Link archive: August, 2020

The land before modern APIs – Increment: APIs

This is a wonderful tale of spelunking into standards from Darius Kazemi—I had no idea that HTTP status codes have their origin in a hastily made decision in the days of ARPANET.

20 people got together at MIT in 1972 for a weekend workshop. On the second day, a handful of people in a breakout session decided it would be a good idea to standardize error messages between two services for transferring data, even though those two services had not necessarily planned to speak to one another. One thing led to another, and now 404 is synonymous with “I can’t find the thing.”

This story is exactly the kind of layering of technologies that I was getting at in the first chapter of Resilient Web Design.

HTTP status codes are largely an accident of history. The people who came up with them didn’t plan on defining a numerical namespace that would last half a century or work its way into popular culture. You see this pattern over and over in the history of technology.

mnot’s blog: RFC8890: The Internet is for End Users

RFC 8890 maybe the closest thing we’ve got to a Hippocratic oath right now.

A community that agrees to principles that are informed by shared values can use them to navigate hard decisions.

Also worth noting:

Many discussions influenced this document, both inside and outside of the IETF and IAB. In particular, Edward Snowden’s comments regarding the priority of end users at IETF 93 and the HTML5 Priority of Constituencies were both influential.

The radium craze | Eric Bailey

The radioactive properties of React.

The Thing With Leading in CSS · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

An excellent explanation of the new leading-trim and text-edge properties in CSS, complete with an in-depth history of leading in typography.

(I’m very happy to finally have a permanent link to point to about this, rather than a post on Ev’s blog.)

Why you should hire a frontend developer - Technology in government

This is a really good description of the role of a front-end developer.

That’s front end, not full stack.

Robin Rendle ･ A Rocket-Powered Jumbo Jet

Before the hagiographical praise for working with an iPad Pro, Robin nails the fundamental shape of the design process:

I had forgotten that there are two modes of design, just as there is in writing.

The first mode is understanding the problem, getting a ten-thousand foot view of the land. It’s getting people to acknowledge that this really is the problem we need to agree upon. This work needs to happen in a sketchbook in the form of messy, back-of-the-napkin drawings or in writing. All this helps you to form a proper argument and focus your thoughts.

The second mode of design is taking that ten-thousand foot view and zooming all the way in to the hairs on the back of the rabbit; figuring out the precise UI and components, the copywriting, the animations, the everything else. This should be done in a design tool like Figma or Sketch. And this is when we should be talking about color palettes, icons, design systems, and consistency.

The problem with almost all design work is that first phase never really happens. People don’t take that ten thousand foot view of the problem and are focusing instead on the pixels; they’re trapped by the system they know too well.

Yes, yes, yes! Spot on:

I think people get stuck in that second mode because productivity in design is often tied to “how many pages or frames did I design today?” when productivity should instead be thought of as “how did my understanding of the problem change?

Revisiting Adaptive Design, a lost design movement (Interconnected)

This sounds like seamful design:

How to enable not users but adaptors? How can people move from using a product, to understanding how it hangs together and making their own changes? How do you design products with, metaphorically, screws not nails?

Make Me Think | Jim Nielsen’s Weblog

The removal of all friction should’t be a goal. Making things easy and making things hard should be a design tool, employed to aid the end user towards their loftiest goals.

Autonomy Online: A Case For The IndieWeb — Smashing Magazine

A wonderful introduction to the indie web—Ana really conveys her sense of excitement!

The difference between aria-label and aria-labelledby - Tink - Léonie Watson

A handy reminder from Léonie (though remember that the best solution is to avoid the problem in the first place—if you avoid using ARIA, do that).

Service Workers | Go Make Things

Chris Ferdinandi blogs every day about the power of vanilla JavaScript. For over a week now, his daily posts have been about service workers. The cumulative result is this excellent collection of resources.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture | Typeset In The Future

The latest edition in this wonderful series of science-fictional typography has some truly twisty turbolift tangents.

Make Your Own Dev Tool | Amber’s Website

I love bookmarklets! I use them every day (I’m using one right now to post this link). Amber does a great job explaining what they are and how you can make one. I really like the way she frames them as your own personal dev tools!

radEventListener: a Tale of Client-side Framework Performance | CSS-Tricks

Excellent research by Jeremy Wagner comparing the performance impact of React, Preact, and vanilla JavaScript. The results are simultaneously shocking and entirely unsurprising.

The Just in Case Mindset in CSS

Examples of defensive coding for CSS. This is an excellent mindset to cultivate!

Web Technologies and Syntax | Jim Nielsen’s Weblog

Syntactic sugar can’t help you if you don’t understand how things work under the hood. Optional chaining in JavaScript and !important in CSS are ways of solving your immediate problem …but unless you know what you’re doing, they’re probably going to create new problems.

Solid Start

A four-point checklist for inclusive design:

Are you a person that makes digital things for other people? Awesome—because this page is all about making things for people. There are four ways you can improve your creation for everybody. All four are testable, fixable and they improve usability for everybody.

The Clearleft podcast and the decline of design · Paul Robert Lloyd

Now this is the kind of response I was hoping to stir up with the first season of the Clearleft podcast!

With echos of design’s subjugation reverberating across all six episodes, this first season inadvertently told the story of how my profession has been captured by a desire to serve business interests above all others, while being disarmed by its tendency for introspection and need to be recognised.

Can digital design redeem itself? I hope so. Maybe in the next season of the Clearleft podcast, we’ll find out how.

2020: an isolation odyssey on Vimeo

What a brilliant homage! And what a spot-on pop-cultural reference for The Situation.

2020: an isolation odyssey is a reenactment of the iconic finale of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). Restaged in the context of home quarantine, the journey through time adapts to the mundane dramas of self-isolation–poking fun at the navel-gazing saga of life alone and indoors.

About Feeds | Getting Started guide to web feeds/RSS

Matt made this website to explain RSS to people who are as-ye unfamilar with it.

Marxian Alienation And Web Development: HeydonWorks

As a web designer or developer burnout comes calling when you try to do good work, but you’re not allowed.

• You want to make the app more performant; your boss wants to fill it full of third party trackers
• You want to make the app more accessible; your boss wants you to focus on the ‘able market’ instead
• You want to word the app more clearly; your boss wants to trick users with misleading language

If you are a good developer, and a good person, asked to do shit work, you will burn out.

Гибкий веб-дизайн

Well, this is just wonderful! Students from Moscow Coding School are translating Resilient Web Design into Russian. Three chapters done so far!

This is literally the reason why I licensed the book with a Creative Commons Attribution‐ShareAlike license.

Project Orbital Ring

An Orbital Ring System as an alternative to a space elevator.

Representing nothing short of the most ambitious project in the history of space exploration and exploitation, the Orbital Ring System is more or less what you would imagine it to be, a gargantuan metal ring high above the Earth, spanning the length of its 40,000 kilometer-long diameter.

If I got made king of web browsers, here’s what I’d do (Interconnected)

I guess, because browser-makers tend to be engineers so they do engineering-type things like making the browser an app-delivery platform able to run compiled code. Or fight meaningless user experience battles like hiding the URL, or hiding View Source – both acts that don’t really help early users that much, but definitely impede the user path from being a consumer to being a fully-fledged participant/maker.

Beyond Smart Rocks

Claire L. Evans on computational slime molds and other forms of unconvential computing that look beyond silicon:

In moments of technological frustration, it helps to remember that a computer is basically a rock. That is its fundamental witchcraft, or ours: for all its processing power, the device that runs your life is just a complex arrangement of minerals animated by electricity and language. Smart rocks.

Chapter 1: Birth | CSS-Tricks

This is wonderful! A whole series on the history of the web from Jay Hoffman, the creator of the similarly-themed newsletter and timeline.

This first chapter is right up my alley, looking at the origins of hypertext, the internet, and the World Wide Web.

Rainbow spacecraft and how humanity might end (Interconnected)

I too am a member of The British Interplanetary Society and I too recommend it.

(Hey Matt, if you really want to go down the rabbit hole of solar sails, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed of Centauri Dreams—Paul Gilster is big into solar sails!)

In a Land Before Dev Tools | Amber’s Website

A great little history lesson from Amber—ah, Firebug!

The Resiliency of the Internet | Jim Nielsen’s Weblog

An ode to the network architecture of the internet:

I believe the DNA of resiliency built into the network manifests itself in the building blocks of what’s transmitted over the network. The next time somebody calls HTML or CSS dumb, think about that line again:

That simplicity, almost an intentional brainlessness…is a key to its adaptability.

It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.

Yes! I wish more web developers would take cues from the very medium they’re building atop of.

Kissa. Book. Launch. — Roden Explorers Archive

Own. Your. Nook. There’s power in owning your nook of the ‘net — your domain name, your design, your archives — and it’s easier than ever to do so, and run a crowdfunding campaign at the same time.

The People’s Space Odyssey: 2010: The Year We Make Contact

This is an epic deep dive into the 1984 sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

For all its flaws, I have a soft spot for this film (and book).

The amazing power of service workers | Go Make Things

So, why would you want to use a service worker? Here are some cool things you can do with it.

Chris lists some of the ways a service worker can enhance user experience.

The things of everyday design || Matthew Ström: designer & developer

The evolution of affordances on the web:

The URL for a page goes at the top. Text appears in a vertically scrolling column. A dropdown menu has a downward-pointing triangle next to it. Your mouse cursor is a slanted triangle with a tail, and when you hover over a link it looks like Mickey Mouse’s glove.

Most of these affordances don’t have any relationship to the physical characteristics of the interaction they mediate. But remove them from a website, application, or interface, and users get disoriented, frustrated, and unproductive.

this vs that - What is the difference between ___ and ___ in the front-end development?

A handy reference for explaining the differences between confusingly similar bits of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.