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Podcast Standards Project | Advocating for open podcasting

A new organisation with the stated goal of keeping podcasting open.

Their first specification is a consolidation of what already exists. That’s good. We don’t want a 927 situation.

My only worry is that many of the companies behind this initiative are focused on metrics and monetization—I hope they don’t attempt to standardise tracking and surveillance in podcasts.

The Podcast Standards Project, a grassroots coalition working to establish modern, open standards, to enable innovation in the podcast industry.

Define “innovation”.

Defaulting on Single Page Applications (SPA)—zachleat.com

This isn’t an opinion piece. This is documentation.

You can’t JavaScript your way out of an excess-JavaScript problem.

How slimmed-down websites can cut their carbon emissions - BBC News

Interesting to see an article on web performance on the BBC. Perhaps we should be emphasising green over speed?

Behind the scenes, animation and interaction effects were added using HTML and CSS, two fundamental web languages. That meant there was no need to download large JavaScript files often used to do this on other sites.

On Container Queries, Responsive Images, and JPEG-XL – Cloud Four

Container queries can’t be used in the sizes attribute for responsive images. Here, Jason breaks down why that is (spoiler: it’s the lookahead pre-parser) and segues into a truly long term solution: a “magical” image format.

If you’ve ever thought it felt weird to put media conditions inside the HTML for responsive images, this will resonate.

Why I’m not the biggest fan of Single Page Applications - Manuel Matuzović

I guess the biggest criticism here is that it feels like people who believe in the superiority of single page applications and the entire ecosystem focus more on developer experience (DX) than user experience. That sounds like a dangerous blanket statement, but after all these years, I never had the feeling that the argument “better DX leads to better UX” was ever true. It’s nothing more than a justification for the immense complexity and potentially significantly worse UX. And even if the core argument isn’t DX, other arguments like scalability, maintainability, competitive ability, easier recruiting (“everyone uses React”), and cost effectiveness, in my experience, only sound good, but rarely hold up to their promises.

Learn Images

Mat has written this free course for you all about images on the web. Covering image formats, responsive images, and workflows, this is one to keep on speed dial.

WebPageTest’s Guiding Principles - WebPageTest Blog

  1. Make the right thing easy
  2. Always answer “so what”?
  3. Close the gap between “something is wrong” to “we fixed it”

Modern Health, frameworks, performance, and harm – Eric Bailey

A person seeking help in a time of crisis does not care about TypeScript, tree shaking, hot module replacement, A/B tests, burndown charts, NPS, OKRs, KPIs, or other startup jargon. Developer experience does not count for shit if the person using the thing they built can’t actually get what they need.

We’re all trying to find the guy who did this

Imagine the web is a storefront, React is a hot dog car, and here’s Create React App dressed as a hot dog:

HTML is the cornerstone of the web — so why does creating a “React app” produce an empty HTML file? Why are we not taking advantage of the most basic feature of the web—the ability to see content quickly before all the interactive code loads? Why do we wait to start loading the data until after all the client-side code has finished loading?

The Web Platform Is Back

So much ink spilled supposedly explaining what “the web platform” is …when the truth is you can just swap in the “the web” every time that phrase is used here or anywhere else.

Anyway, the gist of this piece is: the web is good, actually.

Efficiency over performance

I quite like this change of terminology when it comes to making fast websites. After all, performance can sound like a process of addition, whereas efficiency can be a process of subtraction.

The term ‘performance’ brings to mind exotic super-cars suitable only for impractical demonstrations (or ‘performances’). ‘Efficiency’ brings to mind an electric car (or even better, a bicycle), making effective use of limited resources.

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.

The Performance Inequality Gap, 2023 - Infrequently Noted

It is not an exaggeration to say that modern frontend is so enamoured by post-scarcity fairy tales that it is mortgaging the web’s future for another round of night drinking at the JavaScript party.

Strong—and true—words from Alex.

This isn’t working for users or for businesses that hire developers hopped up Facebook’s latest JavaScript hopium. A correction is due.

I concur.

Frontend’s failure to deliver in today’s mostly-mobile, mostly-Android world is shocking, if only for the durability of the myths that sustain the indefensible. We can’t keep doing this.

If you disagree, I encourage you to dive into the data that Alex shares.

Network effect

Mastodon is not a platform. Mastodon is just a tiny part of a concept many have been dreaming about and working on for years. Social media started on the wrong foot. The idea for the read/write web has always been different. Our digital identities weren’t supposed to end up in something like Twitter or Facebook or Instagram.

Decentralisation, Federation, The Indie Web: There were many groups silently working on solving the broken architecture of our digital social networks and communication channels – long, long before the “web 3” dudes tried to reframe it as their genius new idea.

I’ve been a part of this for many years until I gave up hope. How would you compete against the VC money, the technical and economical benefits of centralised platforms? It was a fight between David and Gloiath. But now Mastodon could be the stone.

How to Weave the Artisan Web | Whatever

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a site that’s not run by an amoral billionaire chaos engine, or algorithmically designed to keep you doomscrolling in a state of fear and anger, or is essentially spyware for governments and/or corporations? Wouldn’t it be nice not to have ads shoved in your face every time you open an app to see what your friends are up to? Wouldn’t it be nice to know that when your friends post something, you’ll actually see it without a social media platform deciding whether to shove it down your feed and pump that feed full of stuff you didn’t ask for?

Wouldn’t that be great?

Get Blogging!

Your easy guide to starting a new blog.

A blog is an easy way to get started writing on the web. Your voice is important: it deserves its own site. The more people add their unique perspectives to the web, the more valuable it becomes.

The Proprietary Syndication Formats - Chris Coyier

Guess which format is going to outlast all these proprietary syndication formats. I’d say RSS, which I believe to be true, but really, it’s HTML.

Progressively enhance for a more resilient web :: jjenzz

I realised, progressive enhancement isn’t only about supporting that 1%. It’s about testing your app without JavaScript to ensure 100% of your users have a more performant, usable, available, and resilient experience.

A really good explanation of progressive enhancement as an approach to building anything on the web:

Progressive enhancement does not mean you need to provide the exact same UI without JavaScript. The enhanced experience should be better and it should do more, otherwise the enhanced experience is not needed at all. It enhances a degraded experience that also allows the user to accomplish their goal. For example, entering a postal code manually into a text box might be the degraded experience, and the progressively enhanced experience would prefill the text box based on Geolocation data.

Will Serving Real HTML Content Make A Website Faster? Let’s Experiment! - WebPageTest Blog

Spoiler: the answer to the question in the title is a resounding “hell yeah!”

Scott brings receipts.