Link archive: May, 2019

Medium | Stackbit

This is very handy! Export your data from Ev’s blog and then import it into a static site generator of your choice.

You may have noticed the recent movement of people looking to get off Medium. Most of us are motivated by a desire to own our content, have data portability and get more control over how/where our content is displayed and monetized. Most importantly many of us consider our blog/site to be a core part of our online identity and while Medium offers a fantastic writing experience it sacrifices other important values. Luckily there’s a modern approach to running your blog which aligns with these ideals, its called the JAMstack and its all around us.

W3C TAG Ethical Web Principles

• There is one web
• The web should not cause harm to society
• The web must support healthy community and debate
• The web is for all people
• Security and privacy are essential
• The web must enable freedom of expression
• The web must make it possible for people to verify the information they see
• The web must enhance individuals’ control and power
• The web must be an environmentally sustainable platform
• The web is transparent
• The web is multi-browser, multi-OS and multi-device
• People should be able to render web content as they want

Characteristics of a Strong Performance Culture | TimKadlec.com

Tim looks at the common traits of companies that have built a good culture of web performance:

1. Top-down support
2. Data-driven
3. Clear targets
4. Automation
5. Knowledge sharing
6. Culture of experimentation
7. User focused, not tool focused

Few companies carry all of these characteristics, so it’s important not to get discouraged if you feel you’re missing a few of them. It’s a process and not a quick one. When I’ve asked folks at companies with all or most of these characteristics how long it took them to get to that point, the answer is typically in years, rarely months. Making meaningful changes to culture is much slower and far more difficult than making technical changes, but absolutely critical if you want those technical changes to have the impact you’re hoping for.

Is CSS Turing Complete? | Lara Schenck

This starts as a good bit of computer science nerdery, that kind of answers the question in the title:

Alone, CSS is not Turing complete. CSS plus HTML plus user input is Turing complete!

And so the takeaway here is bigger than just speculation about Turing completeness:

Given that CSS is a domain-specific language for styling user interface, this makes a lot of sense! CSS + HTML + Human = Turing complete.

At the end of that day, as CSS developers that is the language we really write. CSS is incomplete without HTML, and a styled interface is incomplete without a human to use it.

Decimal Clock

If we had ten hours in a day, instead of 24, and if each of these hours had 100 minutes instead of 60, and if every minute had 100 seconds, our clocks would look like this…

Zdog · Round, flat, designer-friendly pseudo-3D engine for canvas and SVG

Impressively lightweight and smooth!

Cake or death: AMP and the worrying power dynamics of the web | Andrew Betts

Andrew looks at AMP from a technical, UX, and commercial perspective. It looks pretty bad in all three areas. And the common thread is the coercion being applied to publishers.

But casting the web aside and pushing a new proprietary content format (which is optional, but see coercion) seems like an extraordinarily heavy handed way to address it. It’s like saying I see you have a graze on your knee so let’s chop off and replace your whole leg. Instead, we could use the carrot of a premium search result position (as AMP has done) and make it only possible to be there if your site is fast.

He’s absolutely right about how it sounds when the AMP team proudly talk about how many publishers are adopting their framework, as if the framework were actually standing on its own merits instead of being used to blackmail publishers:

It is utterly bizarre to me, akin to a street robber that has convinced himself that people just randomly like giving him their money and has managed to forget the fact that he’s holding a gun to their head.

Photo Editor : Pixlr.com - free image editing online

This is quite nifty: a fully-featured photo editing tool right in the browser, with no log-in or registration required.

Reducing motion with the picture element

Here’s a clever tiny lesson from Dave and Brad: you can use prefers-reduced-motion in the media attribute of the source element inside picture.

Plotters, pantsers, and user onboarding | Krystal Higgins

Krystal compares two styles of writing and applies them to onboarding.

Opinion | It’s 2059, and the Rich Kids Are Still Winning - The New York Times

The New York Times is publishing science-fictional op-eds. The first one is from Ted Chiang on the Gene Equality Project forty years in our future:

White supremacist groups have claimed that its failure shows that certain races are incapable of being improved, given that many — although by no means all — of the beneficiaries of the project were people of color. Conspiracy theorists have accused the participating geneticists of malfeasance, claiming that they pursued a secret agenda to withhold genetic enhancements from the lower classes. But these explanations are unnecessary when one realizes the fundamental mistake underlying the Gene Equality Project: Cognitive enhancements are useful only when you live in a society that rewards ability, and the United States isn’t one.

Obama’s Presidential Library Should Be Digital-First - The Atlantic

Given its origins and composition, the Obama library is already largely digital. The vast majority of the record his presidency left behind consists not of evocative handwritten notes, printed cable transmissions, and black-and-white photographs, but email, Word documents, and JPEGs. The question now is how to leverage its digital nature to make it maximally useful and used.

W3C and WHATWG to work together to advance the open Web platform | W3C Blog

It’s Armistice Day in the world of HTML:

WHATWG maintains the HTML and DOM Living Standards.

W3C stops independent publishing of a designated list of specifications related to HTML and DOM and instead will work to take WHATWG Review Drafts to W3C Recommendations.

It feels like the loop is finally being closed on what I wrote about in the opening chapter of HTML5 For Web Designers back in 2010.

Evolution of Webdesign

Funny because it’s true.

How Ireland became Europe’s data watchdog - BBC News

The coming GDPR storm:

Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner, Helen Dixon, is expected to circulate her decisions on some cases by July or August, with final rulings made by the end of the year.

(That’s my sister-in-law, that is.)

Bullet Time

Bullet comments, or 弹幕 (“danmu”), are text-based user reactions superimposed onto online videos: a visual commentary track to which anyone can contribute.

A fascinating article by Christina Xu on this overwhelming collaborative UI overlaid on Chinese video-sharing sites:

In the West, the Chinese internet is mostly depicted in negative terms: what websites and social platforms are blocked, what keywords are banned, what conversations and viral posts are scrubbed clean from the web overnight. This austere view is not inaccurate, but it leaves out what exactly the nearly 750 million internet users in China do get up to.

Take a look at bullet comments, and you’ll have a decent answer to that question. They represent the essence of Chinese internet culture: fast-paced and impish, playfully collaborative, thick with rapidly evolving inside jokes and memes. They are a social feature beloved by a generation known for being antisocial. And most importantly, they allow for a type of spontaneous, cumulative, and public conversation between strangers that is increasingly rare on the Chinese internet.

Plain Text vs. HTML Emails: Which Is Better? [New Data]

Spoiler: it’s plain text. Every time.

Nothing boosts opens and clicks as well as an old school, plain-text email.

I feel vindicated.

People say they prefer HTML emails ..but they actually prefer plain-text.

This seems like a plausable explanation:

Think about how you email colleagues and friends: Do you usually add images or use well-designed templates? Probably not, and neither does your audience. They’re used to using email to communicate in a personal way, so emails from companies that look more personal will resonate more.

Now get off my lawn, you pesky HTML-email lovin’ kids.

Hidden Heroines of Chaos: Ellen Fetter and Margaret Hamilton | Quanta Magazine

Before leading the software project that put men on the moon, Margaret Hamilton worked on the equations that led to chaos theory, followed by Mount Holyoke graduate, Ellen Fetter.

Night Mode with Mix Blend Mode: Difference

Here’s a clever shortcut to creating a dark mode by using mix-blend-mode: difference.

The Bit Player

Ooh! A documentary on Claude Shannon—exciting!

I just finished reading A Mind At Play, the (very good) biography of Claude Shannon, so this film feels very timely.

Mixing contemporary interviews, archival film, animation and dialogue drawn from interviews conducted with Shannon himself, The Bit Player tells the story of an overlooked genius who revolutionized the world, but never lost his childlike curiosity.

Playdate. A New Handheld Gaming System

Well, this is interesting. Panic, the little software company that could, are making a handheld gaming device. This is like the hardware equivalent of the indie web.

Bruce Lawson’s personal site  : Structured data and Google

Bruce wonders why Google seems to prefer separate chunks of JSON-LD in web pages instead of interwoven microdata attributes:

I strongly feel that metadata that is separated from the user-visible data associated with it highly susceptible to metadata partial copy-paste necrosis. User-visible text is also developer-visible text. When devs copy/ paste that, it’s very easy to forget to copy any associated metadata that’s not interleaved, leading to errors.

You got this. | Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design

I can relate to this.

Complexity Explorables

A cornucopia of interactive visualisations. You control the horizontal. You control the vertical. Networks, flocking, emergence, diffusion …it’s all here.

Accessible Icon Buttons — Sara Soueidan – Freelance-Front-End UI/UX Developer

Sara runs through the many ways of providing an accessible name to an icon button, backed up with Scott’s testing.

Our intern program is returning for 2019 | Clearleft

Know any graduates who’d like to take part in a fun (paid) three month scheme at Clearleft? Send ‘em our way.

Making Future Interfaces: Custom Properties - YouTube

Heydon cracks me up—his Patterns Day is going to have you crying with laughter; guaranteed!

Here he is talking about custom properties in CSS as part of his Making Future Interfaces video series.

Can “Indie” Social Media Save Us? | The New Yorker

This is a really great, balanced profile of the Indie Web movement. There’s thoughtful criticism alongside some well-deserved praise:

If we itemize the woes currently afflicting the major platforms, there’s a strong case to be made that the IndieWeb avoids them. When social-media servers aren’t controlled by a small number of massive public companies, the incentive to exploit users diminishes. The homegrown, community-oriented feel of the IndieWeb is superior to the vibe of anxious narcissism that’s degrading existing services.

Take Back Your Web - Tantek Çelik on Vimeo

Tantek’s barnstorming closing talk from Beyond Tellerrand. This is well worth 30 minutes of your time.

Own your domain. Own your content. Own your social connections. Own your reading experience. IndieWeb services, tools, and standards enable you to take back your web.

The Training Commission

Coming to your inbox soon:

The Training Commission is a speculative fiction email newsletter about the compromises and consequences of using technology to reckon with collective trauma. Several years after a period of civil unrest and digital blackouts in the United States, a truth and reconciliation process has led to a major restructuring of the federal government, major tech companies, and the criminal justice system.

Going Critical — Melting Asphalt

This is an utterly fascinating interactive description of network effects, complete with Nicky Case style games. Play around with the parameters and suddenly you can see things “going viral”:

We can see similar things taking place in the landscape for ideas and inventions. Often the world isn’t ready for an idea, in which case it may be invented again and again without catching on. At the other extreme, the world may be fully primed for an invention (lots of latent demand), and so as soon as it’s born, it’s adopted by everyone. In-between are ideas that are invented in multiple places and spread locally, but not enough so that any individual version of the idea takes over the whole network all at once. In this latter category we find e.g. agriculture and writing, which were independently invented ~10 and ~3 times respectively.

Play around somewhere and you start to see why cities are where ideas have sex:

What I learned from the simulation above is that there are ideas and cultural practices that can take root and spread in a city that simply can’t spread out in the countryside. (Mathematically can’t.) These are the very same ideas and the very same kinds of people. It’s not that rural folks are e.g. “small-minded”; when exposed to one of these ideas, they’re exactly as likely to adopt it as someone in the city. Rather, it’s that the idea itself can’t go viral in the countryside because there aren’t as many connections along which it can spread.

This really is a wonderful web page! (and it’s licensed under a Creative Commons Zero licence)

We tend to think that if something’s a good idea, it will eventually reach everyone, and if something’s a bad idea, it will fizzle out. And while that’s certainly true at the extremes, in between are a bunch of ideas and practices that can only go viral in certain networks. I find this fascinating.

What Does it Mean to Be “Full Stack”? | CSS-Tricks

I’m not trying to convince anyone they aren’t a full-stack developer or don’t deserve that particular merit badge — just that the web is a big place with divergent needs and ever-morphing stacks that all require different sets of skills.

Accessible Color Generator – Learn UI Design

This looks like a really useful tool for generating accessibile colour combinations from a starting colour.

Science Fiction Doesn’t Have to Be Dystopian | The New Yorker

Ted Chiang has new collection out‽ Why did nobody tell me‽

Okay, well, technically this is Joyce Carol Oates telling me. In any case …woo-hoo!!!

Web Bloat Score Calculator

Page web bloat score (WebBS for short) is calculated as follows:

WebBS = TotalPageSize / PageImageSize

Yes, this is a tongue-in-cheek somewhat arbitrary measurement, but it’s well worth reading through the rationale for it.

How can the image of a page be smaller than the page itself?

Eintrag “Take back your web – Tantek Çelik @ Beyond Tellerrand Conference, Düsseldorf 2019” beim Webrocker

Tom shares his thoughts on Tantek’s excellent closing talk at Beyond Tellerrand this week:

Yes, the message of this rather sombre closing talk of this year’s Beyond Tellerrand Conference Düsseldorf is important. Watch it. And then go out, take care of yourself and others, away from the screen. And then come back and publish your own stuff on your own site. Still not convinced? ok, then, please read Matthias Ott’s great article (published on his own site btw), and then start using your own site.

TIL (Today I learned) - Manuel Matuzović

At Clearleft, we’re always saying “Everything is a tiny lesson!”, so I love, love, love this bit of Manuel’s website where notes down short code snippets of little things he learns.

Lighthouse | Eric Bailey

What if accessibility were a ranking signal for Google search results?

Here’s a thought: what if Google put its thumb on the scale again, only this time for accessibility? What if it treated the Lighthouse accessibility score as a first-class ranking metric?

Welcome to Acccessible App | Accessible App

A very welcome project from Marcus Herrmann, documenting how to make common interaction patterns accessible in popular frameworks: Vue, React, and Angular.

A report from the AMP Advisory Committee Meeting – Terence Eden’s Blog

I completely agree with every single one of Terence’s recommendations here. The difference is that, in my case, they’re just hot takes, whereas he has actually joined the AMP Advisory Committee, joined their meetings, and listened to the concerns of actual publishers.

He finds:

• AMP isn’t loved by publishers
• AMP is not accessible
• No user research
• AMP spreads fake news
• Signed Exchanges are not the answer

There’s also a very worrying anti-competitive move by Google Search in only showing AMP results to users of Google Chrome.

I’ve been emailing with Paul from the AMP team and I’ve told him that I honestly think that AMP’s goal should be to make itself redundant …the opposite of the direction it’s going in.

As I said in the meeting - if it were up to me, I’d go “Well, AMP was an interesting experiment. Now it is time to shut it down and take the lessons learned back through a proper standards process.”

I suspect that is unlikely to happen. Google shows no sign of dropping AMP. Mind you, I thought that about Google+ and Inbox, so who knows!

Good point!

Humanizing Your Documentation - Full Talk - Speaker Deck

The slides from Carolyn’s talk at Beyond Tellerrand. The presentation is ostensibly about writing documentation, but I think it’s packed with good advice for writing in general.

Columbia & Elm; Fairfield & Gloucester. — Ethan Marcotte

Coffee talk with Ethan Marcotte. Today’s special: inclusivity.

I want to get there: to have nuanced discussions about text descriptions; I want to read poetry in alt text; to have our work’s success measured by how broadly it can be accessed; to create moving, beautiful experiences for people who may not use the web like I do.

IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf 2019 | 2 | Flickr

Today was a good day …and here are the very good photos.

Into the Personal-Website-Verse · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

There is one alternative to social media sites and publishing platforms that has been around since the early, innocent days of the web. It is an alternative that provides immense freedom and control: The personal website. It’s a place to write, create, and share whatever you like, without the need to ask for anyone’s permission.

A wonderful and inspiring call to arms for having your own website—a place to express yourself, and a playground, all rolled into one.

Building and maintaining your personal website is an investment that is challenging and can feel laborious at times. Be prepared for that. But what you will learn along the way does easily make up for all the effort and makes the journey more than worthwhile.

Brendan Dawes - Permission to Write Stuff

A beautiful post by Brendan, comparing the ease of publishing on the web to the original Flip camera:

Right now there’s a real renaissance of people getting back to blogging on their own sites again. If you’ve been putting it off, think about the beauty and simplicity of that red button, press it, and try and help make the web the place it was always meant to be.

HTML Symbols, Entities, Characters and Codes

For all your copying and pasting needs:

A delightful reference for HTML Symbols, Entities and ASCII Character Codes

Distinguishing cached vs. network HTML requests in a Service Worker | Trys Mudford

Less than 24 hours after I put the call out for a solution to this gnarly service worker challenge, Trys has come up with a solution.

Type in the digital era is a mess

Marcin explains why line height works differently in print and the web. Along the way, he hits upon this key insight about CSS:

Web also took away some of the control from typesetters. What in the print era were absolute rules, now became suggestions.

Remember that every line of CSS you write is a suggestion to the browser.

CSS-only chat

A truly monstrous async web chat using no JS whatsoever on the frontend.

This is …I mean …yes, but …it …I …

Understanding the Design Process through Avengers: Endgame - Speaker Deck

If this is a typical result, I think Khoi should do more last-minute talk prep.

Unraveling The JPEG

A deep, deep, deep dive into the JPEG format. Best of all, it’s got interactive explanations you can tinker with, a la Nicky Case or Bret Victor.

Test the impact of ads and third party scripts

This is a very useful new feature in Calibre, the performance monitoring tool. Now you can get data about just how much third-party scripts are affecting your site’s performance:

The best way of circumventing fear and anxiety around third party script performance is to capture metrics that clearly articulate their performance impact.

JavaScript pedalboard

Effects pedals in the browser, using the Web Audio API. Very cool!

Be sure to read Trys’s write-up too.

A Full Life - MIT Technology Review

A cli-fi short story by Paolo Bacigalupi.

A Conspiracy To Kill IE6

This is a fascinating story of psychological manipulation and internal politics. It leaves me feeling queasy about the amount of power wielded by individuals in one single organisation.

Create a responsive grid layout with no media queries, using CSS Grid - Andy Bell

CSS grid and custom properties really are a match made in heaven.

The Simplest Ways to Handle HTML Includes | CSS-Tricks

Chris looks at all the different ways of working around the fact that HTML doesn’t do transclusion. Those ways include (hah!) Scott’s super clever technique and Trys’s little Sergey.

The Web Developer’s Guide to DNS | RJ Zaworski

At Codebar the other night, I was doing an intro chat with some beginners. At one point I touched on DNS. This explanation is great for detailing what’s going on under the hood.

The Elements of Content Strategy — A Book Apart

Erin’s classic book is now available to read online for free!

AMP as your web framework – The AMP Blog

The bait’n’switch is laid bare. First, AMP is positioned as a separate format. Then, only AMP pages are allowed ranking in the top stories carousel. Now, let’s pretend none of that ever happened and act as though AMP is just another framework. Oh, and those separate AMP pages that you made? Turns out that was all just “transitional” and you’re supposed to make your entire site in AMP now.

I would genuinely love to know how the Polymer team at Google feel about this pivot. Everything claimed in this blog post about AMP is actually true of Polymer (and other libraries of web components that don’t have the luxury of bribing developers with SEO ranking).

Some alternative facts from the introduction:

AMP isn’t another “channel” or “format” that’s somehow not the web.

Weird …because that’s exactly how it was sold to us (as a direct competitor to similar offerings from Apple and Facebook).

It’s not an SEO thing.

That it outright false. Ask any company actually using AMP why they use it.

It’s not a replacement for HTML.

And yet, the article goes on to try convince you to replace HTML with AMP.