mistakes. But it’s amazing to watch it grow up.

Friday, May 19th, 2017

Notes From An Emergency

But real problems are messy. Tech culture prefers to solve harder, more abstract problems that haven’t been sullied by contact with reality. So they worry about how to give Mars an earth-like climate, rather than how to give Earth an earth-like climate. They debate how to make a morally benevolent God-like AI, rather than figuring out how to put ethical guard rails around the more pedestrian AI they are introducing into every area of people’s lives.

Thursday, May 18th, 2017

Tuesday, May 16th, 2017

Sunday, May 14th, 2017

Friday, May 12th, 2017

The cost of change | The White Site

Ben points to a new product aiming to ease the pain of connected devices bumping up against the harsh realities of shearing layers:

By exposing the ‘hardwiring’ of our electrical systems, Conduct emphasises how much we rely on existing systems to power our ‘new’ technology – the rate of change and advancement in our traditional technologies moves at a much slower pace than our mobile app-based world and there are physical limitations as a result of this hardwired legacy.

I am—unsurprisingly—in favour of exposing the seams like this.

Thursday, May 11th, 2017

Saturday, May 6th, 2017

Friday, May 5th, 2017

Codebar Coach Guide

It’s a short list, but this brief guide for coaches at Codebar is packed with excellent advice for anybody getting into teaching or training:

  • Do not take over the keyboard! This can be off-putting and scary.
  • Encourage the students to type and not copy paste.
  • Assume that anyone you’re teaching has no knowledge but infinite intelligence.

Thursday, May 4th, 2017

Wednesday, May 3rd, 2017

The Lost Picture Show: Hollywood Archivists Can’t Outpace Obsolescence - IEEE Spectrum

There are three parts to digital preservation: format, medium, and licensing. Film and television archives are struggling with all three.

Format:

Codecs—the software used to compress and decompress digital video files—keep changing, as do the hardware and software for playback.

Medium:

As each new generation of LTO comes to market, an older generation of LTO becomes obsolete. LTO manufacturers guarantee at most two generations of backward compatibility. What that means for film archivists with perhaps tens of thousands of LTO tapes on hand is that every few years they must invest millions of dollars in the latest format of tapes and drives and then migrate all the data on their older tapes—or risk losing access to the information altogether.

Licensing:

Studios didn’t see any revenue potential in their past work. They made money by selling movie tickets; absent the kind of follow-on markets that exist today, long-term archiving didn’t make sense economically.

It adds up to a potential cultural disaster:

If technology companies don’t come through with a long-term solution, it’s possible that humanity could lose a generation’s worth of filmmaking, or more.

Build a Better Monster: Morality, Machine Learning, and Mass Surveillance

So what happens when these tools for maximizing clicks and engagement creep into the political sphere?

This is a delicate question! If you concede that they work just as well for politics as for commerce, you’re inviting government oversight. If you claim they don’t work well at all, you’re telling advertisers they’re wasting their money.

Facebook and Google have tied themselves into pretzels over this.

Tuesday, May 2nd, 2017

leaving the future behind – Al Robertson

Science fiction isn’t about technology, it’s about people …and how people change in response to technology.

So ironically, perhaps the only way that any piece of science fiction can be sure that it will remain resonant as the years pass is to make sure that any technical speculation can drop away once it’s no longer relevant. The science will fall back to Earth like an exhausted booster section, tumbling away from the rocket that will one day reach the stars. And then we’ll be left with stories about how people change when change arrives – and that, for me, is what science fiction is.

Monday, May 1st, 2017

The People’s Cloud

A documentary by Matt Parker (brother of Andy) that follows in the footsteps of people like Andrew Blum, James Bridle, and Ingrid Burrington, going in search of the physical locations of the internet, and talking to the people who maintain it. Steven Pemberton makes an appearance in the first and last of five episodes:

  1. What is the Cloud vs What Existed Before?
  2. Working out the Internet: it’s a volume game
  3. The Submarine Cable Network
  4. How Much Data Is There?
  5. Convergence

The music makes it feel quite sinister.

Offline Web Applications | Udacity

This is a free online video course recorded by Jake a couple of years back. It’s got a really good step-by-step introduction to service workers, delivered in Jake’s typically witty way. Some of the details are a bit out of date, and I must admit that I bailed when it got to IndexedDB, but I highly recommend giving this a go.

There’s also a free course on web accessibility I’m planning to check out.