Link archive: May, 2021

No, Utility Classes Aren’t the Same As Inline Styles | frontstuff

This is supposed to be a defence of utility classes …but it’s actually a great explanation of why classes in general are a great mechanism for styling.

I don’t think anyone has ever seriously suggested using inline styles—the actual disagreement is about how ludicrously rigid and wasteful the class names dictated by something like Tailwind are. When people criticise those classes they aren’t advocating for inline styles—they’re advocating for better class names and making more use of the power of the class selector in CSS, not less.

Anyway, if you removed every instance of the word “utility” from this article, it would still work.

Principles of User Privacy (PUP)

This looks like an excellent proposal for agreement around discussing privacy on the web.

The section on user agents resonates with what I wrote recently about not considering Google Chrome a user agent any more:

Its fiduciary duties include:

• Duty of Protection
• Duty of Discretion
• Duty of Honesty
• Duty of Loyalty

Doc Searls Weblog · How the cookie poisoned the Web

Lou’s idea was just for a server to remember the last state of a browser’s interaction with it. But that one move—a server putting a cookie inside every visiting browser—crossed a privacy threshold: a personal boundary that should have been clear from the start but was not.

Once that boundary was crossed, and the number and variety of cookies increased, a snowball started rolling, and whatever chance we had to protect our privacy behind that boundary, was lost.

The Doctor is incensed.

At this stage of the Web’s moral devolution, it is nearly impossible to think outside the cookie-based fecosystem.

Should DevTools teach the CSS cascade?

In a break with Betteridge’s law, I think the answer here is “yes.”

Some long-winded thoughts on privacy policies and consent popups — Piper Haywood

A deep dive into GDPR.

Got Google Analytics on your site? You should probably read this.

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The fact that so many people publish their thoughts and share knowledge, is something I’ve always loved about the web. Whether it is practical stuff about how to solve a coding issue or some kind of opinion… everyone’s brain is wired differently. It may resonate, it may not, that’s also fine.

Dribbble first 5k users.

Turns out I was the twelfth ever user of Dribbble—ah, memories!

Google AMP is dead! AMP pages no longer get preferential treatment in Google search

I don’t know if AMP is quite dead yet, but it feels like it would be a mercy to press a pillow down on its face.

Google’s stated intention was to rank sites that load faster but they ended up ranking sites that use AMP instead. And the largest advertising company in the world dictating how websites can be built is not a way to a healthier and more open web.

Learn CSS

This is a great (free!) course on learning CSS from the basics up. Nicely-pitched explanations with plenty of examples.

Faster Integration with Web Components - Cloud Four

It’s good to hear stories like this—makes me feel like the slow-burn of the theoretical benefits of web components is starting to spark and flame up.

Container Queries in Web Components | Max Böck

The point of this post is to show how nicely container queries can play with web components, but I want to also point out how nice the design of the web component is here: instead of just using an empty custom element, Max uses progressive enhancement to elevate the markup within the custom element.

Data isn’t oil, so what is it? - How To Measure Ghosts

The discussions around data policy still feel like they are framing data as oil - as a vast, passive resource that either needs to be exploited or protected. But this data isn’t dead fish from millions of years ago - it’s the thoughts, emotions and behaviours of over a third of the world’s population, the largest record of human thought and activity ever collected. It’s not oil, it’s history. It’s people. It’s us.

Can I :has()

This would be such a great addition to CSS—a parent/ancestor selector!

With the combined might of :has(), :not(), nth-child(), and calc(), CSS has become a powerful language for specifying rules to account for all kinds of situations.

Office politics: A working letter

Here’s the thing: we need politics in the workplace. Politics—that is, the act of negotiating our relationships and obligations to each other—is critical to the work of building and sustaining democracy. And the workplace isn’t separate from democracy—it is democracy. It is as much a part of the democratic system as a neighborhood association or a town council, as a library or youth center or food bank. By the very nature of the outsized role that work plays in our lives, it’s where most of us have the potential to make the biggest impact on how we—and our families and communities—live.

Mandy, as always, hits the nail on the head.

When we talk about politics belonging outside the workplace, we reduce democracy to an extracurricular instead of a core part of our lives. Democracy cannot be sustained by annual visits to the ballot box—it isn’t something we have, it’s something we practice. Like all things that require practice, if you don’t practice it often, you lose it.

Google Workspace Updates: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering: this may impact some Chrome extensions

Yikes!

We’re updating the way Google Docs renders documents. Over the course of the next several months, we’ll be migrating the underlying technical implementation of Docs from the current HTML-based rendering approach to a canvas-based approach to improve performance and improve consistency in how content appears across different platforms.

I’ll be very interested to see how they handle the accessibility of this move.

Add support for defining a theme color for both light & dark modes (prefers color scheme)

There’s a good discussion here (kicked off by Jen) about providing different theme-color values in a web app manifest to match prefers-color-scheme in media queries.

The Linear Oppression of Note-taking Apps

I think this explains why Kinopio resonates with me.

Pixelhop new website walk through

A case study with equal emphasis on animation and performance.

Design for reading: tips for optimizing content for Reader modes and reading apps

The more I consume content in reading apps, the more I am reminded of the importance and the power of progressive enhancement as a strategy to create resilient and malleable experiences that work for everyone, regardless of how they choose to consume our content.

Top stuff from Sara here!

We have a tendency to always make an assumption about how our readers are reading our content—probably in the browser, with our fancy styles applied to it. But if we make a habit out of thinking about the Web in layers and CSS as an enhancement on top of the content layer, then we can start optimizing and enhancing our users’ reading experiences regardless of their context.

Thinking about the different ways in which users access the Web only shines light on the importance of a progressively enhanced approach to building for the Web. The more we think about the Web in layers and try to improve the experience of one layer before moving to the next, the more resilient experiences we can create. That’s what the essence of progressive enhancement is about.

The web we choose to build. Principles for user-centred front-end development by Colin Oakley

I was really chuffed to see some posts of mine referenced in this rather excellent piece about design principles for front-end development.

Building a resilient frontend using progressive enhancement - Service Manual - GOV.UK

Using progressive enhancement means your users will be able to do what they need to do if any part of the stack fails.

What a terrific short guide to sensible web development!

• Start with HTML
  • Using interactive elements
  • Adding the extras
  • Building more complex services
  • Testing your service
  • Do not assume users turn off CSS or JavaScript
  • Case studies and related guides

Simple things are complicated: making a show password option - Technology in government

This is a great deep dive into a single component, a password toggle in this case. It shows how assumptions are challenged and different circumstances are considered in order to make it truly resilient.

Episode 012 - Designing Resilience with Jeremy Keith by The Object-Oriented UX Podcast

I enjoyed this conversation with Sophia (our chat starts around the 11 minute mark) prompted by Resilient Web Design.

Signal >> Blog >> The Instagram ads Facebook won’t show you

The way most of the internet works today would be considered intolerable if translated into comprehensible real world analogs, but it endures because it is invisible.

You can try to use Facebook’s own tools to make the invisible visible but that kind of transparency isn’t allowed.

Stay Curious “Sci-Fi” with Jeremy Keith and Steph Troeth – 16 Jun 2021

I’m excited to do this event with Steph! We’ll be talking about science fiction on the evening of Wednesday, June 16th.

Tickets are from just €10 so grab yours now!

Performance-testing the Google I/O site - JakeArchibald.com

Modern web development:

Imagine you went to a restaurant, took a seat, and 20 minutes later you still haven’t been given a menu. You ask where it is, and you’re told “oh, we’re currently cooking you everything you might possibly ask for. Then we’ll give you the menu, you’ll pick something, and we’ll be able to give you it instantly, because it’ll all be ready”.

Single page apps, ladies and gentlemen.