Wouldn’t it be great if every component in your design system had accessibility acceptance criteria? Paul has some good advice for putting those together:
- Start with accessibility needs
- Don’t be too generic
- Don’t define the solution
- Iterate criteria
I’ve often said that the goal of a good library should be to make itself redundant. jQuery is the poster child for that, and this article points to web components as the way to standardise what’s already happening in JavaScript frameworks:
Remember when
document.querySelectorfirst got wide browser support and started to end jQuery’s ubiquity? It finally gave us a way to do natively what jQuery had been providing for years: easy selection of DOM elements. I believe the same is about to happen to frontend frameworks like Angular and React.
The article goes on to give a good technical overview of custom elements, templates, and the Shadow DOM, but I was surprised to see it making reference to the is syntax for extending existing HTML elements—I’m pretty sure that that is, sadly, dead in the water.
In some cases, it’s entirely valid to explore new products and technologies, but in others, our striving for novelty becomes the driving factor for abandoning perfectly suitable solutions under the umbrella of technical debt.
Just because a technology is a few years old and possibly frustrating in some cases doesn’t mean you’re in technical debt. We need to stop projecting our annoyances as pitfalls of technological or design choices.
When you greet a stranger, look at his shoes.
Keep your money in your shoes.
Put your trouble behind.
When you greet a stranger, look at her hands.
Keep your money in your hands.
Put your travel behind.