Link archive: August, 2018

Offline Web Experiences with Jeremy Keith « CTRL+CLICK CAST

I had a great time chatting with Lea and Emily about service workers on this episode of their podcast—they’re such great hosts!

Here’s the huffduffed audio.

The Complete CSS Demo for OpenType Features - OpenType Features in CSS

Every single font-feature-settings value demonstrated in one single page.

Disable scripts for Data Saver users on slow connections - Chrome Platform Status

An excellent idea for people in low-bandwidth situations: automatically disable JavaScript. As long as the site is built with progressive enhancement, there’s no problem (and if not, the user is presented with the choice to enable scripts).

Power to the people!

Design Laws in Nature by Jordan Moore

A deep, deep dive into biomicry in digital design.

Nature is our outsourced research and development department. Observing problems solved by nature can help inform how we approach problems in digital design. Nature doesn’t like arbitrary features. It finds a way to shed unnecessary elements in advancing long-term goals over vast systems.

The Web I Want - DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻

Scores of people who just want to deliver their content and have it look vaguely nice are convinced you need every web technology under the sun to deliver text.

This is very lawnoffgetting but I can relate.

I made my first website about 20 years ago and it delivered as much content as most websites today. It was more accessible, ran faster and easier to develop then 90% of the stuff you’ll read on here.

20 years later I browse the Internet with a few tabs open and I have somehow downloaded many megabytes of data, my laptop is on fire and yet in terms of actual content delivery nothing has really changed.

A Tale of Two Buttons

In defence of the cascade (especially now that we’ve got CSS custom properties).

I think embracing CSS’s cascade can be a great way to encourage consistency and simplicity in UIs. Rather than every new component being a free for all, it trains both designers and developers to think in terms of aligning with and re-using what they already have.

Remember, every time you set a property in CSS you are in fact overriding something (even if it’s just the default user agent styles). In other words, CSS code is mostly expressing exceptions to a default design.

Mozilla Protocol - Protocol Design System

Mozilla’s work-in-progress style guide and pattern library.

Monotype restored the font Walbaum, a 200-year-old serif typeface — Quartzy

The history and restoratin of a neglected typeface, complete with this great explanation of optical sizing:

Nix illustrated the point with an analogy: “Imagine if we all decided that 10-year-old boys would be the optimal human form,” he says. “Rather than having babies, we just shrunk 10-year-old boys to baby size, and enlarge them to the size of a full grown man. That’s kind of what we’re combatting.”

Playing with the Indieweb

A good half-hour presentation by Stephen Rushe on the building blocks of the indie web. You can watch the video or look through the slides.

I’ve recently been exploring the world of the IndieWeb, and owning my own content rather than being reliant on the continued existence of “silos” to maintain it. This has led me to discover the varied eco-system of IndieWeb, such as IndieAuth, Microformats, Micropub, Webmentions, Microsub, POSSE, and PESOS.

How can designers get better at learning from their mistakes?

Jon has seven answers:

1. Build a culture to learn from mistakes
2. Embrace healthy critique
3. Fail little and often
4. Listen to users
5. Design. Learn. Repeat
6. Create a shared understanding
7. Always be accountable

It’s gratifying to see how much of this was informed by the culture of critique at Clearleft.

Front-End Performance Checklist

A handy pre-launch go/no-go checklist to run through before your countdown.

On HTTPS and Hard Questions - TimKadlec.com

A great post by Tim following on from the post by Eric I linked to last week.

Is a secure site you can’t access better than an insecure one you can?

He rightly points out that security without performance is exlusionary.

…we’ve made a move to increase the security of the web by doing everything we can to get everything running over HTTPS. It’s undeniably a vital move to make. However this combination—poor performance but good security—now ends up making the web inaccessible to many.

Security. Performance. Accessibility. All three matter.

How to build a simple Camera component - Frontend News #4

A step-by-step guide to wrapping up a self-contained bit of functionality (a camera, in this case) into a web component.

Mind you, it would be nice if there were some thought given to fallbacks, like say:

<simple-camera>
<input type="file" accept="image/*">
</simple-camera>

A web of anxiety: accessibility for people with anxiety and panic disorders [Part 1] | The Paciello Group – Your Accessibility Partner (WCAG 2.0/508 audits, VPAT, usability and accessible user experience)

Enumerating the anti-patterns that cause serious user experience issues that don’t get nearly enough attention:

• Urgency
• Unpredictability
• Powerlessness
• Sensationalism

While such intrusions can be a source of irritation or even stress for many people, they may be complete showstoppers for people with anxiety or panic disorders.

I’m looking forward to reading the follow-up post.

(I was going to say I was anxiously awaiting the follow-up post but …never mind.)

Going Offline by Jeremy Keith – a post by Marc Thiele

This is such a lovely, lovely review from Marc!

Jeremy’s way of writing certainly helps, as a specialised or technical book on a topic like Service Workers, could certainly be one, that bores you to death with dry written explanations. But Jeremy has a friendly, fresh and entertaining way of writing books. Sometimes I caught myself with a grin on my face…

Google AMP - A 70% drop in our conversion rate. - Rockstar Coders

Google hijacking and hosting your AMP pages (in order to pre-render them) is pretty terrible for user experience and security:

I’m trying to establish my company as a legitimate business that can be trusted by a stranger to build software for them. Having google.com reeks of a phishing scam or fly by night operation that couldn’t afford their own domain.

Just write.

What you write might help someone understand a concept that you may think has been covered enough before. We each have our own unique perspectives and writing styles.

Yes! This!!

That voice telling you that people are just sitting somewhere watching our every step and judging us based on the popularity of our writing is a big fat pathetic attention-needing liar.

005: Service workers - Web Components Club

I strongly recommend that you read Going Offline by Jeremy Keith. Before his book, I found the concept of service workers quite daunting and convinced myself that it’s one of those things that I’ll have to set aside a big chunk of time to learn. I got through Jeremy’s book in a few hours and felt confident and inspired. This is because he’s very good at explaining concepts in a friendly, concise manner.

The power of progressive enhancement – No Divide – Medium

The beauty of this approach is that the site doesn’t ever appear broken and the user won’t even be aware that they are getting the ‘default’ experience. With progressive enhancement, every user has their own experience of the site, rather than an experience that the designers and developers demand of them.

A case study in applying progressive enhancement to all aspects of a site.

Progressive enhancement isn’t necessarily more work and it certainly isn’t a non-JavaScript fallback, it’s a change in how we think about our projects. A complete mindset change is required here and it starts by remembering that you don’t build websites for yourself, you build them for others.

Let’s serve everyone good-looking content

A terrific piece by Hidde, about CSS grid, but also about a much bigger question:

I don’t think we owe it to any users to make it all exactly the same. Therefore we can get away with keeping fallbacks very simple. My hypothesis: users don’t mind, they’ve come for the content.

If users don’t mind, that leaves us with team members, bosses and clients. In my ideal world we should convince each other, and with that I mean visual designers, product owners, brand people, developers, that it is ok for our lay-out not to look the same everywhere. Because serving good-looking content everywhere is more important than same grids everywhere.

Weft. — Ethan Marcotte

I think we often focus on designing or building an element, without researching the other elements it should connect to—without understanding the system it lives in.

Creating the “Perfect” CSS System – Gusto Design – Medium

This is great advice from Lindsay Grizzard—getting agreement is so much more important than personal preference when it comes to collaborating on a design system.

When starting a project, get developers onboard with your CSS, JS and even HTML conventions from the start. Meet early and often to discuss every library, framework, mental model, and gem you are interested in using and take feedback seriously. Simply put, if they absolutely hate BEM and refuse to write it, don’t use BEM.

It’s all about the people, people!

“Designer + Developer Workflow,” an article by Dan Mall

Dan compares the relationship between a designer and developer in the web world to the relationship between an art director and a copywriter in the ad world. He and Brad made a video to demonstrate how they collaborate.

PWA: Progressive Web All-the-things - Tales of a Developer Advocate by Paul Kinlan

Very valuable observations from Paul on his travels, talking to developers and business people about progressive web apps—there’s some confusion out there.

My personal feeling is that everyone is really hung up on the A in PWA: ‘App’. It’s the success and failure of the branding of the concept; ‘App’ is in the name, ‘App’ is in the conscious of many users and businesses and so the associations are quite clear.

Understanding why Semantic HTML is important, as told by TypeScript.

Oh, this is such a good analogy from Mandy! Choosing the right HTML element is like choosing the right data type in a strongly typed programming language.

Get to know the HTML elements available to you, and use the appropriate one for your content. Make the most it, like you would any language you choose to code with.

Stop building for San Francisco

Overwhelmingly, our software is built by well-paid teams with huge monitors and incredibly fast computers running on a high-bandwidth internet connection. We run MacBook Pros, we have cinema displays, we carry iPhones.

That’s not what the rest of the world looks like.

Accessible Comics - Axess Lab

Nice! It sounds like Lucy and Andy went above and beyond the call of duty when it came to the alt text for 100 Demon Dialogues.

The SHE Is Series | SHE Is Ire Aderinokun

I started writing for myself. The writing was helpful for me and luckily it was helpful for other people as well. But even if you’re the only one that reads your blog it is still helpful as a way to learn.

Securing Web Sites Made Them Less Accessible – Eric’s Archived Thoughts

This is a heartbreaking observation by Eric. He’s not anti-HTTPS by any stretch, but he is pointing out that caching servers become a thing of the past on a more secure web.

Can we do anything? For users of up-to-date browsers, yes: service workers create a “good” man in the middle that sidesteps the HTTPS problem, so far as I understand. So if you’re serving content over HTTPS, creating a service worker should be one of your top priorities right now, even if it’s just to do straightforward local caching and nothing fancier.

Coming to a browser near you - faster than ever before!

A great long-term perspective from Rachel on the pace of change in standards getting shipped in browsers:

The pace that things are shipping, and at which bugs are fixed is like nothing we have seen before. I know from sitting around a table with representatives from each browser vendor at the CSS Working Group how important interop is. No-one wants features to be implemented differently in browsers. This is what we were asking for with WaSP, and despite the new complexity of the platform, browsers rendering standard features in different ways is becoming increasingly rare. Bugs happen, sometimes in the browser and sometimes in the spec, but there is a commitment to avoid these and to create a stable platform we can all rely on. It is exciting to be part of it.

‘Never assume anything’: The golden rules for inclusive design

Inclusive design is also future-proofing technology for everyone. Swan noted that many more developers and designers are considering accessibility issues as they age and encounter poor eyesight or other impairments.

The Web is Made of Edge Cases by Taylor Hunt on CodePen

Oh, this is magnificent! A rallying call for everyone designing and developing on the web to avoid making any assumptions about the people we’re building for:

People will use your site how they want, and according to their means. That is wonderful, and why the Web was built.

I would even say that the % of people viewing your site the way you do rapidly approaches zilch.

Seriously, though. What is a progressive web app? – Amberley Romo – Medium

What an excellent question! And what an excellent bit of sleuthing to get to the bottom of it. This is like linguistic spelunking on the World Wide Web.

Oh, and of course I love the little sidenote at the end.

The Man Who Invented The Web - TIME

This seventeen year old profile of Tim Berners-Lee is fascinating to read from today’s perspective.

Joymaker by Frederik Pohl from The Age of The Pussyfoot

From Frederik Pohl’s 1966 novel:

The remote-access computer transponder called the “joymaker” is your most valuable single possession in your new life. If you can imagine a combination of telephone, credit card, alarm clock, pocket bar, reference library, and full-time secretary, you will have sketched some of the functions provided by your joymaker.

Essentially, it is a transponder connecting you with the central computing facilities of the city in which you reside on a shared-time, self-programming basis.

StyleURL - share CSS tweaks instantly

This is an interesting tool: mess around with styles on any site inside Chrome’s dev tools, and then hit a button to have the updated styles saved to a URL (a Gist on Github).

Altering expectations by improving PWA on iOS | Responsive Web Design

Justin responds to a post of mine which was itself a response to a post by Luke.

I love having discussions like this!

Post Haste

Look, it’s Friday—were you really going to get any work done today anyway?

New Facebook Platform Product Changes and Policy Updates - Facebook for Developers

Welp! As of today, none of my posts, links, or notes can be syndicated to Facebook:

The publish_actions permission will be deprecated. This permission granted apps access to publish posts to Facebook as the logged in user. Apps created from today onwards will not have access to this permission. Apps created before today that have been previously approved to request publish_actions can continue to do so until August 1, 2018.

If you’re reading this on Facebook: so long, it’s been good to know ya.

Nutrition Cards for Accessible Components A11Y Expectations

A handy bunch of checklists from Dave for creating accessible components. Each component gets a card that lists the expectations for interaction.

Accessibility: Start with the foundations | susan jean robertson

I encourage you to think about and make sure you are using the right elements at the right time. Sometimes I overthink this, but that’s because it’s that important to me - I want to make sure that the markup I use helps people understand the content, and doesn’t hinder them.

Dynamic resources using the Network Information API and service workers

Smart thinking—similar to this post from last year—about using the navigator.connection API from a service worker to serve up bandwidth-appropriate images.

This is giving me some ideas for my own site.

The Cost Of JavaScript In 2018 – Addy Osmani – Medium

Addy takes a deep, deep dive into JavaScript performance on mobile, and publishes his findings on Ev’s blog, including this cra-yay-zy suggestion:

Maybe server-side-rendered HTML would actually be faster. Consider limiting the use of client-side frameworks to pages that absolutely require them.

The Bullshit Web — Pixel Envy

There is a cumulative effect of bullshit; its depth and breadth is especially profound. In isolation, the few seconds that it takes to load some extra piece of surveillance JavaScript isn’t much. Neither is the time it takes for a user to hide an email subscription box, or pause an autoplaying video. But these actions compound on a single webpage, and then again across multiple websites, and those seemingly-small time increments become a swirling miasma of frustration and pain.

I agree completely. And AMP is not the answer:

Given the assumption that any additional bandwidth offered to web developers will immediately be consumed, there seems to be just one possible solution, which is to reduce the amount of bytes that are transmitted. For some bizarre reason, this hasn’t happened on the main web, because it somehow makes more sense to create an exact copy of every page on their site that is expressly designed for speed. Welcome back, WAP — except, for some reason, this mobile-centric copy is entirely dependent on yet more bytes. This is the dumbfoundingly dumb premise of AMP.