Link archive: June, 2021

Solutionism

Progressive enhancement in meatspace:

IRL progressive enhancement is quite common when you think of it. You can board planes with paper boarding cards, but also with technology like QR codes and digital wallets. You can pay for a coffee with cash, card or phone. The variety serves diverse sets of people. Just like in web development, not dismissing the baseline lets us cover use cases we didn’t know existed. It is fragile, though: some manager somewhere probably has a fantasy about replacing everything with fancy tech and fancy tech only.

Whatever Happened to UI Affordances? – Terence Eden’s Blog

Flat, minimalist, clean, material - whatever you want to call it - is an annoying antipattern. Computers are here to make life easier for humans. Removing affordances is just a nasty thing to do to your users.

A Lifetime of Systems Thinking - The Systems Thinker

I don’t agree with all of the mythbusting in this litany of life lessons, but this one is spot on:

The best thing that can be done to a problem is to solve it. False. The best thing that can be done to a problem is to dissolve it, to redesign the entity that has it or its environment so as to eliminate the problem.

Remember that next time you’re tempted to solve a problem by throwing more code at it.

Organize your CSS declarations alphabetically – Eric Bailey

Until there is movement on developers taking CSS more seriously and understanding its full capabilities, we are caught in an awkward loop where introducing too much complexity in your project’s CSS will do more harm than good.

Robin Rendle ･ The web is too damn complex

The modern web wouldn’t be possible without big ol’ JavaScript frameworks, but—but—much of the web today is held back because of these frameworks. There’s a lot of folks out there that think that every website must use their framework of choice even when it’s not necessary. And although those frameworks solve a great number of problems, they introduce a substantial number of trade-offs; performance issues you have to deal with, complex build processes you have to learn, and endless dependency updates that can introduce bugs.

Sans Bullshit Sans — Leveraging the synergy of ligatures

As part of my content buddying process, I am henceforth going to typeset all drafts in this font. I just tested it with this sentence:

We can leverage the synergy of a rich immersive user paradigm shift.

Design System Day, Thursday 22 July 2021

This looks interesting: a free one-day Barcamp-like event online all about design systems for the public sector, organised by the Gov.uk design system team:

If you work on public sector services and work with design systems, you’re welcome to attend. We even have some tickets for people who do not work in the public sector. If you love design systems, we’re happy to have you!

Design for Safari 15 - WWDC 2021 - Videos - Apple Developer

There’s a nice shout-out from Jen for Resilient Web Design right at the 19:20 mark.

It would be nice if the add-to-homescreen option weren’t buried so deep though.

My 3 Greatest Revelations - Issue 102: Hidden Truths - Nautilus

Caleb Scharf:

Wait a minute. There is no real difference between the dataome—our externalized world of books and computers and machines and robots and cloud servers—and us. That means the dataome is a genuine alternative living system here on the planet. It’s dependent on us, but we’re dependent on it too. And for me that was nerve-wracking. You get to the point of looking at it and going, Wow, the alien world is here, and it’s right under our nose, and we’re interacting with it constantly.

I like this Long Now view of our dataome:

We are constantly exchanging information that enables us to build a library for survival on this planet. It’s proven an incredibly successful approach to survival. If I can remember what happened 1,000 years ago, that may inform me for success today.

Sci-Fi & Me – Jeremy Keith – Stay Curious Café by beyond tellerrand - YouTube

Here’s the video of the talk I gave on Wednesday evening all about my relationship with reading science fiction. There are handy chapter markers if you want to jump around.

In search of the new

Robin asked a question:

What is a work of science fiction (a book, not a movie, thanks) that could only have been written in the last ten years? AND/OR, what’s a work of science fiction that hinges on experi­ences and feelings new in the last ten years? AND/OR, what’s a work of science fiction that repre­sents the current leading edge of the genre’s specu­la­tive and stylistic devel­op­ment?

The responses make for interesting reading, especially ahead of Wednesday’s event.

Introducing Astro: Ship Less JavaScript

In Astro, you compose your website using UI components from your favorite JavaScript web framework (React, Svelte, Vue, etc). Astro renders your entire site to static HTML during the build. The result is a fully static website with all JavaScript removed from the final page.

YES!

When a component needs some JavaScript, Astro only loads that one component (and any dependencies). The rest of your site continues to exist as static, lightweight HTML.

That’s the way to do it! Make the default what’s best for users (unlike most JavaScript frameworks that prioritise developer convenience at the expense of the end user experience).

This is a tagline I can get behind:

Ship Less JavaScript

mmm.page

This is a fun drag’n’drop way to make websites. And I like the philosophy:

Websites shouldn’t all look the same. We prefer campy, kitschy, messy, imperfect.

Robin Rendle ･ Everything that books ought to be

I’m with Robin. Hardback books are infuriating, not least because of the ridiculous business model of only publishing hardback versions to begin with, and only releasing a paperback when you’ve lost all interest in reading the damn book.

Real-world CSS vs. CSS-in-JS performance comparison - Tomas Pustelnik’s personal website

CSS-in-JS can have a noticeable impact on your webpage. Mainly for low-end devices and regions with a slower internet connection or more expensive data. So maybe we should think better about what and how we use our tooling. Great developer experience shouldn’t come at the expense of the user experience.

UXLondon 2021

Here’s a great write-up (with sketch notes) of last week’s conference portion of UX Fest:

There was a through-line of ethics through the whole conference that I enjoyed. The “design is the underdog” is tired and no longer true. I think that asking ourselves “now that we are here, how do we avoid causing harm?” is a much more mature conversation.

Bringing Dark Patterns to Light. Transcript of the speech I gave at the… | by Harry Brignull | Jun, 2021 | Medium

Harry gave a speech at the Federal Trade Commission’s Dark Patterns workshop in April. Here’s the transcript, posted to Ev’s blog.

When I first worked on Dark Patterns in 2010, I was quite naive. I thought that they could be eradicated by shaming the companies that used them, and by encouraging designers to use a code of ethics.

The fact that we’re here today means that approach didn’t work.

The right tag for the job: why you should use semantic HTML - localghost

A great introduction to structuring your content well:

Using semantic HTML as building blocks for a website will give you a lovely accessible foundation upon which to add your fancy CSS and whizzy JavaScript.

Ancestors and Descendants – Eric’s Archived Thoughts

Eric looks back on 25 years of CSS and remarks on how our hacks and workarounds have fallen away over time, thank goodness.

But this isn’t just a message of nostalgia about how much harder things were back in my day. Eric also shows how CSS very nearly didn’t make it. I’m not exaggerating when I say that Todd Fahrner and Tantek Çelik saved the day. If Tantek hadn’t implemented doctype switching, there’s no way that CSS would’ve been viable.

Let’s talk about failure

Denise shares a cautionary tale of service design gone wrong.

Our Favourite Uses of Typography in Watches

The typography of horology.

Gaming the Iron Curtain

The ZX Spectrum in a time of revolution:

Gaming the Iron Curtain offers the first book-length social history of gaming and game design in 1980s Czechoslovakia, or anywhere in the Soviet bloc. It describes how Czechoslovak hobbyists imported their computers, built DIY peripherals, and discovered games as a medium, using them not only for entertainment but also as a means of self-expression.

Beginner JavaScript Notes - Wes Bos

A very handy collection of organised notes on all things JavaScript.

Two articles on SPA or SPA-like sites vs alternatives — Piper Haywood

On framework-dependency and longevity:

So it’s not even so much about being wary of React or Vue, it’s about not making assumptions, being cautious and cognizant of future needs or restrictions when proposing a tech stack. Any tech stack you choose will ultimately become a ball-and-chain, not just those based on JavaScript frameworks. It’s just that the ball can sometimes be heavier than it needed to be, and you can anticipate that with a little foresight.

I helped pioneer UX design. What I see today horrifies me

Jesse has his Oppenheimer moment, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

What got lost along the way was a view of UX as something deeper and more significant than a step in the software delivery pipeline: an approach that grounds product design in a broad contextual understanding of the problem and goes beyond the line-item requirements of individual components. Also lost along the way were many of the more holistic and exploratory practices that enabled UX to deliver that kind of foundational value.

Priorities

The quest for more is a kind of prison that we make for ourselves. The idea that if we work ourselves to the bone now we can live a better life later is a convenient lie that we’ve been conditioned to tell ourselves.

An open and honest post from Ben.

I see decentralization as a way to lead to a more equitable society through disassembling existing hierarchies, for example, but I see straight through the people who see these ideas as a way to build a new hierarchy for their own benefit. We used to talk about abolishing gatekeepers in the early days of the web, too, until it became clear that many people just wanted to become a new kind of gatekeeper themselves.

What are “unusual characters” – Terence Eden’s Blog

Be liberal in what you accept:

Basically, if your form can’t register Beyoncé – it has failed.