Adactio: Links—Tagged with ad

Apple previews Live Speech, Personal Voice, and more new accessibility features - Apple

This is the kind of press release I like.

Google AMP: how Google tried to fix the web by taking it over - The Verge

AMP succeeded spectacularly. Then it failed. And to anyone looking for a reason not to trust the biggest company on the internet, AMP’s story contains all the evidence you’ll ever need.

This is a really good oral history of how AMP soured Google’s reputation.

Full disclosure: I’m briefly cited:

“When it suited them, it was open-source,” says Jeremy Keith, a web developer and a former member of AMP’s advisory council. “But whenever there were any questions about direction and control… it was Google’s.”

As an aside, this article contains a perfect description of the company cultures of Facebook, Apple, and Google:

“You meet with a Facebook person and you see in their eyes they’re psychotic,” says one media executive who’s dealt with all the major platforms. “The Apple person kind of listens but then does what it wants to do. The Google person honestly thinks what they’re doing is the best thing.”

Spot. On.

The other side of egoism | A Working Library

Mandy takes a deep dive into the treatment of altruism in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.

A very simple rule

I have a very simple rule that serves me well: Don’t think too much about your life after dinnertime.

Grease

Grease is a website starter that makes building performant, accessible, aesthetic websites fast & frictionless.

Interestingly, this starter kit uses cascade layers for managing CSS.

Efficiency trades off against resiliency - Made of Bugs

Past some point, making a system more efficient will mean making it less resilient, and, conversely, building in robustness tends to make a system less efficient (at least in the short run).

This is true of software, networks, and organisations.

When we set metrics or goals for a system or a team or an organization that ask for efficiency, let us be aware that, absent countervailing pressures, we are probably also asking for the system to become more brittle and fragile, too.

Readability Guidelines

Imagine a collaboratively developed, universal content style guide, based on usability evidence.

Learn Privacy

Stuart has written this fantastic concise practical guide to privacy for developers and designers. A must-read!

Use just the data you need

Third parties

Fingerprinting

Encryption

Best practices

Adoption. — Ethan Marcotte

Ethan highlights a classic case of the McNamara Fallacy—measuring adoption of design system components.

print-color-adjust - CSS: Cascading Style Sheets | MDN

I love print stylesheets but I was today years old when I found out that print-color-adjust exists.

Investing in RSS - Web Performance Consulting | TimKadlec.com

Same:

Opening up my RSS reader, a cup of coffee in hand, still feels calm and peaceful in a way that trying to keep up with happenings in other ways just never has.

Stories on the Road - UK 23 | Storyblok

I’ll be speaking at this free early evening event with Arisa Fukusaki and Cassie in Brighton on Monday, February 27th. Grab a ticket and come along for some pizza and nerdiness.

Explore the In Our Time archive | Braggoscope

Matt made this lovely website for spelunking and hyperlinking through the thousand episodes of Radio 4’s excellent In Our Time programme.

He’s also written a little bit about how he made it using some AI (artificial insemination) for the categorisation code.

Patrick / articles / Is the developer experience on the Web so terrible?

Over the past 10 years or so, we’ve slowly but very surely transitioned to a state where frameworks are the norm, and I think it’s a problem.

I concur.

Use the frameworks and libraries that make sense for you to deliver the best UX possible. But also learn the web platform from the ground up. Take time to understand how web browsers work and render webpages. Learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript. And keep an eye, if you can, on the new things.

Henry From Online | How To Make a Website

Write meaningful HTML that communicates the structure of your document before any style or additional interactivity has loaded. Write CSS carefully, reason your methodology and stick to it, and feel empowered to skip frameworks. When it comes time to write JavaScript, write not too much, make sure you know what it all does, and above all, make sure the website works without it.

The whole article is great, and really charmingly written, with some golden nuggets embedded within, like:

You’ll find that spending more time getting HTML right reveals or even anticipates and evades accessibility issues. It’s just easier to write accessible code if it’s got semantic foundations.

In my experience, you will almost always spend more time overriding frameworks or compromising your design to fit the opinions of a framework.

Always style from the absolute smallest screen your content will be rendered on first, and use @media (min-width) queries to break to layouts that allow for more real estate as it becomes available.

If your site doesn’t work without JavaScript, your site doesn’t work.

Always progressively enhance your apps, especially when you’re fucking with something as browser-critical as page routing.

Line heights in CSS work better with ratios | Andy Bell

There’s a broader point here about declarative design:

Setting very specific values may feel like you’re in more control, but you’re actually rescinding control by introducing fragility in the form of overly-specific CSS.

I find, more often than not, that I understand something much less well when I sit down to write about it than when I’m thinking about it in the shower. In fact, I find that I change my own mind on things a lot when I try write them down. It really is a powerful tool for finding clarity in your own mind. Once you have clarity in your own mind, you’re much more able to explain it to others.

Link tags: ad

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