Link archive: November, 2020

Why The Web Is Such A Mess - YouTube

Tom gives a succinct history of the ongoing arms race between trackers and end users.

Rendering Spectrum | CSS-Tricks

Sensible advice from Chris:

So what’s the best rendering method? Whatever works best for you, but perhaps a hierarchy like this makes some general sense:

1. Static HTML as much as you can
2. Edge functions over static HTML so you can do whatever dynamic things
3. Server generated HTML what you have to after that
4. Client-side render only what you absolutely have to

Six uses for Huffduffer • The Pilcrow

I somehow missed this post from last year by Karin Taliga on different ways of using Huffduffer:

• As an Instapaper but for audio
• Listen to own recordings in a podcast player
• Create a podcast feed from youtube videos
• Gather your podcast guest appearances in one place
• Share a custom curated playlist
• Share supplemental material to an online course you have

Static sites, slack and scrollytelling. | Clearleft

Cassie’s enthusiasm for fun and interesting SVG animation shines through in her writing!

The Organic Web - Jim Nielsen’s Weblog

Growing—that’s a word I want to employ when talking about my personal sites online. Like a garden, I’m constantly puttering around in them. Sometimes I plow and sow a whole new feature for a site. Sometimes I just pick weeds.

I like this analogy. It reminds me of the the cooking analogy that others have made.

Most of my favorite websites out there are grown—homegrown in fact. They are corners of the web where some unique human has been nurturing, curating, and growing stuff for years. Their blog posts, their links, their thoughts, their aesthetic, their markup, their style, everything about their site—and themselves—shows growth and evolution and change through the years. It’s a beautiful thing, a kind of artifact that could never be replicated or manufactured on a deadline.

This part of the web, this organic part, stands in start contrast to the industrial web where websites are made and resources extracted.

As Antitrust Pressure Mounts, Google to Pull Back Benefit to News Sites That Adopted Its Preferred Mobile Technology – The Markup

More great reporting from Adrianne Jeffries at The Markup.

An engineer at a major news publication who asked not to be named because the publisher had not authorized an interview said Google’s size is what led publishers to use AMP.

Standardizing `select` And Beyond: The Past, Present And Future Of Native HTML Form Controls — Smashing Magazine

While a handful of form controls can be easily styled by CSS, like the button element, most form controls fall into a bucket of either requiring hacky CSS or are still unable to be styled at all by CSS.

Despite form controls no longer taking a style or technical dependency on the operating system and using modern rendering technology from the browser, developers are still unable to style some of the most used form control elements such as select. The root of this problem lies in the way the specification was originally written for form controls back in 1995.

Stephanie goes back in time to tell the history of form controls on the web, and how that history has led to our current frustrations:

The current state of working with controls on the modern web is that countless developer hours are being lost to rewriting controls from scratch, as custom elements due to a lack of flexibility in customizability and extensibility of native form controls. This is a massive gap in the web platform and has been for years. Finally, something is being done about it.

Amen!

The Browser Company

It looks like something interesting is going on here. A new browser? It’s hard to tell from the vague marketing copy, but I suspect we’re not looking at a new rendering engine here, but perhaps a new browser interface.

Keepers of the Secrets | The Village Voice

A deeply fascinating look into the world of archives and archivists:

The reason an archivist should know something, Lannon said, is to help others to know it. But it’s not really the archivist’s place to impose his knowledge on anyone else. Indeed, if the field could be said to have a creed, it’s that archivists aren’t there to tell you what’s important. Historically momentous documents are to be left in folders next to the trivial and the mundane — because who’s to say what’s actually mundane or not?

Goodbye.Domains

A graveyard for good domains you let expire.

The Long Now Foundation: “Nadia Eghbal Talk”

This is a great talk by Nadia Eghbal on software, open source, maintenance, and of course, long-term thinking.

Daily diary for April 24, 2021 – A Whole Lotta Nothing

A blog post from the future. I’m on board with the subgenre of speculative blogging.

Zonelets Home

Zonelets is a simple HTML blogging engine with scrappy, DIY spirit! I made it because I really want everyone to blog, but I felt that the existing options were generally overcomplicated and commercially-focused in a way that made web creativity feel intimidating and arcane.

I love the philosophy behind this blogging tool, which actively encourages you to learn a little bit of HTML:

Plenty of services can help you to “create a professional-looking website without writing a single line of code.” Now, thanks to Zonelets, you can create an UNPROFESSIONAL-looking website by writing NUMEROUS lines of code!

The Core Web Vitals hype train

Goodhart’s Law applied to Google’s core web vitals:

If developers start to focus solely on Core Web Vitals because it is important for SEO, then some folks will undoubtedly try to game the system.

Personally, my beef with core web vitals is that they introduce even more uneccessary initialisms (see, for example, Harry’s recent post where he uses CWV metrics like LCP, FID, and CLS—alongside TTFB and SI—to look at PLPs, PDPs, and SRPs. I mean, WTF?).

CSS Stats

A handy tool for getting an overview of your site’s CSS:

CSS Stats provides analytics and visualizations for your stylesheets. This information can be used to improve consistency in your design, track performance of your app, and diagnose complex areas before it snowballs out of control.

Playing with Envision Glasses - Tink - Léonie Watson

The street finds its own uses for things, and it may be that the use for Google Glass is assistive technology. Here’s Léonie’s in-depth hands-on review of Envision Glasses, based on Google Glass.

The short wait whilst the image is processed is mitigated by the fact a double tap is all that’s needed to request another scene description, and being able to do it just by looking at what I’m interested in and tapping a couple of times on my glasses is nothing short of happiness in a pair of spectacles.

Introducing Simple Search – The Markup

A browser extension that will highlight the actual search results on a Google search results page—as opposed to Google’s own crap. Handy!

Or you can use Duck Duck Go.

Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data

I like the way that Simon is liberating his data from silos and making it work for him.

Chris Ferdinandi: The Lean Web – WordPress.tv

This video of Chris’s presentation is well worth watching:

The web in 2020 is a bloated and over-engineered mess! Many modern web development “best practices” are making the web worse. This thought-provoking talk shares ideas on how to fix the problem as it explores an alternate set of best practices.

An Ocean of Books

What you see is the big map of a sea of literature, one where each island represents a single author, and each city represents a book. The map represents a selection of 113 008 authors and 145 162 books.

This is a poetic experiment where we hope you will get lost for a while.

Coded Bias Official Trailer on Vimeo

Coded Bias follows MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini’s startling discovery that many facial recognition technologies fail more often on darker-skinned faces, and delves into an investigation of widespread bias in artificial intelligence.

The Great Distractor — Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy

James has penned a sweeping arc from the The Mechanical Turk, Sesame Street, and Teletubbies to Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

Web Platform Design Principles

Principles behind the design of web APIs:

• Put user needs first (Priority of Constituencies)
• It should be safe to visit a web page
• Trusted user interface should be trustworthy
• Ask users for meaningful consent when appropriate
• Support the full range of devices and platforms (Media Independence)

I should add these to my collection.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Timing for bringing page experience to Google Search

Good news: as of May 2021, page speed (or core web vitals, if you must) will be a ranking factor in Google Search.

Even better news: at the same time, Google AMP will lose its unfairly privileged position in the top stories carousel. Hopefully this marks the beginning of the end for Google’s failed experiment in forcing publishers to use their tech.

All Them Switches: Responsive Elements and More

Container queries are like buses: you’re waiting for ages and then two come along at once.

This switch() syntax looks interesting.

Plausible Analytics | Simple, privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics

Another alternative to Google Analytics—nice and lightweight too!

An opinionated guide to accessibility testing /// Iain Bean

0. First impressions
1. The Tab key
2. Automated testing tools
3. Screen reader testing
4. Next steps

Not so short note on aria-label usage – Big Table Edition – HTML Accessibility

This is a very handy table of elements from Steve of where aria-label can be applied.

Like, for example, not on a div element.

HTML Forms: How (and Why) to Prevent Double Form Submissions – Bram.us

I can see how this would be good to have fixed at the browser level.

Operator Lookup - Search JavaScript operators · Josh W Comeau

Operators in JavaScript—handy! I didn’t know about most of these.

Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet | MIT Technology Review

Some suggested that the digital garden was a backlash to the internet we’ve become grudgingly accustomed to, where things go viral, change is looked down upon, and sites are one-dimensional. Facebook and Twitter profiles have neat slots for photos and posts, but enthusiasts of digital gardens reject those fixed design elements. The sense of time and space to explore is key.

Intent to Prototype: Container Queries

Hell has frozen over! Container queries might actually happen!

Webbed Briefs

Heydon is back on his bullshit, making extremely entertaining and occassionally inappropriate short videos about web stuff.

WEBBED BRIEFS are brief videos about the web, its technologies, and how to make the most of them. They’re packed with information, fun times™, and actual goats. Yes, it’s a vlog, but it isn’t on Youtube. Unthinkable!

The pilot episode is entitled “What Is ARIA Even For?”

Copying is the way design works || Matthew Ström: designer & developer

A people’s history of copying, from art to software.

Designers copy. We steal like great artists. But when we see a copy of our work, we’re livid.

Presentable #96: The Employee-Owned Design Agency - Relay FM

If you want to know more about Clearleft’s new employee-ownserhip model, Andy tells Jeff all about it in this huffduffable hour of audio.

Painting With the Web · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

By using static wireframes and static layouts, by separating design and development, we are often limiting our ability to have that creative dialogue with the Web and its materials. We are limiting our potential for playful exploration and for creating surprising and novel solutions. And, most importantly, we are limiting our ability to make conscious, well-informed decisions going forward. By adding more and more layers of abstraction, we are breaking the feedback loop of the creative process.