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Charlotte shares her thoughts on the elements of a fruitful mentorship:
- Learn from each other
- Find the right level of challenge
- Reach out
- Meet with intent
- Offer feedback and ask for feedback
Here’s the website for Alla’s forthcoming book. You can sign up to a low-volume mailing list to get notified of updates.
Alla’s book is going to be a must-have (I know because I’ve been reviewing it as she’s been writing it). Pre-order it now. It’s out in September.
AMP is a symptom that someone, somewhere, thinks the web is failing so badly (so slow, so unresponsive) for a portion of the world that they want to take all the content and package it back up in a sterile, un-webby, branded box. That makes me so sad. PWAs, to me, are a potential treatment.
The first of Neil Bomkamp’s series of short films—testbeds for potential feature films.
A website should not fight the browser. Let the browser provide the chrome, and simply provide the content.
This post is about Medium, but I think there’s a lesson here for progressive web apps too. A progressive web app should not fight the browser. Are you listening, Google?
A great collection of learned lessons from implementing service workers.
I really, really like it when people share their own personal experiences and “gotchas!” like this.
Bram hopes for a way to define aspect ratios natively in CSS. We can sort of manage it now, but all the solutions are pretty hacky.
A look at the feedback needed for a slider control that feels “right”.
You can get most of the behavioural (though not styling) suggestions in HTML by doing this:
<form>
<input type="range" min="0" max="100" value="50"
onchange="amount.value=this.value"
onmousemove="amount.value=this.value">
<output name="amount">50</output>
</form>
This is a fun game (I scored a measly 73/100). The idea is to develop a feeling for the balance between font-size, line-height, and line length …just like the three sides of an equilateral triangle.
Too many of them still set line-height, font size and line width as independent features when in fact they should all be considered together. The equilateral triangle is a perfect representation of how the three features work in harmony.
Can an opinionated flat design still have depth and truly be free of drop shadows?
Scott proposes a technique that mimics atmospheric perspective—y’know, when things in the distance look hazier than things in the foreground.
The fact is, we are surrounded by a world that is full of depth, and very little of it is defined by shadow. If we are going to replace drop shadows in our visual UI metaphors, we should look at other options that create depth in the world around us.
Form validation taken to the extreme. If you want to know more about how it was done, there’s an article explaining the markup and CSS.
How the IETF redefined the process of creating standards.
To some visionary pioneers, such as Ted Nelson, who had been developing a purist hypertext paradigm called Xanadu for decades, the browser represented an undesirably messy direction for the evolution of the Internet. To pragmatists, the browser represented important software evolving as it should: in a pluralistic way, embodying many contending ideas, through what the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) calls “rough consensus and running code.”
I think Chris is on to something here when he identifies one of the biggest issues with CSS growing out of control:
The developers are afraid of the CSS.
A handy tool with some pre-made CSS clip paths that you can then tweak to your heart’s desire.
Analysing what the web is. It’s not the technology stack.
To count as being part of the web, your app or page must:
- Be linkable, and
- Allow any client to access it.
I think that’s a pretty good definition.
Mind you, I think this is a bit rich in an article published on The Verge:
The HTML web may be slow and annoying and processor intensive, but before we rush too fast into replacing it, let’s not lose what’s good about it.
Excuse me? Slow, annoying, processor-intensive web pages have nothing to do with the technology, and everything to do with publishers like The Verge shoving bucketloads of intrusive JavaScript trackers into every page view.
Still, we can agree on this:
Preserving the web, or more specifically the open principles behind it, means protecting one of the few paths for innovation left in the modern tech world that doesn’t have a giant company acting as a gatekeeper.
Breaking down programming tasks into smaller chunks …and naming things.
I’ll take a piece of paper and write the function names I’m going to implement. Or I’ll do it directly in my code editor, with real functions or comments.
It allows you to focus on one problem at a time. When you’re writing those function names, you are thinking about what the code should be doing. When you’re implementing the functions, you are thinking about how the code should do it.
Mike examines the real power of CSS custom properties compared to Sass variables—they can change at runtime.
I’m convinced that in almost all cases, responsive design logic should now be contained in variables. There is a strong argument too, that when changing any value, whether in a media query or an element scope, it belongs in a variable. If it changes, it is by definition a variable and this logic should be separated from design.
Beautifully designed and typeset eBooks of royalty-free works—yours for the taking and reading.
There’s a styleguide if you want to get involved on the production side too.
A great one-page intro to microformats (h-card in particular), complete with a parser that exports JSON. Bookmark this for future reference.
Richard MacManus begins to document the process of making his website part of the indie web.
Beyond Curie is a design project that highlights badass women in science, technology, engineering + mathematics.
A pretty good summary of some key indie web ideas.
The following film describes an unusual motion picture now being produced in London for release all over the world, starting in early 1967.
A really great introduction to web components by Monica. But I couldn’t help but be disheartened by this:
Web components tend to have dependencies on other web components, so you need a package manager to herd all them cats.
For me, this kind of interdependence lessens the standalone nature of web components—it just doesn’t feel quite so encapsulated to me. I know that this can be solved with build tools, but now you’ve got two problems (and one more dependency).
The transcript of Josh’s fantastic talk on machine learning, voice, data, APIs, and all the other tools of algorithmic design:
The design and presentation of data is just as important as the underlying algorithm. Algorithmic interfaces are a huge part of our future, and getting their design right is critical—and very, very hard to do.
Josh put together ten design principles for conceiving, designing, and managing data-driven products. I’ve added them to my collection.
- Favor accuracy over speed
- Allow for ambiguity
- Add human judgment
- Advocate sunshine
- Embrace multiple systems
- Make it easy to contribute (accurate) data
- Root out bias and bad assumptions
- Give people control over their data
- Be loyal to the user
- Take responsibility
It’s interesting to see how excessive surveillance is (finally!) being treated as damage and routed around. Apple seem to get it—they’re tackling the tracking issue. Meanwhile Google are focusing purely on the visibility and UX of invasive advertising, without taking steps against tracking.
There’s a huge opportunity here for Chrome’s competitors—if Firefox and Safari protect users from unwarranted tracking, that could be enough to get people to switch, regardless of the feature sets of the browsers.
A conference in my old stomping grounds of Freiburg on archives, preservation, and long-term thinking:
It will present the state of art in long-term archiving as well as the present problems in preservation of information and scientific data in archives and libraries. Perhaps the most interesting aspect is that, since all conceivable systems are finite but can be quite large, a choice on the contents has to be made. This requires thinking of the human condition: Who we are, what we are and what do we find worth to preserve.
I’ve added these to my collection of design principles:
- Provide comparable experience
- Consider situation
- Be consistent
- Give control
- Offer choice
- Prioritise content
- Add value
Truly awful interfaces …made real.
Dave muses on the challenges of maintaining a pattern library:
- Rolling out a Pattern Library is infinitely harder than building one.
- If you don’t have pages, it’s doesn’t solve the problem.
- Vertical spacing will make or break you.
- The Pattern Library is dead if it’s not prioritized.
A simple little tool for figuring out which keys map to JavaScript keycodes. This’ll save me some googling.
This is what Jessica has been working on for the past year—working very hard, I can attest.
This wrap-up post is a fascinating insight into the translation process.
Charlie conducts an experiment by living without JavaScript for a day.
So how was it? Well, with just a few minutes of sans-javascript life under my belt, my first impression was “Holy shit, things are fast without javascript”. There’s no ads. There’s no video loading at random times. There’s no sudden interrupts by “DO YOU WANT TO FUCKING SUBSCRIBE?” modals.
As you might expect, lots of sites just don’t work, but there are plenty of sites that work just fine—Google search, Amazon, Wikipedia, BBC News, The New York Times. Not bad!
This has made me appreciate the number of large sites that make the effort to build robust sites that work for everybody. But even on those sites that are progressively enhanced, it’s a sad indictment of things that they can be so slow on the multi-core hyperpowerful Mac that I use every day, but immediately become fast when JavaScript is disabled.
Sometimes our job titles and distinctions feel like the plastic grass in a sushi bento; flimsy and only there for decoration.
Your website’s only as strong as the weakest device you’ve tested it on.
A great description of one of the most powerful features in CSS Grid.
This function opens the door to us being able to write much more powerful and succinct CSS by allowing us to set, as a value for a grid track, a function including both a minimum and maximum value.
A style guide for voice interfaces.
This is an excellent move by Apple—interpreting cross-site tracking as damage and routing around it.
If you use the ProcessWire Content Management System, Johannes has written a handy plug-in that allows you to specify which files should be cached by a service worker.
When I was in Düsseldorf for this year’s excellent Beyond Tellerrand conference, I had the pleasure of meeting Nadieh Bremer, data visualisation designer extraordinaire. I asked her a question which is probably the equivalent of asking a chef what their favourite food is: “what’s your favourite piece of data visualisation?”
There are plenty of popular answers to this question—the Minard map, Jon Snow’s cholera map—but we had just been chatting about Nadieh’s previous life in astronomy, so one answer popped immediately to mind: the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.
This was my favourite talk from this year’s Interaction conference—packed full of insights, and delivered superbly.
It prompted so many thoughts, I found myself asking a question during the Q&A.
…a full one-third of my window is covered by a pop-over trying to get me to sign in or sign up for Facebook. I will go out of my way to avoid linking to websites that are hostile to users with pop-overs. (For example, I’ve largely stopped linking to anything from Wired, because they have such an aggressive anti-ad-block detection scheme. Fuck them.)
Same.
Facebook forbids search engines from indexing Facebook posts. Content that isn’t indexable by search engines is not part of the open web.
And then there’s this:
And in the same way they block indexing by search engines, Facebook forbids The Internet Archive from saving copies of posts.
Oh my goodness! Maciej is channelling Jason Scott:
Delicious has over a billion bookmarks and is a fascinating piece of web history. Even Yahoo, for whom mismanagement is usually effortless, had to work hard to keep Delicious down. I bought it in part so it wouldn’t disappear from the web.
The really nicely documented design system for Lost My Name.
They’ve also written up the process of creating the design system which includes a refreshingly honest account of missteps made along the way—very valuable!