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Though I didn’t make the connection until much later, the philosophy of progressive enhancement in web design, which I’ve been advocating for nearly two decades now, is very much the embodiment of equity. It’s concerned with building interfaces that adapt to a wide range of circumstances, both tied to an individual user’s capabilities as well as those of the devices, networks, and environment in which they are accessing our creations.
The day we started to allow email clients to be full-blown web browsers (but without the protections of browsers) was the day we lost — time, security, privacy, and effectiveness. Now we spend all our time fighting with the materials of an email (i.e. color and layout) rather than refining its substance (i.e. story and language).
The design process in action in Victorian England:
Recognizing that few people actually read statistical tables, Nightingale and her team designed graphics to attract attention and engage readers in ways that other media could not. Their diagram designs evolved over two batches of publications, giving them opportunities to react to the efforts of other parties also jockeying for influence. These competitors buried stuffy graphic analysis inside thick books. In contrast, Nightingale packaged her charts in attractive slim folios, integrating diagrams with witty prose. Her charts were accessible and punchy. Instead of building complex arguments that required heavy work from the audience, she focused her narrative lens on specific claims. It was more than data visualization—it was data storytelling.
I really, really enjoyed this deep dive into practical HTML semantics. Sit back and enjoy!
This is a story about pizza and geometry.
The interactive widget here really demonstrates the difference between showing and telling.
I want to posit that, in a time of great uncertainty—in an era of climate change and declining freedom, of attrition and layoffs and burnout, of a still-unfolding rearrangement of our relationship to work—we would do well to build more space for practicing the future. Not merely anticipating it or fearing it or feeding our anxiety over the possibilities—but for building the skill and strength and habits to nurture the future we need. We can’t control what comes next, of course. But we can nudge, we can push, we can guide and shape, we can have an impact. We can move closer to the future we want to live in, no matter how far away it seems to be.
The algorithm I’m going after is pretty simple: If the grid of items has an odd number of items, then make the first item full-width. But CSS can’t do logic… right? Well… hold my proverbial beer.
Prompted by my recent post about using native button elements, Trys puts forward a simple explanation for why someone would choose to use a div instead.
The one common feature between every codebase I’ve encountered on that doesn’t use
buttons well, is a bad CSS reset. Developers try to use abutton, and find that it still looks like a native browser button, so they grab a plain old, blank canvasdiv, and build from there.
Occam’s Razor makes Trys’s explanation the most likely one.
Not much stays in one place for one long, especially when it comes to digital artifacts. When the Yahoo Groups archive was summarily deleted by parent company Verizon just a few years ago, fandom suffered massive losses, just as it had during the Livejournal purges of the late 02000s, and during the Tumblr porn ban in 02018. Fandom preservation, then, ties into the larger issue of digital preservation as a whole, and specifically the question of how individual and group emotions and experiences — which make up so much of what it means to be a fan — can be effectively documented, annotated, and saved.
A terrfic presentation from Matt Jones (with the best talk title ever). Pace layers, seamful design, solarpunk, and more.
I really enjoyed this deep dive into some design fiction work done by Fabien Girardin, Simone Rebaudengo, and Fred Scharmen.
(Remember when Simone spoke at dConstruct about toasters? That was great!)
I really enjoyed Laurie’s talk in Berlin a few weeks back. I must blog my thoughts on it.
But I must admit that something didn’t sit quite right about the mocking tone he took on the matter of “the fundamentals” (whatever that may mean). Chris shares my misgivings:
Those websites that don’t load on slow connections, or break completely when a JS file fails to load, or don’t work for people with visual or physical impairments?
That’s not an issue of time. It’s an issue of fundamentals.
I think I agree with Laurie that there’s basically no such thing as fundamental technologies (and if there is such a thing, the goalposts are constantly moving). But I agree with Chris with that there is such a thing as fundamental concepts. On the web, for example, accessibility is a core principle of its design that should, in my opinion, be fundamental.
This, basically:
Do I wanna see teenagers building frivolous websites? Absolutely. But when people are getting paid well to build our digital world, they have a responsibility to ensure the right to engage with that world for everyone.
A thoughtful response to the current CMA consultation:
The inability to compete with native apps using Progressive Web Apps fully—particularly on iOS—also has a big impact on my work and the businesses I have worked with. Progressive Web Apps are extremely accessible for development, allowing for the creation of a simple app in a fraction of the time and complexity of a native app. This is fantastic for allowing smaller agencies and businesses to innovate on the web and on mobile devices and to reach consumers. However the poor support for PWA features by Safari and by not allowing them in the App Store, Apple forces app development to be difficult, time consuming and extremely expensive. I have spoken with many companies who would have liked an app to compete with their larger competitors but are unable to afford the huge costs in developing a native app.
Get your response in by Friday by emailing browsersandcloud@cma.gov.uk.
Jim mashes up Ilya Grigorik’s book High Performance Browser Networking with my talk on the layers of the web and Nassim Taleb’s idea of antifragility.
So to me, this blog represents the original promise of the open web.
The one that’s here, and still is here, and always has been here, and is available to you.
Right now.
The one where you can speak the truths that you believe without the permission, or the editorial control, or the power dynamics, of anyone claiming to hold authority over you; or, perhaps, anyone keen to impose it.
Heather takes a break from her relentless crusading in favour of users against the idiocy of the UK government and reflects on the joy of doing it all from her own personal website.
And perhaps you should too, on your own blog, owned on your own hosting space, using your own words, and speaking your own truth. That sounds like a good little weekend project, don’t you think?
A fascinating account of the history of JAWS and NVDA.
Steven Johnson profiles Lou Montulli, creator of the cookie, and ponders unintended consequences:
Years ago, the mathematician Edward Lorenz proposed a metaphor to describe how very small elements in a system’s initial conditions can lead to momentous changes over time. Imagining a tornado that ultimately emerges out of the tiny air perturbations caused by the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, Lorenz called it the “butterfly effect.” For better and for worse, Montulli’s cookie may be the most pronounced example of a technological butterfly effect in our time. But instead of a butterfly flapping its wings, it’s a 23-year-old programmer writing a few lines of code to make a shopping cart feature work. Almost three decades later, we’re still riding out the storm that code helped create.
This is why prefers-reduced-motion matters.
I love this kind of spelunking into the history of why things are they way they are on the web!
Here, Detective Chief Inspector Suzanne tries to get to the bottom of why every browser has eight pixels of margin applied to the body element in the user-agent stylesheet.
The history of humanity in food and recipes.
The timeline of this website is equally impressive—it’s been going since 1999!
I’ve done this and I can attest that it works, but I never knew it had a name.
Body-doubling is simply having another person in the room with you, working quietly alongside you. They can work on something similar, or something completely different.
A fascinating interactive journey through biometrics using your face.
If only all thinkpieces on complexity in software development were written in such an entertaining style! (Although, admittedly, that would get very old very fast.)
A layman’s guide to thinking like the self-aware smol brained
The headline is clickbaity, but the advice is solid. Use progressive enhancement and don’t worry about polyfilling.
When I say ‘Stop supporting IE’ it means to me that I won’t go the extra mile to get unsupported features working in Internet Explorer, but still make sure Internet Explorer users get the basics, and can use the site.
The problem I’ve regularly encountered in my work is that I don’t get to do my job the way I think is best for both me and my employer or client. The employer, who isn’t the web development expert, almost always has a clear idea of what real web development is supposed to look like: Single-Page-Apps and React (or React-like frameworks).
An intimation that it wouldn’t be the right solution for this particular problem is taken as an admission of incompetence.
I’ve experienced this. And I think this observation is even more true when it comes to recruitment.
We have been seduced by Harari because of the power not of his truth or scholarship but of his storytelling. As a scientist, I know how difficult it is to spin complex issues into appealing and accurate storytelling. I also know when science is being sacrificed to sensationalism. Yuval Harari is what I call a “science populist.” (Canadian clinical psychologist and YouTube guru Jordan Peterson is another example.) Science populists are gifted storytellers who weave sensationalist yarns around scientific “facts” in simple, emotionally persuasive language. Their narratives are largely scrubbed clean of nuance or doubt, giving them a false air of authority—and making their message even more convincing. Like their political counterparts, science populists are sources of misinformation. They promote false crises, while presenting themselves as having the answers. They understand the seduction of a story well told—relentlessly seeking to expand their audience—never mind that the underlying science is warped in the pursuit of fame and influence.
Harari has seduced us with his storytelling, but a close look at his record shows that he sacrifices science to sensationalism, often makes grave factual errors, and portrays what should be speculative as certain.
Here’s the video of the talk I gave in front of an enormous audience at the We Are Developers conference …using a backup slidedeck.
