Link archive: February, 2022

Open Web Advocacy

A grassroots coalistion of web developers lobbying to get Apple to allow fair competition on iOS.

We have identified the #AppleBrowserBan as the number one threat to the future of the open web.

A Long Bet on Link Rot is Resolved, but Questions About the Durability of the Web Still Remain - Long Now

The Long Now foundation has a write-up on my recently-lost long bet:

On February 22, 02011, Jeremy Keith made a prediction that he hoped would be proven wrong.

The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online - David Perell

Blogging isn’t dead. In fact, the opposite is true. We’re about to enter a golden age of personal blogs.

Make it easy for people to find you. Buy a domain name and use it to create your own website, even if it’s very simple at first. Your website is your resume, your business card, your store, your directory, and your personal magazine. It’s the one place online that you completely own and control – your Online Home.

Good advice. Also:

Don’t write on Medium.

Look, I get it. Writing on Medium is an easy way to pick up readers and increases your chances of going viral. But the costs exceed the benefits. Medium is terrible for SEO. You don’t own your content and the platform makes it difficult to turn one-time readers into loyal ones.

The more you can use platforms you own, the better. Rather than writing on Medium, do the work to build a personal blog. That way, you can have a central place to point people to.

How to make MPAs that are as fast as SPAs | Go Make Things

The headline is a little misleading because if you follow this advice, your multi-page apps will be much much faster than single page apps, especially when you include that initial page load of a single page app.

Here’s a quick high-level summary of what I do…

1. Serve pre-rendered, mostly static HTML.
2. Inline everything, including CSS and JavaScript.
3. Use mostly platform-native JavaScript, and as little of it as possible.
4. Minify and gzip all the things.
5. Lean heavily on service workers.

That’s an excellent recipe for success right there!

The web is overrun and pop-up blockers haven’t worked in years

The technical challenge in blocking modern pop-ups is bigger than the pop-ups of the past decades. However, it’s long overdue that web browsers step up and act to protect their users’ interests. Pop-ups, pop-overs, interstitials, modal dialogs, whatever you want to call them! It’s time to ban them from the web again! At least immediately after a page load.

Bones, Bones: How to Articulate a Whale

I found this to be thoroughly engrossing. An articulate composition, you might say.

I couldn’t help thinking of J.G. Ballard’s short story, The Drowned Giant.

SPAs were a mistake | Go Make Things

Browsers give you a ton of stuff for free, built right in, out-of-the-box. SPAs break all that, and force you to recreate it yourself with JavaScript. Most developers do it wrong, and for the ones who do it right, it results in a ton of extra code to recreate features the browser already gave you for free.

A Long Bet Pays Off - Internet Archive Blogs

The bet was been won (not by me, thankfully) and Jason has some thoughts.

💡 David Deutsch: Optimism, Pessimism and Cynicism

Not only was fire always dangerous as well as beneficial, so was the wheel. A spear could injure or kill your friends, not only your dinner. With clothes came not only protection but also body lice. With farming came not only a more reliable food supply but also hard, repetitive work – and plunder by hungry bandits.

Every solution creates new problems. But they can be better problems. Lesser evils. More and greater delights.

That’s what progress is. That is what is most visible today. And that is what cynicism must therefore besmirch, obfuscate and argue away if it is to make itself, and pessimism, superficially plausible.

Code & Pixels

This forthcoming podcast about design engineering sounds like my cup of tea!

Which color scale to use when visualizing data - Datawrapper Blog

A fascinating four-part series by Lisa Charlotte Muth on colour in data visualisations:

1. Which color scale to use when visualizing data
2. When to use quantitative and when to use qualitative color scales
3. When to use sequential and when to use diverging color scales
4. When to use classed and when to use unclassed color scales

Web3 - creating problems where we need solutions on Vimeo

This is a great talk from Laura that clearly explains what web3 actually is. It pairs nicely with Molly White’s wb3 is going just great (speaking of which, Casey Newton interviewed Molly White about the site recently).

Functions and the future of design systems || Matthew Ström, designer-leader

Despite their name, most design systems aren’t all that much like systems. Granted, they are designed according to a system, and there’s a logical consistency to how their components and tokens are defined, but really, most design systems work like a dictionary: look up a component, get the instructions for using that component.

Mathew goes on to advocate moving towards a more function-centred approach to systematic design. It makes a lot of sense.

By the way, this isn’t directly related—other than metaphor being used—but I wrote about web standards, dictionaries, and design systems a while back.

Canned web development — Jeremy Wagner

Our mental model for how we build for the web is too reliant on canned solutions to unique problems.

This is very perceptive indeed.

Compounding this problem is that too few boot camps are preparing new web developers to think critically about what problems are best solved by JavaScript and which aren’t — and that those problems that are best solved by JavaScript can be solved without engaging in frivolous framework whataboutism. The question developers should ask more often when grappling with framework shortcomings shouldn’t be “what about that other framework?”, but rather “what’s best for the user experience?”.

Personal Websites as Self-Portraiture | starbreaker.org

What, then, is a personal website? It is precisely that, personal. It is a new kind of self-portraiture done not with pencils, charcoal, ink, or paint. Instead it is self-portraiture done in markup language, code, prose, images, audio, and video.

A Recipe to Your Own Home-Coded Personal Website

There’s a sort of joy in getting to manually create the site of your own where you have the freedom to add anything you want onto it, much like a homemade meal has that special touch to it.

gilest.org: What using RSS feeds feels like

• You’re the curator
• You decide what’s interesting
• You have more control over what you read and how
• It’s a fast and efficient way of reading a lot of web
• It’s just better than the endless scroll of a social media feed

Spot on!

To me, using RSS feeds to keep track of stuff I’m interested in is a good use of my time. It doesn’t feel like a burden, it doesn’t feel like I’m being tracked or spied on, and it doesn’t feel like I’m just another number in the ads game.

To me, it feels good. It’s a way of reading the web that better respects my time, is more likely to appeal to my interests, and isn’t trying to constantly sell me things.

That’s what using RSS feeds feels like.

Awesome astrophotography from the South Downs | Science | The Guardian

To mark the start of the Dark Skies Festival today, here are some fantastic photographics taken not that far from Brighton.

Automate Mindfully | Jorge Arango

But a machine for writing isn’t the same as a machine that writes for you. A machine for viewing photos isn’t the same thing as a machine that travels in your stead. A machine for sketching isn’t the same thing as a machine that designs. I love doing these things and doing them more efficiently. But I have no desire to have them done for me. It’s a key distinction: Do not automate the work you are engaged in, only the materials.

Add Responsive-Friendly Enhancements to `details` with `details-utils`—zachleat.com

This is how a web component should be designed! Zach has made a custom element that wraps around an existing HTML element, turbocharging its powers. That’s the way to think about web components—as a progressive enhancement.

Why Safari does not need any protection from Chromium – Niels Leenheer

Safari is very opinionated about which features they will support and which they won’t. And that is fine for their browser. But I don’t want the Safari team to choose for all browsers on the iOS platform.

A terrific piece from Niels pushing back on the ridiculous assertion that Apple’s ban on rival rendering engines in iOS is somehow a noble battle against a monopoly (rather than the abuse of monopoly power it actually is). If there were any truth to the idea that Apple’s browser ban is the only thing stopping everyone from switching to Chrome, then nobody would be using Safari on MacOS where users are free to choose whichever rendering engine they want.

The Safari team is capable enough not to let their browser become irrelevant. And Apple has enough money to support the Safari team to take on other browsers. It does not need some artificial App Store rule to protect it from the competition.

WebKit-only proponents are worried about losing control and Google becoming too powerful. And they feel preventing Google from controlling the web is more important than giving more power to users. They believe they are protecting users against themselves. But that is misguided.

Users need to be in control because if you take power away from users, you are creating the future you want to prevent, where one company sets the rules for everybody else. It is just somebody else who is pulling the strings.

The web is a miracle

I wonder what kinds of conditions would need to be true for another platform to be built in a similar way? Lots of people have tried, but none of them have the purity of participation for the love of it that the web has.

Globle

Like Wordle, but for geography instead of words.

Every day, there is a new Mystery Country. Your goal is to guess the mystery country using the fewest number of guesses. Each incorrect guess will appear on the globe with a colour indicating how close it is to the Mystery Country.

The difference between correct-ness and useful-ness in a design system • Robin Rendle

I remember Lara telling me a great quote from the Clarity conference a few years back: “A design system needs to be correct before it’s complete.” In other words, it’s better to have one realistic component that’s actually in production than to have a pattern library full of beautiful but unimplemented components. I feel like Robin is getting at much the same point here, but he frames it in terms of correctness and usefulness:

If we want to be correct, okay, let’s have components of everything and an enormous Figma library of stuff we need to maintain. But if we want to be useful to designers who want to get an understanding of the system, let’s be brief.

February’s Font of the Month: Warbler Text | David Jonathan Ross

A lovely font based on the Bulmer typeface.

Is Momentum Shifting Toward a Ban on Behavioral Advertising? – The Markup

I really hope that Betteridge’s Law doesn’t apply to this headline.

Software Paper Cuts · Matthew Bischoff

Running up against a paper cut bug feels a little bit like getting a physical one: not the end of the world, but certainly unpleasant. These types of tiny annoyances accrete over time, especially when no one is paying attention to them. In a single day of using my phone, I encounter dozens of these minor bugs that each annoy me just a little bit, making the task I’m trying to accomplish just a little bit more complicated.

How to progressively enhance a nav menu | Go Make Things

A lot of folks assume that progressive enhancement means having to write the same code twice, but often, it can be as simple as extending the pattern you already have once the JS loads.

‘Like an atomic bomb’: So what now for the IAB’s GDPR fix after regulator snafu? - Digiday

Simply put, the popups asking people for consent whenever they land on a site are illegal.

When Women Make Headlines

This is a great combination of rigorous research and great data visualisation.

Using Google Fonts Breaches GDPR – Interdependent Thoughts

Remember when I said you should avoid third-party dependencies?

Daring Fireball: Robin Berjon on ‘Topics’, Google’s Proposed Replacement for FLoC

Google Topics is the successor to Google FLoC. It seems to require collusion from your “user agent”:

I can’t see why any other browser would consider supporting Topics. Google wants to keep tracking users across the entire web in a world where users realize they don’t want to be tracked. Why help Google?

Google sees Chrome as a way to embed the entire web into an iframe on Google.com.

“Evergreen” Does Not Mean Immediately Available | CSS-Tricks - CSS-Tricks

Smart advice on future-proofing and backward-compatibility:

There isn’t a single, specific device, browser, and person we cater to when creating a web experience. Websites and web apps need to adapt to a near-infinite combination of these circumstances to be effective. This adaptability is a large part of what makes the web such a successful medium.

Consider doing the hard work to make it easy and never remove feature queries and @supports statements. This creates a robust approach that can gracefully adapt to the past, as well as the future.