Link archive: September, 2018

CTS - conserve the sound

An online museum of sounds—the recordings of analogue machines.

Control Panel

Analogue switches, dials, and buttons, buttons, buttons (just like that Flickr group I linked to).

Letterform Archive – From the Collection: Blissymbolics

The fascinating story of Charles K. Bliss and his symbolic language:

The writing system – originally named World Writing in 1942, then Semantography in 1947, and finally Blissymoblics in the 1960s – contains several hundred basic geometric symbols (“Bliss-characters”) that can be combined in different ways to represent more complex concepts (“Bliss-words”). For example, the Bliss-characters for “house” and “medical” are combined to form the Bliss-word for “hospital” or “clinic”. The modular structure invites comparison to the German language; the German word for “hospital ” – “krankenhaus” – translates directly to “sick house”.

Thinking about permissions on the web | Sally Lait

Sally takes a long hard look at permissions on the web. It’s a fascinating topic because of all the parties involved—browsers, developers, and users.

In order to do permissions well, I think there are two key areas to think about - what’s actually being requested, and how it’s being requested.

Is a site being intrusive with what they can potentially learn about me (say, wanting my precise location when it’s unnecessary)? Or is it being intrusive in terms of how they interact with me (popping up a lot of notifications and preventing me from quickly completing my intended task)? If one of those angles doesn’t work well, then regardless of whether the other is acceptable to someone, they’re likely to start opting out and harbouring negative feelings.

DasSur.ma – The 9am rush hour

Why JavaScript is a real performance bottleneck:

Rush hour. The worst time of day to travel. For many it’s not possible to travel at any other time of day because they need to get to work by 9am.

This is exactly what a lot of web code looks like today: everything runs on a single thread, the main thread, and the traffic is bad. In fact, it’s even more extreme than that: there’s one lane all from the city center to the outskirts, and quite literally everyone is on the road, even if they don’t need to be at the office by 9am.

What is Modular CSS?

A walk down memory lane, looking at the history modular CSS methodologies (and the people behind them):

• Nicole’s OOCSS,
• Varya’s BEM, and
• Snook’s SMACSS (try saying that ten times fast).

Jongert

Nick demonstrates the responsive power of variable fonts by recreating a lovely design from Jacob Jongert.

Grab that browser window and get squishin’!

Thoughts on Offline-first | Trys Mudford

Service Workers have such huge potential power, and I feel like we (developers on the web) have barely scratched the surface with what’s possible.

Needless to say, I couldn’t agree more!

Trys is thinking through some of the implicatons of service workers, like how we refresh stale content, and how we deal with slow networks—something that’s actually more of a challenge than dealing with no network connection at all.

There’s some good food for thought here.

I’m so excited to see how we can use Service Workers to improve the web.

My favorite design tool. — Ethan Marcotte

“What if someone doesn’t browse the web like I do?”

Picular

A search engine for colours.

How to Build a Low-tech Website?

This is fascinating! A website that’s fast and nimble, not for performance reasons, but to reduce energy consumption. It’s using static files, system fonts and dithered images. And no third-party scripts.

Thanks to a low-tech web design, we managed to decrease the average page size of the blog by a factor of five compared to the old design – all while making the website visually more attractive (and mobile-friendly). Secondly, our new website runs 100% on solar power, not just in words, but in reality: it has its own energy storage and will go off-line during longer periods of cloudy weather.

Ping! That’s the sound of my brain going “service worker!”

I’ve sent them an email offering my help.

ColorBox by Lyft Design

I don’t really understand what this colour tool is doing or what it’s for, but I like it.

The State of Fieldset Interoperability - Bocoup

The long-standing difficulties of styling fieldset and legend are finally getting addressed …although I’m a little shocked that the solution involves extending -webkit-appearance. I think that, at this point, we should be trying to get rid of vendor prefixes from the web once and for all, not adding to them. Still, needs must, I suppose.

Incomplete Open Cubes Revisited

Art, geometry, and code. Sol LeWitt started it. Rob saw it through.

Medieval Fantasy City Generator by watabou

Procedurally generated medieval town plans. Pick a size and then have some fun with the “warp” option.

Salty JavaScript analogy - HankChizlJaw

JavaScript is like salt. If you add just enough salt to a dish, it’ll help make the flavour awesome. Add too much though, and you’ll completely ruin it.

How To Kill Your Tech Industry

I’m currently making my way through Programmed Inequality by Marie Hicks. In that book and in this article, she describes how Britain squandered its lead in the field of computing through indemic sexism. There’s also the remarkable story of Dame Stephanie Shirley.

Hyperlight

Another great sci-fi short film from Dust.

Good Tech Conf | Using technology for social good

This looks like a really interesting two-day event here in Brighton in November. Like Indie Web Camp, it features one day of talks followed by one day of making.

After a day of tech talks from project teams using their skills for social good, you’ll have the chance to take part in workshops and hackathons to use your own talents for a worthy cause.

And you get to go up the i360.

The costs and benefits of tracking scripts – business vs. user // Sebastian Greger

I am having a hard time seeing the business benefits weighing in more than the user cost (at least for those many organisations out there who rarely ever put that data to proper use). After all, keeping the costs low for the user should be in the core interest of the business as well.

HTML elements, unite! The Voltron-like powers of combining elements. | CSS-Tricks

This great post by Mandy ticks all my boxes! It’s a look at the combinatorial possibilities of some of the lesser-known HTML elements: abbr, cite, code, dfn, figure, figcaption, kbd, samp, and var.

RevAMP. — Ethan Marcotte

I’m heartened to see that Google’s moving to make the AMP format more open. But this new governance model doesn’t change the underlying, more fundamental issues: specifically, Google’s use of its market dominance to broaden AMP’s adoption, and to influence the direction of a more decentralized and open web.

Winston Hearn | What’s best for users

The incentives that Google technology created were very important in the evolution of this current stage of the web. I think we should be skeptical of AMP because once again a single company’s technology – the same single company – is creating the incentives for where we go next.

A thorough examination of the incentives that led to AMP, and the dangers of what could happen next:

I’m not sure I am yet willing to cede the web to a single monopolized company.

Your Public Library Is Where It’s At + Subtraction.com

Fuck yeah, libraries!

Even more radically, your time at the library comes with absolutely no expectation that you buy anything. Or even that you transact at all. And there’s certainly no implication that your data or your rights are being surrendered in return for the services you partake in.

This rare openness and neutrality imbues libraries with a distinct sense of community, of us, of everyone having come together to fund and build and participate in this collective sharing of knowledge and space. All of that seems exceedingly rare in this increasingly commercial, exposed world of ours. In a way it’s quite amazing that the concept continues to persist at all.

And when we look at it this way, as a startlingly, almost defiantly civilized institution, it seems even more urgent that we make sure it not only continues to survive, but that it should also thrive, too.

Color Leap - History’s Palettes

Colour palettes throughout the ages that you can copy and use.

CSS dismissal is about exclusion, not technology

As a community, we love to talk about meritocracy while perpetuating privilege.

This is playing out in full force in the front-end development community today.

Front-end development is a part of the field that has historically been at least slightly more accessible to women.

Shockingly, (not!) this also led to a salary and prestige gap, with back-end developers making on average almost $30,000 more than front-end.

(Don’t read the comments.)

Breaking the Deadlock Between User Experience and Developer Experience · An A List Apart Article

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Our efforts to measure and improve UX are packed with tragically ironic attempts to love our users: we try to find ways to improve our app experiences by bloating them with analytics, split testing, behavioral analysis, and Net Promoter Score popovers. We stack plugins on top of third-party libraries on top of frameworks in the name of making websites “better”—whether it’s something misguided, like adding a carousel to appease some executive’s burning desire to get everything “above the fold,” or something truly intended to help people, like a support chat overlay. Often the net result is a slower page load, a frustrating experience, and/or (usually “and”) a ton of extra code and assets transferred to the browser.

Even tools that are supposed to help measure performance in order to make improvements—like, say, Real User Monitoring—require you to add a script to your web pages …thereby increasing the file size and degrading performance! It’s ironic, in that Alanis Morissette sense of not understanding what irony is.

Stacking tools upon tools may solve our problems, but it’s creating a Jenga tower of problems for our users.

This is a great article about evaluating technology.

On using tracking scripts | justmarkup

Weighing up the pros and cons of adding tracking scripts to a website, from a business perspective and from a user perspective.

When looking at the costs versus the benefits it is hard to believe that almost every website is using tracking scripts.

The next time, you implement a tracking script it would be great if you could rethink it and ask yourself if it is really worth it.

The power of self-publishing - HankChizlJaw

This is something I struggle to articulate to friends who are suffering because they feel tied to silos like Facebook and Twitter:

What self-publishing does is provide me a choice, which makes me feel good. I feel like I can step away from platforms at will and I don’t feel as shackled as I have done previously.

The map we need if we want to think about how global living conditions are changing - Our World in Data

While a geographical map is helpful if you want to find your way around the world, a population cartogram is the representation that we need if we want to know where our fellow humans are at home.

The Importance Of Manual Accessibility Testing — Smashing Magazine

This is very timely. I’ve been doing some consulting at a company where they are perhaps a little over-reliant on automated accessibility tests.

Automated accessibility tests are a great resource to have, but they can’t automatically make your site accessible. Use them as one step of a larger testing process.

Magic Paintbox – Illuminated – Medium

What we get from the pattern library is time and freedom to be creative. I’ve seen people claim pattern libraries are the death of creativity and innovation in design. For us, it’s the opposite of that.

Private by Default

Feedbin has removed third-party iframes and JavaScript (oEmbed provides a nice alternative), as well as stripping out Google Analytics, and even web fonts that aren’t self-hosted. This is excellent!

The “Developer Experience” Bait-and-Switch | Infrequently Noted

JavaScript is the web’s CO2. We need some of it, but too much puts the entire ecosystem at risk. Those who emit the most are furthest from suffering the consequences — until the ecosystem collapses. The web will not succeed in the markets and form-factors where computing is headed unless we get JS emissions under control.

Damn, that’s a fine opening! And the rest of this post by Alex is pretty darn great too. He’s absolutely right in calling out the fetishisation of developer experience at the expense of user needs:

The swap is executed by implying that by making things better for developers, users will eventually benefit equivalently. The unstated agreement is that developers share all of the same goals with the same intensity as end users and even managers. This is not true.

I have a feeling that this will be a very bitter pill for many developers to swallow:

If one views the web as a way to address a fixed market of existing, wealthy web users, then it’s reasonable to bias towards richness and lower production costs. If, on the other hand, our primary challenge is in growing the web along with the growth of computing overall, the ability to reasonably access content bumps up in priority. If you believe the web’s future to be at risk due to the unusability of most web experiences for most users, then discussion of developer comfort that isn’t tied to demonstrable gains for marginalized users is at best misguided.

Oh,captain, my captain!

Tools that cost the poorest users to pay wealthy developers are bunk.

Brand New Roman

A font made of corporate logos.

Removing jQuery from GitHub.com frontend | GitHub Engineering

You really don’t need jQuery any more …and that’s thanks to jQuery.

Here, the Github team talk through their process of swapping out jQuery for vanilla JavaScript, as well as their forays into web components (or at least the custom elements bit).

Internet Archive: Connections season 1, episodes 1-10

Videos for the whole first season of James Burke’s brilliant Connections TV series.

Internet Archive and chill.

Why the Future of Data Storage is (Still) Magnetic Tape - IEEE Spectrum

It turns out that a whole lot of The So-Called Cloud is relying on magnetic tape for its backups.

“Killing the URL” | CSS-Tricks

URLs are the single greatest feature of the web.

881410 - Incorrect transforms when stripping subdomains

The latest version of Chrome is removing seams by messing with the display of the URL.

This is a bug.

Chrome’s NOSCRIPT Intervention - TimKadlec.com

Testing time with Tim.

Long story short, the NOSCRIPT intervention looks like a really great feature for users. More often than not it provides significant reduction in data usage, not to mention the reduction in CPU time—no small thing for the many, many people running affordable, low-powered devices.

Unit deconverter - make your units less useful!

Take a perfectly useful standardised measurement of length, weight, speed or time, and convert to something far less useful (but much more fun).

The mysterious case of missing URLs and Google’s AMP | sonniesedge.co.uk

My reaction to that somewhat sensentionalist Wired article was much the same as Charlie’s—seeing it on the same day at the latest AMP sneakiness has me worried.

The hiding of URLs fits perfectly with AMPs preferred method of making sites fast, which is to host them directly on Google’s servers, and to serve them from a Google domain. Hiding the URL from the user then makes a Google AMP site indistinguishable from an ordinary site.

As well as sharing Charlie’s concern, I also share her hope:

I really hope that the people who are part of Google can stop something awful like this from happening.

Weaknotes 1

I really like Alice’s updates.

I think I’ll do weaknotes. Some collections of notes. Sometimes. Not very well written probably. Generally written with the urgency of someone who is waiting for a baby wake up.

fascism in sci-fi | Sci-fi interfaces

Chris is putting his examination of interfaces in science fiction on pause while he examines a more pressing matter for today’s political climate—an examination of depictions of fascism in science fiction:

1. Sci-fi interfaces and fascism
2. A surprisingly empty survey: Strong fascism in screen sci-fi
3. Why is strong fascism missing in screen sci-fi?

How do you mark up an accordion? — Sara Soueidan

I love this deep dive that Sara takes into the question of marking up content for progressive disclosure. It reminds me Dan’s SimpleQuiz from back in the day.

Then there’s this gem, which I think is a terrificly succinct explanation of the importance of meaningful markup:

It’s always necessary, in my opinion, to consider what content would render and look like in foreign environments, or in environments that are not controlled by our own styles and scripts. Writing semantic HTML is the first step in achieving truly resilient Web sites and applications.

The principles behind Bulb’s design – Making Bulb – Medium

This is a great piece by Alla, ostensibly about Bulb’s design principles, but it’s really about what makes for effective design principles in general. It’s packed full of great advice, like these design principles for design principles:

• Good principles are genuine
• Good principles have a point of view
• Good principles are memorable

The Font Loading Checklist—zachleat.com

This checklist came in very handy during a performance-related workshop I was running today (I may have said the sentence “Always ask yourself What Would Zach Do?”).

1. Start Important Font Downloads Earlier (Start a Web Font load)
2. Prioritize Readable Text (Behavior while a Web Font is loading)
3. Make Fonts Smaller (Reduce Web Font load time)
4. Reduce Movement during Page Load (Behavior after a Web Font has loaded)

The first two are really straightforward to implement (with rel="preload" and font-display). The second two take more work (with subsetting and the font loading API).

Google Wants to Kill the URL | WIRED

Change will be controversial whatever form it takes. But it’s important we do something, because everyone is unsatisfied by URLs. They kind of suck.

Citation very fucking needed.

I’m trying very hard to give Google the benefit of the doubt here, but coming as it does on top of all the AMP shit they’re pulling, it sure seems like Google are trying to remake the web in their image.

Oh, and if you want to talk about URLs confusing people, AMP is a great example.

Google AMP Can Go To Hell | Polemic Digital

Harsh but fair words about Google AMP.

Google has built their entire empire on the backs of other people’s effort. People use Google to find content on the web. Google is just a doorman, not the destination. Yet the search engine has epic delusions of grandeur and has started to believe they are the destination, that they are the gatekeepers of the web, that they should dictate how the web evolves.

Take your dirty paws off our web, Google. It’s not your plaything, it belongs to everyone.

Daring Fireball: Medium Deprecates Custom Domains Service

I know many people love Medium’s editing interface, but I just can’t believe that so many writers and publications have turned toward a single centralized commercial entity as a proposed solution to what ails the publishing industry. There is tremendous strength in independence and decentralization.

Pitfalls of Card UIs - daverupert.com

I’m going through a pattern library right now, and this rings true:

I’m of the opinion that all cards in a Card UI are destined to become baby webpages. Just like modals. Baby hero units with baby titles and baby body text and baby dropdown menu of actions and baby call to action bars, etc.

In some ways this outcome is the opposite of what you were intending. You wanted a Card UI where everything was simple and uniform, but what you end up with is a CSS gallery website filled with baby websites.

Your “thread” should have been a blog post…

I’m telling you this stuff is often too important and worthy to be owned by an algorithm and lost in the stream.

Offline Content with Service Worker — Chris Ruppel

A step-by-step walkthrough of a really useful service worker pattern: allowing users to save articles for offline reading at the click of a button (kind of like adding the functionality of Instapaper or Pocket to your own site).

The Ecological Impact of Browser Diversity | CSS-Tricks

This is a terrific spot-on piece by Rachel. I firmly believe that healthy competition and diversity in the browser market is vital for the health of the web (which is why I’m always saddened and frustrated to hear web developers wish for a single monocultural rendering engine).

Conversational Semantics · An A List Apart Article

I love, love, love all the little details of HTML that Aaron offers up here. And I really like how he positions non-visual user-agents like searchbots, screen readers, and voice assisants as headless UIs.

HTML is a truly robust and expressive language that is often overlooked and undervalued, but it has the incredible potential to nurture conversations with our users without requiring a lot of effort on our part. Simply taking the time to code web pages well will enable our sites to speak to our customers like they speak to each other. Thinking about how our sites are experienced as headless interfaces now will set the stage for more natural interactions between the real world and the digital one.

Accessibility is not a feature. — Ethan Marcotte

Just last week I came across an example of what Ethan describes here: accessibility (in a pattern library) left to automatic checks rather than human experience.

Changing Our Approach to Anti-tracking - Future Releases

This is excellent news from Mozilla. Firefox is going to make it easier to block vampiric privacy-leeching and performance-draining third-party scripts and trackers.

In the physical world, users wouldn’t expect hundreds of vendors to follow them from store to store, spying on the products they look at or purchase. Users have the same expectations of privacy on the web, and yet in reality, they are tracked wherever they go.

The Emperor’s New Tools?: pragmatism and the idolatry of the web | words from Cole Henley, @cole007

I share many of Cole’s concerns. I think we’re in fairly similiar situations. We even share the same job title: Technical Director …whatever that even means.

I worry about our over-reliance and obsession with tools because for many these are a barrier to our discipline. I worry that they may never really make our work better, faster or easier and that our attention is increasingly focussed not on the drawing but on the pencils. But I mostly worry that our current preoccupation with the way we work (rather than necessarily what we work on) is sapping my enthusiasm for an industry I love and care about immensely.