Watch Transitions in Slow Motion in Chrome’s DevTools - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
This is a very handy tip if you’re adding view transitions to your website!
Link tags: fr
2246
Jack Franklin – Abstractions, complexities and off-ramps – All Day Hey! 2023 - YouTube
This is a terrific talk by Jack on how to deal with the tooling involved in modern front-end development:
- Maintaining control,
- Dependency awareness,
- Lean on browser primitives,
- Have an exit strategy.
Building a Frontend Framework; Reactivity and Composability With Zero Dependencies
The thinking behind the minimal JavaScript framework, Strawberry:
Even without specialized syntax, you can do a lot of what the usual frontend framework does—with similar conciseness—just by using
ProxyandWebComponents.
How to build lean efficient websites in 2023 | Go Make Things
- Start with mostly static HTML.
- Progressively enhance the dynamic parts.
- Pick small, focused tools.
The Industrial Hammer Complex
Coincidentally, I was just talking about hammers and nails in another context.
Progressive enhancement used to be a standard approach. Then React came along and didn’t support that approach. So, folks stopped talking about that and focused entirely on JS-centric client solutions. A few years later and now folks are talking about progressive enhancement again, under the new name of “islands”.
What is going on here?
It turns out, it’s the same old thing. Vendors peddling their wares. When Facebook introduced React, that act transformed the font-end space into a hype-driven, cult-of-personality disaster zone where folks could profit from creating the right image and narrative. I observed that it particularly preyed on the massive influx of young web developers. Facebook had finally found the silver bullet of Web Development, or so they claimed! Just adopt our tech, no questions asked, and you too can be a rock star making six figures! We’ve been living through this mess for ten years now.
The cosmic ballet goes on.
The Cost of Convenience - DEV Community
The pros and cons of dependencies in your toolchain.
WPDS - Accessibility | Resources
I didn’t know the Washington Post had a design system or that the system has this good section on accessibility.
Make Something Wonderful | Steve Jobs
This anthology of Steve Jobs interviews, announcements and emails is available to read for free as a nicely typeset web book.
Rich Harris: Hot takes on the web 🌶️ - YouTube
I don’t agree with all of these takes-of-varying-spiciness, but Rich Harris is always worth paying attention to.
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.
CSS Text balancing with text-wrap:balance - Ahmad Shadeed
Ahmad runs through some of the scenarios where text-wrap: balance could be handy.
Even though it’s not well-supported yet in browsers, there’s no reason not to start adding it to sites now; it’s classic progressive enhancement.
Enhance
After admiring the loveliness of the homepage for Enhance, try reloading it with JavaScript switched off.
Spot the difference? Me neither.
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.
The perfect link - The A11Y Collective
How do we write, design, and code a link that works for everyone on every device? Let’s dive into the world of creating the perfect link, without making a pig’s breakfast of it.
Preventing too-short final lines of blocks | Clagnut by Richard Rutter
Check out the demo that Rich has put together to go with Amelia’s proposed syntax.
Pixel Pioneers Bristol 2023 Speaker Spotlight: Jeremy Keith
Oliver asked me some questions about my upcoming talk at Pixel Pioneers in Bristol in June. Here are my answers.
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.
Craft vs Industry: Separating Concerns by Thomas Michael Semmler: CSS Developer, Designer & Developer from Vienna, Austria
Call me Cassandra:
The way that industry incorporates design systems is basically a misappropriation, or abuse at worst. It is not just me who is seeing the problem with ongoing industrialization in design. Even Brad Frost, the inventor of atomic design, is expressing similar concerns. In the words of Jeremy Keith:
[…] Design systems take their place in a long history of dehumanising approaches to manufacturing like Taylorism. The priorities of “scientific management” are the same as those of design systems—increasing efficiency and enforcing consistency.
So no. It is not just you. We all feel it. This quote is from 2020, by the way. What was then a prediction has since become a reality.
This grim assessment is well worth a read. It rings very true.
What could have become Design Systemics, in which we applied systems theory, cybernetics, and constructivism to the process and practice of design, is now instead being reduced to component libraries. As a designer, I find this utter nonsense. Everyone who has even just witnessed a design process in action knows that the deliverable is merely a documenting artifact of the process and does not constitute it at all. But for companies, the “output” is all that matters, because it can be measured; it appeals to the industrialized process because it scales. Once a component is designed, it can be reused, configured, and composed to produce “free” iterations without having to consult a designer. The cost was reduced while the output was maximized. Goal achieved!
Why aren’t logical properties taking over everything? - Chris Coyier
Good question.
I think it’s mostly inertia.