Link archive: December, 2018

How I write conference talks. — Ethan Marcotte

I can relate to Ethan’s 16-step process for writing conference talks.

Step 14 is the most important.

Very Slow Movie Player on Vimeo

I love this use of e-ink to play a film at 24 frames per day instead of 24 frames per minute.

The power of progressive enhancement

Andy’s slides:

We dive into why progressive enhancement is important and how we can leverage the power of Vanilla JavaScript, Web Components and modern CSS to deliver a hack-free, lightweight and progressive experience for our users.

as days pass by — Why isn’t it their job

The secret is: if you use semantic HTML, then they do the work, not you. Their browser does the work, not you. If your pages use semantic HTML, you’re not going to get bug reports saying that your web app doesn’t work in a screenreader, or your buttons don’t work without mouse clicks, or your site doesn’t show anything on a Yoyodyne SuperPhone 3 running FailBrowser, because it will and they will and it will. And using semantic HTML elements is no more effort; it’s just as easy to use main as it is to use div id="main". Easier, even.

Making single color SVG icons work in dark mode

Another good reason to use the currentColor value in SVGs.

Carson: Textured fluid type - Steve Honeyman

I reckon it’s time for distressed type to make a comeback—CSS is ready for it.

A New Mailing List, Goodbye Instagram?, Future Book Hello Again — Roden Explorers Archive

Craig’s slow walk away from Instagram:

I want to have a place very far apart from that, where I can post photos on my own terms. Not have an algorithm decide which of my posts is best (have you noticed Instagram making the second photo in series appear first in the carousel?). And I don’t want to be rewarded for being anodyne, which is what these general algorithms seem to optimize for: things that are easily digestible, firmly on the scale of “fine, just fine.” It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the more boring stuff we shove into our eyeballs, the more boring our taste becomes.

The 100 Year Web (In Praise of XML)

I don’t agree with Steven Pemberton on a lot of things—I’m not a fan of many of the Semantic Web technologies he likes, and I think that the Robustness Principle is well-suited to the web—but I always pay attention to what he has to say. I certainly share his concern that migrating everything to JavaScript is not good for interoperability:

This is why there are so few new elements in HTML5: they haven’t done any design, and instead said “if you need anything, you can always do it in Javascript”.

And they all have.

And they are all different.

Read this talk transcript, and even if you don’t agree with everything in it today, you may end up coming back to it in the future. He’s playing the long game:

The web is the way now that we distribute information. We will need the web pages we create now to be readable in 100 years time, just as we can still read 100-year-old books.

Requiring a webpage to depend on a particular 100-year-old implementation of Javascript is not exactly evidence of future-thinking.

Malicious AI Report

Well, this an interesting format experiment—the latest Black Mirror just dropped, and it’s a PDF.

Will PWAs Replace Native Mobile Apps? — Smashing Magazine

This article conflates progressive web apps with having an app shell architecture. That’s a real shame.

Tumble log xyz

Kevin made this handy catch-all service for hosting Tumblr blogs on their own domain (which can bypass Tumblr’s annoying Oath interstital). Here’s mine.

The ‘Future Book’ Is Here, but It’s Not What We Expected | WIRED

Craig writes about reading and publishing, from the memex and the dynabook to the Kindle, the iPhone, and the iPad, all the way back around to plain ol’ email and good old-fashioned physical books.

We were looking for the Future Book in the wrong place. It’s not the form, necessarily, that needed to evolve—I think we can agree that, in an age of infinite distraction, one of the strongest assets of a “book” as a book is its singular, sustained, distraction-free, blissfully immutable voice. Instead, technology changed everything that enables a book, fomenting a quiet revolution. Funding, printing, fulfillment, community-building—everything leading up to and supporting a book has shifted meaningfully, even if the containers haven’t. Perhaps the form and interactivity of what we consider a “standard book” will change in the future, as screens become as cheap and durable as paper. But the books made today, held in our hands, digital or print, are Future Books, unfuturistic and inert may they seem.

We Should Replace Facebook With Personal Websites - Motherboard

Facebook isn’t really all that much better or more convenient than having your own website, or sending emails or chats. But for some reason, Facebook (and Instagram) are where we post now.

Performance Calendar » All about prefetching

A good roundup of techniques for responsible prefetching from Katie Hempenius.

ANDI - Accessibility Testing Tool - Install

Another bookmarklet for checking accessibility—kind of like tota11y—that allows to preview how screen readers will handle images, focusable elements, and more.

Stop Learning Frameworks – Lifehacks for Developers by Eduards Sizovs

It’s a terribly clickbaity (and negatively phrased) title, but if you turn it around, there’s some good advcie in here for deciding where to focus when it comes to dev technology:

• Programming languages are different, but design smells are alike.
• Frameworks are different, but the same design patterns shine through.
• Developers are different, but rules of dealing with people are uniform.

The 15 Web Design Books of 2018 You Can’t Afford to Miss

How lovely! Going Offline is in very good company in this list, and Oliver has some nice words to say about it:

Starting with no assumption of JavaScript knowledge, Jeremy explains the latest strategies, the ins and outs of fetching and caching, how to enhance your website’s performance, and more.

Extremely beginner-friendly and approachable, it can be read in half a day and will help you get Service Workers up and running in no time.

But all I want for Christmas is for Shopify to stop enabling Breitbart.

Material Conference 2018: Craft on the Web - Charlotte Dann - YouTube

Charlotte’s opening talk at the Material conference was really excellent—a great narrative at the intersection of code and creativity.

Remove Background from Image – remove.bg

Well, this looks like it could come in handy—no more tedious time in Photoshop trying to select turn a person into a separate layer by hand; this does it for you.

Oh Hello Ana - Blogging and me

A personal history of personal publishing from Ana—it’s wonderful!

When I was feeling low and alone I would recall how happy I used to be before I was working in tech. I would remember my silly fan sites, my experiments, my blogs and everything that I loved so much that made me become a developer.

Using aria-live

A terrific explanation of the aria-live attribute from Ire. If you’re doing anything with Ajax, this is vital knowledge.

GitHub - GoogleChromeLabs/quicklink: ⚡️Faster subsequent page-loads by prefetching in-viewport links during idle time

This looks like a very handle little performance-enhancing script: it attempts to prefetch some links, but in a responsible way. It won’t do any prefetching on slow connections or where data saving is enabled, and it only prefetches when the browser is idle.

GitHub - frctl/awesome-fractal: A curated list of awesome things related to Fractal

A starter list of Fractal examples and links. You can expand it.

Learning to unlearn – The Sea of Ideas

This is the real challenge for service workers:

For 30 years, we taught billions of humans that you need to be connected to the internet to consume the web via a browser! This means web users need to unlearn that web sites can’t be used offline.

What’s the difference between JavaScript event delegation, bubbling, and capturing? | Go Make Things

I can never keep these straight—this is going to be a handy reference to keep on hand.

Is Tech Too Easy to Use? - The New York Times

Seams!

Of all the buzzwords in tech, perhaps none has been deployed with as much philosophical conviction as “frictionless.” Over the past decade or so, eliminating “friction” — the name given to any quality that makes a product more difficult or time-consuming to use — has become an obsession of the tech industry, accepted as gospel by many of the world’s largest companies.

The Case Against Quantum Computing - IEEE Spectrum

This is the best explanation of quantum computing I’ve read. I mean, it’s not like I can judge its veracity, but I could actually understand it.

What I Learned in Six Years at GDS ◆ 24 ways

Blogging about what you are working on is is really valuable for the writer because it forces you to think logically about what you are doing in order to tell a good story.

It’s also really valuable to blog about what you’ve learned, especially if you’ve made a mistake. It makes sure you’ve learned the lesson and helps others avoid making the same mistakes.

How Readable? | Clearleft

Cassie and I went to a great Async talk last night all about code readability, which was well-timed because it’s been on our minds all week. Cassie explains more in this post.

Browser diversity starts with us. | Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design

Hear, hear!

When one company decides which ideas are worth supporting and which aren’t, which access problems matter and which don’t, it stifles innovation, crushes competition, and opens the door to excluding people from digital experiences.

So how do we fight this? We, who are not powerful? We do it by doubling down on cross-browser testing. By baking it into the requirements on every project, large or small. By making sure our colleagues, bosses, and clients know what we’re doing and why.

Goodbye, EdgeHTML - The Mozilla Blog

Mozilla comes out with all guns blazing:

Microsoft is officially giving up on an independent shared platform for the internet. By adopting Chromium, Microsoft hands over control of even more of online life to Google.

Design process for the messy in-between » cog & sprocket

Designing your design process:

1. Know your strengths and focus resources on your weaknesses.
2. Learn to identify the immovable objects.
3. What has to be perfect now and what can be fixed later?

Big ol’ Ball o’ JavaScript | Brad Frost

Backend logic? JavaScript. Styles? We do that in JavaScript now. Markup? JavaScript. Anything else? JavaScript.

Historically, different languages suggested different roles. “This language does style.” “This language does structure.” But now it’s “This JavaScript does style.” “This JavaScript does structure.” “This JavaScript does database queries.”

Drupal’s commitment to accessibility | Dries Buytaert

Shots fired!

I’ve come to believe that accessibility is not something you do for a small group of people. Accessibility is about promoting inclusion. When the product you use daily is accessible, it means that we all get to work with a greater number and a greater variety of colleagues. Accessibility benefits everyone.

Microsoft Edge: Making the web better through more open source collaboration - Windows Experience BlogWindows Experience Blog

The marketing people at Microsoft are doing their best to sell us on the taste and nutritional value of their latest shit sandwich piece of news.

We will move to a Chromium-compatible web platform for Microsoft Edge on the desktop.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Introducing Background Fetch  |  Web  |  Google Developers

I’m going to have to read through this article by Jake a few times before I begin to wrap my head around this background fetch thing, but it looks like it would be perfect for something like the dConstruct Audio Archive, where fairly large files can be saved for offline listening.

Four Days Trapped at Sea With Crypto’s Nouveau Riche

A brilliantly written piece by Laurie Penny. Devestating, funny, and sad, featuring journalistic gold like this:

John McAfee has never been convicted of rape and murder, but—crucially—not in the same way that you or I have never been convicted of rape or murder.

WALL·E | Typeset In The Future

A deep dive into Pixar’s sci-fi masterpiece, featuring entertaining detours to communist propaganda and Disney theme parks.

While we Blink, we lose the Web

Losing [browser] engines is like losing languages. People may wish that everyone spoke the same language, they may claim it leads to easier understanding, but what people fail to consider is that this leads to losing all the culture and way of thought that that language produced. If you are a Web developer smiling and happy that Microsoft might be adopting Chrome, and this will make your work easier because it will be one less browser to test, don’t be! You’re trading convenience for diversity.

Risking a Homogeneous Web - TimKadlec.com

When’s the last time you can remember that a framework was given preferential treatment like AMP has been given? You could argue that it’s a format, like RSS, but no one has ever tried to convince developers to build their entire site in RSS.

I’m with Tim on his nervousness about Google’s ever-increasing power in the world of web standards.

Monocultures don’t benefit anyone.

Why You Should Never, Ever Use Quora – Waxy.org

Never mind their recent data breach—the reason to avoid Quora is that it’s a data roach motel.

All of Quora’s efforts to lock up its community’s contributions make it incredibly difficult to preserve when that they go away, which they someday will. If you choose to contribute to Quora, they’re actively fighting to limit future access to your own work.

Going Offline First (Video Series)

A five-part video series from Ire on how she built the “save for offline” functionality on her site.

The first one is about getting a set set up on Ghost so you can probably safely skip that one and go straight to the second video to get down to the nitty-gritty of the Cache API and service workers.

Create Landmark Timing Slides - Notist

This is something I do in my presentations. I have speaker notes scattered throughout the slide deck with the “beats” of the talk—10 minutes, 20 minutes, etc.

If I hit one of those slides and I’m ahead of schedule, I can go on a few more tangents. If I hit one of those slides and I’m behind schedule, I can cut to the chase. Either way, having those decision points spread throughout the talk really helps to keep things smooth.

One thing that can really help in the delivery is knowing if you’re running fast or slow before you crash into the end of your talk. That way you can make adjustments as you go along by glossing over smaller points to speed up or expanding more on your ideas to slow down.

Rams — Gary Hustwit

The newest Gary Hustwit film is a documentary about Dieter Rams, featuring plinkity music by Brian Eno.

Rams is a design documentary, but it’s also a rumination on consumerism, materialism, and sustainability.

Mistletoe Offline ◆ 24 ways

They let me write a 24 Ways article again. Will they never learn?

This one’s a whirlwind tour of using a service worker to provide a custom offline page, in the style of Going Offline.

By the way, just for the record, I initially rejected this article’s title out of concern that injecting a Cliff Richard song into people’s brains was cruel and unusual punishment. I was overruled.

Reluctant Gatekeeping: The Problem With Full Stack | HeydonWorks

The value you want form a CSS expert is their CSS, not their JavaScript, so it’s absurd to make JavaScript a requirement.

Absolutely spot on! And it cuts both ways:

Put CSS in JS and anyone who wishes to write CSS now has to know JavaScript. Not just JavaScript, but —most likely—the specific ‘flavor’ of JavaScript called React. That’s gatekeeping, first of all, but the worst part is the JavaScript aficionado didn’t want CSS on their plate in the first place.

Voxxed Thessaloniki 2018 - Opening Keynote - Taking Back The Web - YouTube

Here’s the talk I gave recently about indie web building blocks.

There’s fifteen minutes of Q&A starting around the 35 minute mark. People asked some great questions!

Barely Maps

Minimalist cartography.

One Time File

Drag and drop a file up to 400MB and share the URL without a log-in (the URLs are using What Three Words).