Tags: frontend

Web Platform Feature Availability

Here’s a handy graph from Paul:

Powered by data from caniuse.com and StatCounter, this page indicates the percentage of users who have a browser that natively supports various web platform features.

Offline content with service workers · MadebyMike

This is a really great step-by-step walkthrough of adding a service worker to a website. Mike mentions the gotchas he encountered along the way, and describes how he incrementally levelled up the functionality.

If you’ve been going through a similar process, please write it down and share it like this!

First impressions of React

I’m following Remy’s experiments with great interest—his approach sounds like the holy grail:

I’m trying to build a web app that uses progressive enhancement as a design principle with state as a core value to the coding approach.

Web Animation Workshops

Val Head and Sarah Drasner have teamed up to offer a two-day workshop on web animation. If you have a chance to attend, do it!

Responses To The Screen Reader Strategy Survey | HeydonWorks

Heydon asked screen readers some questions about their everyday interactions with websites. The answers quite revealing: if you’re using headings and forms correctly, you’re already making life a lot easier for them.

Web development as a hack of hacks - QuirksBlog

PPK reads a Hacker News thread so you don’t have to.

Proposal to CSSWG, Sept 2016 // Speaker Deck

Jen has some ideas for a new CSS Region spec to turbo-boost Grid. I’m still trying to wrap my head around it, but in the meantime, if you have feedback on this, please let her know.

Progressive Web Apps Simply Make Sense - Cloud Four

Progressive Web Apps versus native is the wrong question because every step on the path to a Progressive Web App makes sense on its own, irrespective of what a company does with their native apps.

Not all of your customers are going to have your app installed. For those who visit via the web, providing them with a better experience will make them happier and generate more revenue for your business.

It’s really that simple.

SpeedCurve | PWA Performance

Steve describes a script you can use on WebPageTest to simulate going offline so you can test how your progressive web app performs.

Why we use progressive enhancement to build GOV.UK | Technology at GDS

This is a terrific read that gets to the heart of why progressive enhancement is such a solid methodology: progressive enhancement improves resilience.

Meeting our many users’ needs is number one on our list of design principles. We can’t know every different setup a person might use while building our systems, but we can build them in a way that gives all of our users the greatest chance of success. Progressive enhancement lets us do this.

The article is full of great insights from a very large-scale web project.

An intro to progressive web apps | 8th Light

A nice introduction to progressive web apps. There’s a little bit of confusion about permissions—whether a site has been added to the home screen or not has no effect on the permissions granted to it (for things like push notifications)—but the wrap-up nails the advantages of using the web:

No more waiting to download an app, no more prompts for updating an app. From a developer perspective, it means we will be able to iterate a lot quicker. We don’t need to wait for app store approvals anymore, and we can deploy at our own leisure.

Another advantage that a progressive web app has over a native mobile app is that it is linkable, hence it is easier to share and, probably even more importantly, can be indexed by search engines. This makes discoverability of the app a lot better.

The Typekit Blog | Variable fonts, a new kind of font for flexible design

This is what Nick Sherman has been banging on about for years, and now the time has come for variable fonts …as long as typographers, browser makers, and standards bodies get behind it.

More details on Ev’s blog.

Nordic.js 2016 • Jeremy Keith - Resilience: Tried and tested approaches - YouTube

I’m just back from a little mini 3-conference tour of Europe where I was delivering my talk on resilience. The first stop was Stockholm for Nordic.js and the video is already online.

CanvasSwirl: An animated spirograph experiment in JavaScript and canvas by xhva.net

But, like, have you have ever really looked at your hand?

Cross-origin Service Workers: Experimenting with Foreign Fetch | Web Updates - Google Developers

This one is definitely for service worker nerds only. I’ve been trying to get my head around this idea of “foreign fetch” which allows third parties to install service workers—could be handy for sites with APIs like Huffduffer and The Session. This article does a good job of explaining the somewhat tangled process.

What, Exactly, Makes Something A Progressive Web App? | Infrequently Noted

Alex runs through the features that a progressive web app must have, should have, and would be nice to have.

In general, installability criteria are tightening. Today’s Good-To-Haves may become part of tomorrow’s baseline. The opposite is unlikely because at least one major browser has made a strong commitment to tightening up the rules for installability.

Right now, this is in the nice-to-have category:

Mobile-friendly, not mobile-only.

Personally, I’d put that in the must-have category, and not just for progressive web apps.

Anyway, read on for some advice on testing and tooling when it comes to evaluating progressive web apps.

lyzadanger/pragmatist-service-worker: Pragmatist’s Guide to Service Worker

Lyza put together some example code for her Smashing Conference talk on service workers. If you haven’t written a service worker before, these are really nice examples of how to grok it bit by bit.

How Google And Others Are Plotting The Revenge Of The Web App | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

It’s always, um …”interesting” when a mainstream publication covers a topic from the web’s bikeshed. In this case, it’s progressive web apps, and—apart from the sensationalist headline—it’s actually not that bad at all.

Style Guides, Pattern Libraries, Design Systems and other amenities. // Speaker Deck

This slide deck is a whistle-stop tour of all things styleguide and pattern-library related. Nice to see Charlotte’s excellent exercise get a shout-out.

Oh, shit, git!

Bookmark this page! Who knew that so much knowledge could be condensed into one document? In this case, it’s life-saving git commands, explained in a user-centred way.

So here are some bad situations I’ve gotten myself into, and how I eventually got myself out of them in plain english.

CSS Mega Dropdown | CodyHouse

I’m no fan of mega menus, and if a site were being designed from scratch, I’d do everything I could to avoid them, but on some existing projects they’re an unavoidable necessity (the design equivalent of technical debt). In those situations, this looks like a really nice, responsive approach.

Webfonts on the Prairie · An A List Apart Article

A good ol’ polemic in favour of using web fonts. It’s a good read although I strongly disagree with this line of reasoning:

The average internet speed in the United States today is three times as fast as it was in 2011.

But that americentric view is redeemed later on:

The World Wide Web may be a creation of the West, but now, at long last, it needs to get ready for the rest.

I may not agree with all the points in this article, but I think we can all agree that if we’re going to use web fonts, we must use them responsibly …otherwise users are going to treat them as damage and route around them.

`font-display` for the Masses | CSS-Tricks

The font-display property is landing in browsers, and this is a great introduction to using it:

If you don’t know which option to use, then go with swap. Not only does it provide an optimal balance between custom fonts and accessibility of content, it provides the same font loading behavior that we’ve relied on JavaScript for. If you have fonts on the page that you’d like to have load, but could ultimately do without, consider going with fallback or optional when using font-display.

Until it’s more widely supported, you can continue to use a JavaScript solution, but even then you can feature detect first:

if ("fontDisplay" in document.body.style === false) {
  /* JavaScript font loading logic goes here. */
}

The Building Blocks Of Progressive Web Apps – Smashing Magazine

This is a really good overview of progressive web apps:

An ideal web app is a web page that has the best aspects of both the web and native apps. It should be fast and quick to interact with, fit the device’s viewport, remain usable offline and be able to have an icon on the home screen.

At the same time, it must not sacrifice the things that make the web great, such as the ability to link deep into the app and to use URLs to enable sharing of content. Like the web, it should work well across platforms and not focus solely on mobile. It should behave just as well on a desktop computer as in other form factors, lest we risk having another era of unresponsive m.example.com websites.

I Wanted To Type a Number | Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA

Choosing the right input type for your form field.

The web is not print and other stories

Rachel takes a look back at twenty years of building on the web. Her conclusion: we’ve internalised constraints that are no longer relevant, and that’s holding us back from exploring new design possibilities:

Somehow the tables have turned. As the web moves on, as we get CSS that gives us the ability to implement designs impossible a few years ago, the web looks more and more like something we could have build with rudimentary CSS for layout. We’ve settled on our constraints and we are staying there, defined by not being print.

Aria-Controls is Poop | HeydonWorks

I wrote a while back about how I switched from using a button to using a link for progressive disclosure patterns. That looks like it was a good move—if I use a button, I’d need to use aria-controls and, as Heydon outlines here, the screen reader support is pants.

Create awesome styles- Nucleus - Living style guide generator

Another style guide generator that parses comments in CSS.

Indicating offline | justmarkup

Some interesting interface ideas here for informing users when a service worker is doing its magic.

In the future users may expect a site to work offline after visiting again, but until this happens, I think it is a good idea to let the users know about this feature.

How we made the RioRun progressive web app | Info | The Guardian

The devs at The Guardian walk through the process of building a progressive web app for the Olympics. There were some gotchas with the life cycle of service workers, but the pay-off was worth it:

Once you get there though, it’s quite magical when you load the page on a phone, switch it to airplane mode, reload, and continue using the app as though nothing was wrong.

MarkApp: Building apps with HTML

Here’s an interesting collection from Lea: small JavaScript libraries that do their configuration declaratively via HTML, rather than in JavaScript.

Shadow DOM v1: self-contained web components | Web Fundamentals - Google Developers

An in-depth look at the current Shadow DOM spec. It’s well-written but I don’t think this will really click with me until I start playing around with it for myself.

It’s good to see that the examples have some thought given to fallback content.

There’s also a corresponding tutorial on custom elements

Writing Less Damn Code | HeydonWorks

I’m in complete agreement with Heydon here:

But it turns out the only surefire way to make performant Web Stuff is also to just write less. Minify? Okay. Compress? Well, yeah. Cache? Sounds technical. Flat out refuse to code something or include someone else’s code in the first place? Now you’re talking.

Just like the “mobile first” mindset, if you demand that everything must justify its existence, you end up with a better experience for everyone:

My favorite thing about aiming to have less stuff is this: you finish up with only the stuff you really need — only the stuff your user actually wants. Massive hero image of some dude drinking a latte? Lose it. Social media buttons which pull in a bunch of third-party code while simultaneously wrecking your page design? Give them the boot. That JavaScript thingy that hijacks the user’s right mouse button to reveal a custom modal? Ice moon prison.

Using Feature Queries in CSS ★ Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog

A thorough explanation of @supports from Jen, with plenty of smart strategies for using it in your CSS today.

10K Apart

The 10K competition—spiritual successor to Stewart Butterfield’s 5K.org—is back. This time there’s no escape clause with web fonts or jQuery. You can lazy-load in more content after the initial 10K payload …but whatever you’re building needs to be usable in that first 10K.

Give it a go. There’s nothing like having a constraint to really get the creative juices flowing.

What is React?

I’m in a similar position to Remy:

I don’t use React. I don’t really gravitate towards larger frameworks, only because my daily work doesn’t require it, and I’m personally more interested in the lower level techniques and parts of the web and JavaScript.

But, like Remy, I’m interested in knowing what are the ideas and techniques embedded within large frameworks that will end up making their way into the web stack:

What I want to know is: what should I be taking away from React into my own continued evolution as a web developer?

There are some good responses in the comments.

gmetais/sw-delta: An incremental cache for the web

Here’s an interesting use of service workers: figure out the difference (the delta) between the currently-cached version of a file, and the version on the network, and then grab only the bits that have changed. It requires some configuration on the server side (to send back the diff) but it’s an interesting approach that could be worth keeping an eye on.

Download Blisk - a browser for web developers

A browser aimed specifically at web developers. It’s got some nice features around mobile device emulation.

cursory hack

Sorcery!

(well technically, JavaScript + canvas, but y’know, to-may-to, to-mah-to)

Start Building Accessible Web Applications Today - Course by @marcysutton @eggheadio

A great series of short videos from Marcy on web accessibility.

Refactoring CSS Without Losing Your Mind // Speaker Deck

A talk from Harry on the whys and hows of refactoring CSS. He mentions the all: initial declaration, which I don’t think I’ve come across before.

Creating An Accessible Modal Dialog

In the same vein as Hugo’s script, Ire walks through the steps involved in making an accessible modal window. Seeing all the thinking and code required for this really highlights the need for a way of making the document in the background inert.

Stuff I wish I’d known sooner about service workers

Some helpful “gotchas” that could save you some frustration if you’re starting out with service workers.

Progressive Enhancement for JavaScript App Developers | De Voorhoede

Build JS apps responsibly - cover your basics, render strategically and enhance into true apps.

sw-toolbox

If you’re going to dip your toes into the world of service workers, this handy library from the Chrome team is a good place to start.

CSS Writing Mode

Some nifty layout tricks using the writing-mode property in CSS.

Service worker meeting notes - JakeArchibald.com

Jake has written up the notes from the most recent gathering to discuss service workers. If you have any feedback on any of the proposed changes or additions to the spec, please add them. This proposal is the biggie:

We’re considering allowing the browser to run multiple concurrent instances of a service worker.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: AMP your content - A Preview of AMP’ed results in Search

Google’s search results now include AMP pages in the regular list of results (not just in a carousel). They’re marked with a little grey lightning bolt next to the word AMP.

The experience of opening of those results is certainly fast, but feels a little weird—like you haven’t really gone to the website yet, but instead that you’re still tethered to the search results page.

Clicking on a link within an AMP spawns a new window, which reinforces the idea of the web as something separate to AMP (much as they still like to claim that AMP is “a subset of HTML”—at this point, it really, really isn’t).

React Isomorphic Demo

It is possible to use React without relying completely on client-side JavaScript to render all your content—though it’s certainly not the default way most tutorials teach React. This ongoing tutorial aims to redress that imbalance.

Besides the main benefit of server rendering giving faster page loads, it also enables large amounts of the site to run without JavaScript. There are many reasons why you would want this, but my personal reasons are that it allows you to completely drop support JavaScript in older browsers, but still have the site function.

Inline SVG spriting and currentColor | Charlotte Jackson, Front-end developer

The currentColor value in CSS comes in very handy when you’ve got an SVG sprite and you want icons to inherit their colour from the surrounding text.

ServiceWorker: A Basic Guide to BackgroundSync

A nice introduction to using Service Workers to enable syncing in the background: when the user is offline, tasks get queued up and then when the user is back online, those tasks execute.

Horizontal lines around centered content

Here’s another clever CSS technique. It uses flexbox to add horizontal lines either side of centred content.

CSS only scroll indicator

This is witchcraft. I’ve been deconstructing the CSS to figure out how this works and it’s really clever.

(Hint: try commenting out some of the CSS and see what happens.)

Hidden Expectations - daverupert.com

Over the years I’ve come to realize that most difficult part of making websites isn’t the code, it’s the “hidden expectations”, the unseen aspects I didn’t know were my responsibility when I started: Accessibility, Security, Performance, and Empathy.

Web Components and progressive enhancement - Adam Onishi

Adam and I share the same hopes and frustrations with web components. They can be written in a resilient, layered way that allows for progressive enhancement, but just about every example out there demonstrates a “my way or the highway” approach to using them.

We were chatting about this in the Design Systems slack channel, and it helped clarify some of my thoughts. I’ll try to poop out a blog post about this soon.

The Lumpy Web - Tales of a Developer Advocate

Paul argues that the biggest problems for interoperability on the web don’t come from support (or lack of support) for entire features, but from the frustrating inconsistencies when features land in different browsers at different times with different implementations:

• Platform inconsistencies hurt us more than big feature differences, we should start to try and prioritize aligning the platform
• We need better tools to help us understand what the inconsistencies are and guidance on how to manage them
• Developers should raise more issues to keep browser vendors accountable when there are differences

Web Design in 4 minutes

This is a wonderful way of progressively explaining the layered approach to building for the web that Charlotte was teaching in her Codebar workshop.

A Code Review, Or Yet Another Reason to Love the Web | Brad Frost

I love this back and forth between Brad and Jonathon. I think they’ve both got some good ideas:

• I agree with Brad that you can start marking up these kind of patterns before you’ve got visual designs.
• I agree with Jonathon that it’s often better to have a generic wrapper element to avoid making assumptions about which elements will be used.

shawnbot/custom-elements: All about HTML Custom Elements

A good introduction to custom elements, one piece of the web components stack.

That said, when using custom elements—or anything involving JavaScript, for that matter—you should always design experiences for progressive enhancement, and plan for the possibility that JavaScript isn’t enabled or available.

Hmmm …that’s kind of hard when JavaScript is required to make custom elements work at all.

Join Fractal on Slack!

If you’re planning on giving Fractal a test drive, jump into this Slack channel. Mark and others will be able to help you out with any questions that aren’t covered in the docs.

A workshop for codebar students: Build a portfolio or blog site | Charlotte Jackson, Front-end developer

Charlotte did a fantastic job putting this workshop together on the weekend. It was inspiring!

Adding Service Worker to a simple website - rossta.net

A nice little walkthrough of a straightforward Service Worker for a content-based site, like a blog.

Fractal v1.0 | Clearleft

Mark sets the scene for Fractal, the fantastic tool he’s built for generating pattern libraries.

This 1.0 release is just a start; it hopefully provides a solid foundation on which we (and anyone else who wants to contribute) can build and expand on in the future.

Exciting!

Fractal Documentation

This is the tool that we use at Clearleft to generate pattern libraries. It’s pretty damn cool. Mark built it. It’s pretty damn cool.

The Service Worker Lifecycle

The life cycle of a Service Worker—with all its events and states—is the one bit that I’ve never paid that much attention to. My eyes just glaze over when it comes to installation, registration, and activation. But this post explains the whole process really clearly. Now it’s starting to make sense to me.

Vox Product Accessibility Guidelines

I’m not a fan of the checklist approach to accessibility, but this checklist of checklists makes for a handy starting point and it’s segmented by job role. Tick all the ones that apply to you, and this page will generate a list for you to copy and paste.

Design Systems

A newsletter dedicated to all things related to design systems, style guides, and pattern libraries.

Qualities of Successful Pattern Libraries: Pick Any Two - Cloud Four

I think Tyler’s onto something here:

I noticed three qualities that recurred in different combinations. Without at least two, the projects seemed doomed to failure.

1. User-Friendly
2. Collaborative
3. Integrated

I certainly think there’s a difference in how you approach a pattern library intended as a deliverable (something we do a lot of at Clearleft) compared to building a pattern library for an ongoing ever-evolving product.

Teaching web development to design students (Phil Gyford’s website)

Phil’s write-up of teaching web development to beginners is immensely valuable in the run-up to the Codebar workshop that Charlotte is running this weekend. This bit gave both us a real “a-ha!” moment:

It only occurred to me at the end that I should have encouraged the students to try and fix each other’s bugs. If anyone had problems I’d go round and help people and often it’d be a little typo somewhere. Helping each other would acknowledge that this is entirely normal and that a second pair of eyes is often all that’s needed.

Adapting to Input · An A List Apart Article

Jason breaks down the myths of inputs being tied to device form factors. Instead, given the inherent uncertainty around input, the only sensible approach is progressive enhancement.

Now is the time to experiment with new forms of web input. The key is to build a baseline input experience that works everywhere and then progressively enhance to take advantage of new capabilities of devices if they are available.

The best of Google I/O 2016 | Andrew Betts

Andrew picks out his favourite bits from this year’s Google I/O, covering web payments, CSS containment, and—of course—Service Workers and progressive web apps, although he does note (and I concur):

I wish Google would focus as much attention on ‘normal’ sites that perform navigations as they do on so called ‘app-shell’ (which is just a new name for single-page apps, as far as I can tell), but then many people will be building SPAs and these recipes will make those apps fly. In news publishing we seem to flip flop between traditional page navigations and SPAs, but I’ve never found a SPA news site (or a native app) that I really like more than a normal website. Maybe a really good progressive web app will change that. But I’m not convinced.

Still, as he says:

All this really just underscores how flexible ServiceWorker is and that with it we can disagree on what the right solution is, but we can all get what we want anyway.

A Comprehensive Guide to Font Loading Strategies—zachleat.com

A terrific rundown of all your options when it comes to web font loading.

The Business Case for Progressive Web Apps - Cloud Four

Jason looks at the business reasons for and against building progressive web apps. In short, there’s everything to gain and nothing to lose.

Seriously, why would you not add a Service Worker and a manifest file to your site? (assuming you’re already on HTTPS)

The Progress of Web Apps | Microsoft Edge Dev Blog

The roadmap for progressive web apps from Microsoft; not just their support plans, but also some ideas for distribution.

Snyk’s Style Guide

…and Anna describes the process of creating the Snyk style guide.

Creating a Bocoup style guide - Bocoup

Susan describes the process behind creating Bocoup’s style guide…

Making And Maintaining Atomic Design Systems With Pattern Lab 2 – Smashing Magazine

A walkthrough of what’s new in Pattern Lab 2. It’s really interesting to see the convergent evolution of ideas here with what’s brewing in Fractal at Clearleft.

The Conjoined Triangles of Senior-Level Development - The Frontside

This is relevant to my interests because I think I’m supposed to be a senior developer. Or maybe a technical director. I’m really not sure (job titles suck).

Anyway, I very much appreciate the idea that a technical leadership position isn’t just about technical skills, but also communication and connectedness.

When we boiled down what we’re looking for, we came away with 12 traits that divide pretty cleanly along those three areas of responsibility: technical capability, leadership, and community.

For someone like me with fairly mediocre technical capability, this is reassuring.

Now if I only I weren’t also mediocre in those other areas too…

CSS Diner - Where we feast on CSS Selectors!

Here’s a fun game to help practice those CSS selectors.

A11y Dialog

Hot on the heels of an accessible toggle, here’s an accessible modal dialog script.

EmberCamp London Keynote 2016 // Speaker Deck

I really, really like what Ember is aiming for here:

First, we deliver the raw content, ensuring those on slow connections or without JavaScript get they’re after as soon as possible. Next, we load the minimum set of JavaScript needed to interactivity for that page, keeping transfer time and parsing time low. Once the user has an interactive page, we can start preemptively loading other parts of the application, including frequently-accessed data.

That’s how you get the holy grail of resilience and performance:

Subsequent visits and interactions are therefore nearly instantaneous, because they don’t rely on the network.

I sincerely hope other frameworks are paying attention to this layered approach.

Oh, and I also like this observation:

There’s an age-old argument about the difference between “web pages” and “web apps”. In reality, there’s a continuum between the two.

CSS Containment Module Level 3

A way of declaring the scope of an element’s layout and paint styles, which browsers can then use as a hint to optimise performance. It’s already shipping in Chrome and Opera.

The Search For The Holy Grail: How I Ended Up With Element Queries, And How You Can Use Them Today – Smashing Magazine

An attempt to crack the element query nut. It relies on executing JavaScript at runtime so it doesn’t feel production-ready to me unless you’re already relying on JavaScript to render or style your content. Still, there’s a lot of good thinking has gone into the syntax—it’s worth investigating for that reason alone.

How Will Web Components Change CSS Architecture? - Snook.ca

Depending on how you’re currently structuring your CSS and class attributes, web components might not make all that much of a difference to your workflow.

Typography Handbook

You can think of this as a short book or a long article, but either way it’s a handy overview of typography on the web:

A concise, referential guide on best web typographic practices.

Mind you, I take issue with this assertion:

Establishing a vertical rhythm is simple.

The :target Trick

An alternative to using the :checked pseudo-class for sprinkling in some behaviour—you can use the :target pseudo-class. It might mess up the browser history though.

Building Web Applications that Work Everywhere

The second book in Adam Scott’s series on ethical web development is a nice quick read, covering URL design, Service Workers, and performance.

Rivets.js — Lightweight and powerful data binding + templating solution for building modern web applications

Mark recommended this JavaScript library as lightweight alternative to Vue.js …itself a kind of lightweight alternative to React. Basically I’m interested in the data-binding stuff.

Astrum - A lightweight pattern library for any project

One more tool for making pattern libraries. This one looks fairly simple and straightforward.

Things to Know (and Potential Dangers) with Third-Party Scripts | CSS-Tricks

Third-party scripts can provide powerful functionality, but they also bring risks to privacy, security, performance, and page behavior.

Completely CSS: Progressively Collapsing Navigation | Kenan Yusuf

One way of implementing the growing/shrinking navigation pattern—an alternative to just shoving everything behind a hamburger icon.

MarkSheet: a free HTML and CSS tutorial - Free tutorial to learn HTML and CSS

This looks like a great resource for beginners looking to learn HTML and CSS.

Accessibility Matters: Meet Our New Book, “Inclusive Design Patterns” (Pre-Release) – Smashing Magazine

I think it’s a safe bet that this new book by Heydon will be absolutely brilliant.

It’s a handbook with valuable, time-saving techniques that will help you avoid hacky workarounds and solve common issues effectively.

The Languages Which Almost Were CSS - Eager Blog

A wonderful deep dive into the history of styling languages before CSS. I love spelunking down these internet history potholes—fascinating stuff!

Persistent Storage | Web Updates - Google Developers

Here’s an interesting proposal from Google for a user-initiated way of declaring a site’s offline assets should be prioritised (and not wiped out in a clean-up). Also interesting: the way that this idea is being tried out is through a token that you can request …sure beats prefixes!

» Service Workers at Scale, Part II: Handling Fallback Resources Cloud Four Blog

This ongoing series about the nuts’n’bolts of implementing Service Workers is really good. This one is great for getting to grips with the cache API.

ISP’s are updating your site without your permission

One more reason to make the switch to HTTPS.

Snapper: A CSS Snap Points Carousel | Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA

Scott introduces a polyfill for CSS snap points.

Progressive Web Apps Dev Summit | hiddedevries.nl

Hidde’s write-up of the Progressive Web App Dev Summit:

It was exciting to hear about the technologies, and to see that a lot of them already work on a great deal of platforms. Most of the major browser vendors expressed how much they liked the idea, so it is realistic to say support will increase in the short term. This, and the fact that all PWA techniques can be regarded as a ‘progressive enhancement’ (with some leniency as to what that term means), entails that we can build Progressive Web Apps today.

Hopefully, we will do so responsibly. Native apps really only work on their particular platforms. PWAs, in theory, can be built to work universally. For everyone with a web enabled device. This is awesome! Major browser vendors are behind the idea, and I think as developers we should be, too.

Dev.Opera — Making progressive web apps even better: ambient badging and “pop into browser”

Andreas demoed these ideas yesterday. Proper ambient badging and a way of getting at URLs even if a progressive web app is running in fullscreen or standalone mode. Great stuff!

PWAs: The Panel (Progressive Web App Summit 2016) - YouTube

Here’s the video of the panel I moderated yesterday at the Progressive Web App Dev Summit. I had to get a bit Paxman at times with some of the more media-trained panelists.

ManifeStation - Automagically create your Web App Manifest

If you’re going to make a manifest file for an existing site, start with this very handy tool. You give it the URL of your site and it then parses the content for existing metadata to create a best first stab at a manifest JSON file.

Enhancing Optimistically | Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA

I love the thinking that Scott puts into all aspects of building on the web. Here, he outlines a really robust approach to cutting the mustard for progressive enhancement.

Building better accessibility primitives

On the need for a way to mark parts of a document as “inert” while the user is interacting with modal content.

Research with blind users on mobile devices | Accessibility

Some interesting outcomes from testing gov.uk with blind users of touchscreen devices:

Rather than reading out the hierarchy of the page, some of the users navigated by moving their finger around to ‘discover’ content.

This was really interesting - traditionally good structure for screen readers is about order and hierarchy. But for these users, the physical placement on the screen was also really important (just as it is for sighted users).

» Introducing Drizzle Cloud Four Blog

A new pattern library tool, this time from the smart people at Cloud Four. It’s called Drizzle and it started life as a fork of Fabricator.

The web is catching up on mobile

A good impartial overview of progressive web apps, as described at the most recent Google I/O. This is very telling:

At the start I found the term a bit confusing as some PWA examples are single page applications (SPA) controlled by JavaScript. These apps are not strictly using progressive enhancement where JavaScript is added on top to enhance the experience.

The term also begs the question; what is the difference between websites and apps? It seems many of the new capabilities fit well for any dynamic website, not just apps.

Anyhow. It’s good to have an umbrella term to talk about these things.

eBay MIND Patterns - GitBook

A very handy collection:

This book contains frontend coding patterns (and anti-patterns) that will assist developers in building accessible e-commerce web pages, widgets and workflows.

I like that it contains a list of anti-patterns too.

There’s also a corresponding collection of working demos.

Making your JavaScript Pure · An A List Apart Article

I really like this piece by Jack. All the things he’s talking about—pure functions and referential transparency—are terms I was previously unfamiliar with …but the concepts smell familiar. It’s good to have terminology (and reasoning) to apply to the way I structure my JavaScript.

Progressive Web App Dev Summit 2016 | Home

Google have asked me to moderate a panel on the second day of this event in Amsterdam dedicated to progressive web apps. Very brave of them, considering some of my recent posts.

Smart Responsive Design Patterns, Or When Off-Canvas Isn’t Good Enough – Smashing Magazine

Vitaly takes a look at some of the more unusual patterns used in responsive designed.

Progressive web apps – let’s not repeat the errors from the beginning of responsive web design | justmarkup

Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it:

When people learned about responsive design, there were many wrong assumptions. The iPhone and early Android phones all had the same screen size (320x480px) and people thought it is a good idea to change the design based on these device-specific sizes.

We wouldn’t do that now, right? We wouldn’t attempt to create something that’s supposed to be a progressive web app, only to make it device-specific, right?

We are still at the beginning of learning about the best ways to build Progressive Web Apps. I hope it will make many more people aware of progressive enhancement. I hope that nobody makes the error again and concentrates on the device part.

as days pass by — Programmatic Progressiveness

Stuart’s ideas for Lighthouse sound a lot like the resilience validator tool that Scott mentioned recently.

This is our chance to help stamp out sites that don’t do things right, and help define that a progressive web app should actually be progressive.

If you have ideas on this, please file an issue.

Intro to Flexbox

The slides from Arelia’s flexbox talk.

Progressively less progressive | Andrew Betts

I agree with everything Andrew says here. Progressive web apps are great, but as long as Google heap praise on mobile-only solutions (like the Washington Post doorslam) and also encourage separate AMP sites, they’re doing a great disservice to the web.

More features arrive regularly to make this “one web” even better and easier to maintain. Service worker, streams, app manifests, payment request, to name a few. But adding these features one at a time to large, mature applications like WaPo or FT or Nikkei is a slow and painstaking process. That’s why it’s taking us a long time for us to tick off all these new features, and why it seems like madness to try and build the entire app several times over.

However, by creating the concept of PWAs and marketing them as they do, Google is encouraging publishers to ‘start again’. And they’re doing exactly the same thing with AMP.

You Don’t Need JavaScript for That!

A few common patterns—tooltips, fly-out menus, and toggles—that you can achieve with CSS.

Going Offline With Progressive Web Apps

Dave turned Day Trip into a progressive web app.

Starting this week, Android users (~13% of our active user base) who use DayTrip more than once will eventually be asked if they want to install our web app to their Home Screen. That’s important real estate for a small startup like ourselves.

Progressive Enhancement and Modern JavaScript ― Caolan

I think JavaScript frameworks have been blinkered to the needs of many developers (most websites are not SPAs or run by Node, nor should they be) for too long. We need to find a way to apply the lessons of modern frameworks to the rest of the web - it would be sad if everyone had to run JavaScript on their server and good-old resilient HTML was considered only as a fallback.

Yet another blog about the state and future of Progressive Web App - The blog of Ada Rose Edwards

Bravo!

In the web developer community’s collective drive to be more App Like and compete with native apps we may lose or weaken some of the web’s strongest features and we need to consider carefully before we throw away urls or the entire browser chrome in an effort to look like and behave like the cool kids of native.

You can hear more of Ada’s thoughts on progressive web apps on a recent episode of JavaScript Air.

Introducing Multirange: A tiny polyfill for HTML5.1 two-handle sliders | Lea Verou

You’re supposed to be able to create two-handled sliders with input type="range" but the browser support isn’t there yet. In the meantime, Lea has created a nice lightweight polyfill.

DRY: Do Repeat Yourself - QuirksBlog

Y’know, I think PPK might be on to something here. It’s certainly true that developers have such an eversion to solving a problem twice that some users end up paying the cost (like in the examples of progressive enhancement here).

I will be pondering upon this.

Vanilla List: The Vanilla Javascript Repository

Here’s a handy directory of scripts that set out to solve one problem without any dependencies. Useful for poking at, picking apart, and learning from.

marmelab/universal.css: The only CSS you will ever need

Ensure that your class names never go out of sync with your style declarations with this one simple trick:

Take any CSS rule you want to apply, replace : by -, and dots by -dot-, and you get the name of the corresponding universal css classname.

The only thing missing is immutability, so I would suggest also putting !important after each declaration in the CSS. Voila! No more specificity battles.

Frend — A collection of accessible, modern front-end components.

A nice little collection of interaction patterns with built-in accessibility and no dependencies.

Revision 263: Im Gespräch mit PPK, Chris Heilmann und Jeremy Keith | Working Draft

The Working Draft podcast is usually in German, but this episode is in English. It was recorded in a casual way by a bunch of people soaking up the sun sitting outside the venue at Beyond Tellerrand. Initially that was PPK and Chris, but then I barged in half way through. Good fun …if you’re into nerdy discussions about browsers, standards, and the web. And the sound quality isn’t too bad, considering the circumstances under which this was recorded.

Responsive Product Comparison Tables - daverupert.com

Dave explains the thinking behind his responsive table pattern I linked to a while back. He’s at pains to point out that you should always make sure a pre-made pattern is right for you instead of just deploying it no-questions-asked:

Using prefabricated, road tested solutions from Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, Google’s Material Design, Twitter’s Bootstrap, and Brad Frost’s Responsive Patterns is always a good place to start, but don’t settle there. My biggest advice would be to turn off the 27” display and use your sites and projects on your phone, there’s lots of low hanging fruit that could give way to new patterns, tailor-suited to your content.

State of the gap

Remy looks at the closing gap between native and web. Things are looking pretty damn good for the web, with certain caveats:

The web is the long game. It will always make progress. Free access to both consumers and producers is a core principle. Security is also a core principle, and sometimes at the costs of ease to the developer (but if it were easy it wouldn’t be fun, right?).

That’s why there’ll always be some other technology that’s ahead of the web in terms of features, but those features give the web something to aim for:

Flash was the plugin that was ahead of the web for a long time, it was the only way to play video for heavens sake!

Whereas before we needed polyfills like PhoneGap (whose very reason for existing is to make itself obsolete), now with progressive web apps, we’re proving the philosophy behind PhoneGap:

If the web doesn’t do something today it’s not because it can’t, or won’t, but rather it is because we haven’t gotten around to implementing that capability yet.

Flex Layout Attribute (FLA)

The markup here (with proprietary inline attributes for styling) is a terrible idea but the demo that accompanies is great at showing how flexbox works …I just wish it didn’t try to abstract away the CSS. This is so close to being a really good learning tool for flexbox.

» Autofill: What web devs should know, but don’t

Jason takes good look at the browser support for autocomplete values and then makes a valiant attempt to make up for the complete lack of documentation for Safari’s credit card scanning.

CSS When/Else Rules

A really interesting proposal for more logic constructs in CSS: when/else conditions. At first glance, this looks like it would complicate the language (and one of the most powerful features of CSS is its simplicity), but when you dig a bit deeper you realise that there’s nothing new enabled by this extra syntax—it actually simplifies what’s already possible.

Semantic CSS - Snook.ca

Snook has been on a roll lately, sharing lots of great insights into front-end development. This is a particularly astute post about that perennial issue of naming things.

Position Wanted: Front-End Director - Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design

Hmmm …I think Jeffrey might have just given me my new job title.

Issue 596729 - chromium - Do not show the app banner unless the Manifest has a display set to standalone or fullscreen - Monorail

I am shocked and disgusted by this arbitrary decision by the Chrome team. If your Progressive Web App doesn’t set its manifest to obscure its URL, you get punished by missing out on the add to home screen prompt.

Google is declaring war on URLs again.

Developing Dependency Awareness – Smashing Magazine

A typically superb article by Aaron. Here, he breaks down a resilient approach to building for the web by examining the multiple ways you could add a button to a page. There’s a larger lesson here too:

We don’t control where our web-based products go or how our users access them. All we can do is imagine as many less-than-perfect scenarios as possible and do our best to ensure our creations will continue to do what they’re supposed to do. One of the easiest ways to do that is to be aware of and limit our dependencies.

Building Web Apps for Everyone - O’Reilly Media

Here’s a fantastic and free little book by Adam Scott. It’s nice and short, covering progressive enhancement, universal JavaScript, accessibility, and inclusive forms.

Download it now and watch this space for more titles around building inclusive web apps, collaboration, and maintaining privacy and security.

Did I mention that it’s free?

Responsive Product Comparison Table

Here’s a nice little pattern from Dave—showing data tables one column at a time on smaller screens.

Render 2016 - Jeremy Keith on Vimeo

Here’s another version of my talk Resilience—the same one I gave at Beyond Tellerrand—this time from the Render conference in Oxford.

FamilySearch Style Guide

A straightforward little pattern library. There’s also the story of making it a living style guide.

The Sonos Pattern Library — zdfs

There’s a lot I disagree with here. I don’t think this pattern library process is very elegant or scalable, and it certainly wouldn’t work for me.

But I’m still linking to it. Why? Because I think it’s absolutely wonderful that people share their processes like this. It doesn’t matter one whit whether or not it would work for me.

Frontend development may have gotten a lot more complicated, but the simple premise of sharing what you’ve learned hasn’t.

I couldn’t agree more!

Let’s Write Beautiful CSS Comments | Sparkbox

If you don’t comment your CSS, you’ll confuse other people looking at your code, and, more embarrassingly, you’ll confuse future you. If you do comment CSS, everybody will be less confused, and things will be accidentally broken less often. You will be popular and generally well-liked, and people will remember to send you cards on your birthday. Comment more.

Some good advice here on how to write better comments in CSS.

Jeremy Keith on Vimeo

Here’s the video of the talk I just gave at the Beyond Tellerrand conference in Düsseldorf: Resilience.

Rebuilding the Perch UI - creating a pattern library

Rachel and Drew have been beta-testing Mark’s Fractal project for organising a library of components for Perch’s interface. Sounds like it’s working out very, very well indeed!

Webfonts Last by Frederic Marx

Some smart thoughts on web fonts.

Aesthetics of the invisible | Francesco Schwarz

Hidden little details that make a big difference for screen readers.

A website is only as beautiful as the underlying markup.

HTML5 accessibility

A glanceable one-stop-shop for how today’s browsers are dealing with today’s accessibility features. Then you can dive deeper into each one.

On Building Component Libraries | Clearleft

Mark has dumped his brains!

Seriously, there is a lot of thought that has gone into this, and it’s just the beginning: Mark recounts the experience that Clearleft has had with delivering pattern libraries, laying the groundwork for releasing the library-generating tool that he has been building.

Watch this space.

Sign O’ The Times - original video in pure CSS

This is quite wonderful: a recreation of the video for Prince’s Sign O’ The Times made entirely with HTML and CSS.

The history of ‘this website is well-crafted’ hints | Holovaty.com

Adrian runs through the history of well-crafted websites:

• 1990s: Dynamic websites
• 2002: All-CSS layouts
• 2003: Nice URLs
• 2005: Ajax
• 2009: Custom web fonts
• 2010: Responsive web design

I think he’s absolutely right with his crystal ball too:

What’s a big hint that a site is crafted by forward-looking web developers? I’d say it’s service workers, the most interesting thing happening in web development.

But leaving trends aside, Adrian reminds us:

Some things never go out of style. None of the following is tied to a particular time or event, but each is a sign a website was made by people who care about their craft:

• Making sure the site works without JavaScript
• Semantic markup
• Following accessibility standards

Updating Our Prefixing Policy | WebKit

Ted has snuck a blog post out from behind Apple’s wall of silence, and it’s good news: WebKit is not going to use vendor prefixes for new features.

Flexbox Patterns

Here’s a well put-together collection of common patterns that are now much easier thanks to flexbox.

chartd - responsive, retina-compatible charts with just an img tag

This could be a handy replacement for some Google Charts images of graphs. It uses SVG and is responsive by default.

I bet it wouldn’t be too tricky to use this to make some sparklines.

A Complete Guide to CSS Grid Layout | Chris House

This guide to CSS grid layout is the perfect companion piece to Rachel’s Grid by Example.

Layout Demos by Jen Simmons

If you want to keep up to date with all the coolest stuff landing in CSS, I recommend bookmarking this ever-changing page.

Clarity 2016 Wrapup by Chris Coyier on CodePen

As well as compèring the event, Chris took the time to make notes at the Clarity conference, dedicated to all things patterny.

Kite - Programming copilot

This looks like it could be a very nifty tool to have at your disposal while coding. I like that it’s editor-agnostic.

Why Javascript Development is Crazy

The state of Javascript development is overwhelming and confusing because everyone is overengineering their apps by default without even realizing it.

Interactive Form

I quite like this step-by-step interface for a form, all cleverly handled with the :focus pseudo-class. I’d want to refine some of the usability issues before using it in production, but the progressive disclosure is nice.

A debugging thought process

Remy walks us through his performance debugging routine …and now Una must write him a song.

Aligning text smartly in CSS

Here’s a clever way to get text centred when it’s short, but left-aligned when it wraps.

A couple of alternatives to the hamburger menu | Kenan Yusuf

Two (similar) patterns for responsive navigation that don’t involve sweeping everything behind a hamburger icon.

When I’ve experimented with auto-overflowing horizontal patterns like this, I’ve found that a judiciously-placed box shadow can give a nice affordance.

CSS Pseudo // Speaker Deck

Everything you ever wanted to know about CSS pseudo-classes (and pseudo-elements).

Progressive Web Apps have leapfrogged the native install model … but challenges remain

While many challenges remain, the good news is … it’s progressive. Developers can already see the benefits by sprinkling in these technologies to their existing websites and proceed to build on them as browsers and operating systems increase support.

Clarity Conf: Brad Frost

I wish I could’ve made it to the Clarity conference—I had a Salter Cane gig to play—but luckily for me, Brad took lots of notes.

Design Patterns on CodePen

Well, this is rather wonderful! A one-stop-shop for exploring UI patterns on CodePen …this is going to be time sink.

simpl.info

This is a very handy resource—a collection of minimum viable implementations of HTML5 features and JavaScript APIs.

RAFP: a proposal for performance measurements through requestAnimationFrame - QuirksBlog

Here’s an interesting proposal from ppk: use requestAnimationFrame to gauge how performant a browser in behaving and then enhance accordingly.

Should I use Grid or Flexbox?

Rachel compares two CSS layout modules; Grid and Flexbox. This distinction is crucial:

Flexbox is essentially for laying out items in a single dimension – in a row OR a column. Grid is for layout of items in two dimensions – rows AND columns.

Front-End Style-Guides: Definition, Requirements, Component Checklist

You know that front-end pattern libraries have hit the mainstream when the Nielsen Norman Group get in on the action.

As ever, I’m not sure their sweeping generalisations can be applied to every project, but their checklist approach makes for a good starting point.

CSS and Scalability

Some good thoughts in here about writing scalable CSS …although the finger-pointing at sites (that are shipping at scale) reminds me a bit of that quote by copywriter Paul Butterworth: “Where the heck were you when the page was blank?”

Dirty Tricks From The Dark Corners Of Front-End // Speaker Deck

Vitaly calls them dirty tricks but this is a handy collection of front-end development techniques. They’re not really dirty …just slightly soiled.

The copy & paste guide to your first Service Worker

Minimum viable Service Worker tutorial. Copy, paste, and don’t ask questions.

Also:

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Progressive Enhancement Makes Me Sad | HeydonWorks

Well, I’m convinced.

Progressive web apps: the long game

Remy sums up the psychological end goal of progressive apps (HTTPS + Service Worker + manifest JSON file) prompting an add to home screen action:

This high bar of entry will create a new mental model for our users.

If I add this app to my home screen, it will work when I open it.

It’s a shame that this charge to turbo-boast the perception of the web on mobile is a bit one-sided: I would love to see Apple follow Google’s lead here. But if Android succeed in their goal, then I think iOS will have to follow suit just to compete.

Bruce Lawson’s personal site  : One weird trick to get online — designers hate it!

I don’t care about Opera Mini (I’m not its Product Manager). In the same way, I don’t care about walking sticks, wheelchairs, mobility scooters or guide dogs. But I care deeply about people who use enabling technologies — and Opera Mini is an enabling technology. It allows people on feature phones, low-powered smartphones, people in low-bandwidth areas, people with very small data plans, people who are roaming (you?) connect to the web.

PX, EM or REM Media Queries? by Zell Liew

Just recently on a Clearleft project, some of us were discussing whether there was a reason not to use rems instead of ems for media queries. Apart from one older browser implementation difference, we couldn’t come up with much.

Some in-depth research here supports the use of em values for media queries. Very good to know.

Managing Mobile Performance Optimization – Smashing Magazine

Some solid sensible advice on optimising performance.

Service Workers: Save your User’s Data using the Save-Data Header | Dean Hume

I hadn’t heard of the save-data header. This article shows how you can use a Service Worker to sniff for it and serve up smaller assets, but I’m guessing you could also sniff for it from the server.

CSS Flexbox Is Entirely Logical (Almost) / Paul Robert Lloyd

Paul is digging deep into flexbox and finding it particularly useful for internationalisation …but there are still some gotchas.

Web Progressions

This looks a good (free!) event in London all about the latest browser goodies, all wrapped in the “progressive apps” buzzword.

Alas, I’ll be making my way back from Indie Web Camp Düsseldorf the day this is on.

Instagram-style filters in HTML5 Canvas | Viget

Una’s [Instagram filters in CSS}(https://github.com/una/CSSgram) are great, but the browser support for CSS filters isn’t as good as, say, the browser support for canvas. Here’s a clever bit of scripting to polyfill filters using canvas.

Introducing A11y Toggle

Here’s a bit of convergent evolution: Hugo’s script is similar to what I wrote about recently.

He also raises a point that Kevin mentioned:

I would like to investigate on the details and summary elements as they are basically a native implementation for content toggles.

For some reason details never got much browser love, even though it’s clearly paving a well-trodden cowpath.

ECSS

Enduring CSS (not int the sense of “put up with” but in the sense of “long-lasting”) is a new book by Ben Frain all about writing and maintaining modular reusable CSS.

You can read the whole thing for free online or buy an eBook.

Design is choice by Jaime Caballero

A lovely outlook on designing with progressive enhancement:

There will always be users coming from places you didn’t expect, using devices you didn’t test for.

An update (March 2016) on the current state & recommendations for JavaScript …

Making web apps? Care about SEO? Here’s Google’s advice:

Use feature detection & progressive enhancement techniques to make your content available to all users.

Styling Broken Images

This is really, really clever. You can’t use generated content (:before and :after) on replaced content. The img element is replaced content …but only when the image actually loads. So if the image fails to load, you can apply specific fallback styles (using :before and :after).

A Year Without jQuery

In many ways, moving to vanilla JavaScript highlights the ugliness of working with the DOM directly, and the shortcomings of native Element object — shortcomings which Resig solved so incredibly eloquently with the jQuery API.

Having said that, the lessons I’ve learned over the last year have made me a better developer, and the tools built in the process have opened my eyes and given me enough confidence and understanding of vanilla JavaScript that the only scenario where I would personally consider using jQuery again would be a project needing IE8 support.

Use rems for global sizing, use ems for local sizing | Clagnut

In this extract from his forthcoming book, Richard looks at when to use ems, when to use rems …and when to use ch (no, me neither).

Infinite Scrolling, Pagination Or “Load More” Buttons? Usability Findings In eCommerce – Smashing Magazine

A good side-by-side comparison of loading techniques, with some clear advice. But pay attention to this note:

While the debate over “Load more” versus infinite scrolling versus pagination has been debated for years, the product loading method shouldn’t be the first thing that most e-commerce vendors spend their development resources on.

Flexbox Defense

If Flexbox Froggy was too easy for you, take it to the next level with this tower defence game.

Maybe we could tone down the JavaScript / fuzzy notepad

Accept that sometimes, or for some people, your JavaScript will not work. Put some thought into what that means. Err on the side of basing your work on existing HTML mechanisms whenever you can.

If you’re going to override or reimplement something that already exists, do some research on what the existing thing does first. You cannot possibly craft a good replacement without understanding the original.

Remember that for all the power the web affords you, the control is still ultimately in end user’s hands.

Embracing simplicity by Adam Silver

The full text of Adam’s excellent talk at EnhanceConf.

EnhanceConf - Stefan Tilkov - How to embrace the browser - YouTube

The videos from EnhanceConf are started to go up already. Stefan’s talk really struck me—all the talks were great but this one had the most unexpected insight for me. It really clarifies a lot of ideas that I’ve been trying to articulate, but which Stefan crystalises by taking the long-zoom view.

jgarber623/aria-collapsible: A lightweight, dependency-free JavaScript module for generating progressively-enhanced collapsible regions using ARIA States and Properties.

A very lightweight script for toggling the appearance of elements in an accessible way.

Atomic Classification | Trent Walton

There is one truism that has been constant throughout my career on the web, and it’s this: naming things is hard.

Trent talks about the strategies out there for naming things. He makes specific mention of Atomic Design, which as Brad is always at pains to point out, is just one way of naming things: atoms, molecules, organisms, etc.

In some situations, having that pre-made vocabulary is perfect. In other situations, I’ve seen it cause all sorts of problems. It all depends on the project and the people.

Personally, I like the vocabulary to emerge from the domain knowledge of the people on the project. Building a newspaper website? Use journalism-related terms. Making a website about bicycles? Use bike-related terms.

Most importantly, make the naming process a collaborative exercise, as outlined by Alla and Charlotte.

Performance is a feature. Why performance is an opportunity for online businesses.

The problem is that performance is a feature that is not on anyone’s product roadmap.

For whatever reason, the fact that it correlates directly to bounce rate, time on site, pages-per-visit etc. has not struck home with many product owners.

Most websites, certainly in the publishing industry where I have worked for a good part of my career, see those metrics as core KPIs. So you would think that anything that improved them would get prioritised. But no.

Ignacio Villanueva

Ignacio asked me some questions. I was happy to answer them.

Walmart Web Style Guide

A pattern library of Walmart’s front-end code.

The New Web Typography › Robin Rendle

A wonderfully thoughtful piece on typography, Jan Tschichold and the web. This really resonated with me:

It’s only been over the past year or so in which I’ve recognised myself as a ‘Web designer’ with a capital W, as I now believe that something happens to information and technology, and even typography itself, when people pass through these interconnected networks and interact with hypertext.

It’s for these reasons that I don’t believe in “digital design” or “designing for screens” and it’s why I’m often attracted to one particular side of this spectrum.

Robin proposes three “principles, suggestions, outlines, or rather things-that-I-ought-to-be nervous-about when setting text on the web”:

1. We must prioritise the text over the font, or semantics over style.
2. We ought to use and/or make tools that reveal the consequences of typographic decisions.
3. We should acknowledge that web typography is only as strong as its weakest point.

There’s an in-depth look at applying progressive enhancement to web type, and every single link in the resources section at the end is worth investigating.

Oh, and of course it’s beautifully typeset.

How to lint your Sass/CSS properly with Stylelint — Creative Nightly

Linting CSS seems like a very good idea, especially if you’re not the only one writing the CSS. This guide is going to come in very handy when I give it a try.

Preload: What Is It Good For? – Smashing Magazine

A comprehensive overview of rel="preload" which looks very useful indeed …I just wish it wasn’t (like “nofollow”) a nonsensical value for the rel attribute: a resource can’t have a relationship of “preload” to the linking document.

hunt

This looks like it could be quite a handy (and relatively lightweight) script for attaching events—like animations—to an item’s visibility, so the events only trigger when the item is scrolled into view.

Frontend Design | Brad Frost

Well, this pretty much sums up the front-end team at Clearleft:

Frontend design involves creating the HTML, CSS, and presentational JavaScript code that makes up a user interface.

I’ve often said that at Clearleft, development is always in the service of design. And like Brad, I often find myself defining that work by what it isn’t:

They understand UX principles and best practices, but may not spend their time conducting research, creating flows, and planning scenarios

They have a keen eye for aesthetics, but may not spend their time pouring over font pairings, comparing color palettes, or creating illustrations and icons.

They can write JavaScript, but may not spend their time writing application-level code, wiring up middleware, or debugging.

They understand the importance of backend development, but may not spend their time writing backend logic, spinning up servers, load testing, etc.

Ethical Web Development

I really, really like these principles. Time to add them to the list.

16 CSS Lessons via Post-it® Notes

’Sfunny—I was just talking about how important it is to keep document ways of teaching the basics of CSS, then I come across this delightful series of explanations.

(I hope Kaylan posts this to her own site as well as Ev’s blog.)

Teaching the order of margins in CSS | Charlotte Jackson, Front-end developer

Y’know, all too often we’re caught up in the latest techniques and technologies. It’s easy to forget that there are people out there trying to learn this whole web thing from scratch. That’s why I think blog posts like this are so, so important!

Based on her experience teaching CSS at Codebar, Charlotte describes how she explains margins. Sounds simple, right? But is that because we’ve internalised this kind of thing? When was the last time we really thought about the basic building blocks of making websites?

Anyway, this is by far the best explanation of margin shorthand properties that I’ve seen.

More of this kind of thing, please!

Vanishing boxes with display contents

I’ve seen the exact problem that Rachel describes here—flexbox only applied to direct children, meaning the markup would have to be adjusted. display: contents looks like a nifty solution.

Battling BEM – 5 common problems and how to avoid them

We tend to use a variant of BEM in our CSS at Clearleft. Glad to see that when we’ve hit these issues, we’ve taken the same approach.

Surma.link – New ways to make your web app jank with Houdini – An introduction

This is a really good primer on all the pieces that make up the Houdini approach to CSS—giving authors access to low-level APIs for rendering.

As is often repeated here, it’s still early days and caution is advised, but it’s still a good idea to wrap your head around what’s coming down the standards pipe.

There’s even more specs in Houdini’s list of drafts, but the future of those is rather uncertain and they are not much more than a placeholder for an idea at this point. Examples include custom overflow behaviors, CSS syntax extension API, extension of native scroll behavior and similar ambitious things that allow you to screw up your web app even worse than ever before. Rejoice!

Developer Resources : Microsoft Edge Dev

Microsoft are officially on board with implementing Service Workers in Edge:

Roadmap Priority: High — We intend to begin development soon.

Short note on improving usability of scrollable regions

Three very easy to implement additions to scrollable areas of your web pages: tabindex="0", role="region", and an aria-label attribute.

Link rel=serviceworker - Chrome Platform Status

Ooh, I really like this idea! Pointing to your Service Worker the same way you point to your style sheet makes a lot of sense to me.

Jeremy Kard

You can do anything with CSS these days.

Making A Service Worker: A Case Study – Smashing Magazine

Lyza has written an excellent deep dive into Service Workers, complete with code.

I’m really chuffed that she gave me a shout-out to my exhortation:

So if you decide to play around with Service Workers, please, please share your experience.

By the way, I like her point about this being a good opportunity to use ES6/ES2015/HipsterScript features like arrow functions in the browser: any browser that supports Service Workers also supports the latest JavaScript.

A simple HTML5 Progress bar | Charlotte Jackson, Front-end developer

I love this little markup pattern: simple, accessible and elegant …with some quirky CSS gotchas around styling non-standard prefixed pseudo-elements. They came from the Shadow DOM …dun dun DUN!

The accessibility stack: making a better layer cake » Simply Accessible

A great description of a solid architectural approach to building on the web (and not just for accessibility either).

Introducing Soundslice offline mode | The Soundslice Blog

Adrian documents how he’s using Service Workers on Soundslice. I could imagine doing something similar for The Session.

Responsive Image Breakpoints Generator by Cloudinary

A very handy tool for figuring out breakpoints for responsive images.

Upload an image in its largest size, play around with the settings, and then generate the breakpoints, the markup, and the resized images for each breakpoint.

Performance Budget Builder

A nifty tool from Brad to help calculate and allocate performance budgets. Click around and edit the numbers.

EnhanceConf line-up by Simon McManus

This is shaping up to be a great affordable one-day event in London on March 4th. The format will be similar to Responsive Day Out.

I suggest you grab a ticket.

The elements of HTML

A complete list of HTML elements, past and present. They’re all hyperlinked to the relevant specs.

Developer Fallacies | HeydonWorks

Some of the explanations get a little ranty, but Heydon’s collection of observed fallacies rings true:

• The gospel fallacy
• The Luddite fallacy
• The scale fallacy
• The chocolate fireguard fallacy
• The pull request fallacy
• The ‘made at Facebook’ fallacy
• The Bob the Builder fallacy
• The real world fallacy
• The Daphne and Celeste fallacy

I’ve definitely had the Luddite fallacy and the scale fallacy thrown in my face as QEDs.

The ‘made at Facebook’ fallacy is pretty much identical to what I’ve been calling the fallacy of assumed competency: copying something that large corporation X is doing just because large corporation X is doing it.

edX Pattern Library · The Visual, UI, and Front End styleguide for edX’s applications

A nicely documented pattern library.

Revisiting the Float Label pattern with CSS — That Emil is Emil Björklund

A clever technique by Emil to implement the “float label” pattern using CSS. It all hinges on browsers supporting the :placeholder-shown pseudo-class which, alas, is not universal.

I was hoping that maybe @supports could come to the rescue (so that a better fallback could be crafted), but that tests for properties and values, not selectors. Damn!

The Art of Debugging

I was just helping out with some debugging at work and it reminded me of this great talk/post by Remy:

1. Replicate: see the bug
2. Isolate: understand the bug
3. Eliminate: fix the bug

RWD Interview with Jeremy Keith and Trent Walton

Myself and Trent answer some questions on responsive design for Justin’s excellent newsletter.

JavaScript web apps considered valuable · molily

A response to a rant I linked to recently.

The solution for bad JavaScript web apps is not to abandon them altogether, but to make better ones.

I couldn’t agree more. The tools have evolved and we now have frameworks and practices that allow us to render from the server and use the same code to render on the client, progressively enhancing from a solid robust base.

JavaScript is the best technology to build excellent interactivity in the browser. Still, the most important skill of a client-side JavaScript developer is to know when not to solve a problem with client-side JavaScript. It’s always more robust to solve a problem further down in the stack.

The problem is that I don’t see a willingness from developers to embrace this way of thinking. Instead I see it dismissed as being unrealistic or more expensive.

Still, it always takes time for behaviour to change so maybe things will only get better. I certainly hope so.

Don’t tell me what my browser can’t do! by Christian Heilmann

A great piece by Christian on taking a responsible, customer-focused approach to building on the web.

You don’t have to support old browsers and terrible setups. But you are not allowed to block them out. It is a simple matter of giving a usable interface to end users. A button that does nothing when you click it is not a good experience. Test if the functionality is available, then create or show the button.

Yes, this is an argument for progressive enhancement. No, that does not mean you can’t use JavaScript.

You can absolutely expect JavaScript to be available on your end users computers in 2016. At the same time it is painfully naive to expect it to work under all circumstances.

Why I hate your Single Page App by Stefan Tilkov

A linkbaity title for a ranty post. But it’s justified.

My point is that from an architectural perspective, most single page apps are the result of making the wrong choices and missing important opportunities.

Feature.js

A lightweight alternative to Modernizr. It doesn’t add classes to your markup so it’s up to what you do with the results of any test.

It’s perfect for cutting the mustard on a case-by-case basis.

Delicious Changes | The Official Delicious Blog

The first big change you’ll notice is our transition from the javascript front-end framework that has been powering the content at https://www.delicious.com. The engineers who crafted this version of the site are incredibly talented, and their code is amazing. It’s beautiful and powerful, but it has posed several significant challenges for us. For example, the search engines have a real problem reading our content, hindering users’ efforts to use Google or Bing to find what they’re looking for on Delicious.

WTF Opera Mini?!

The proxy browser Opera Mini is one of the most popular mobile browsers in the world, and rightly so. Ire Aderinokun has put together a handy collection—based on caniuse.com data—of all the features that are unavailable or only partially available in that browser. The point here is not to avoid using these features, but to make sure you’ve got a solid fallback in place:

This isn’t about bashing the problem, but figuring out the solution.

Using System Fonts in the Browser

We have some new font keywords that are basically shortcuts to using the system fonts on a device. This article explains the details.

Reimagining Single-Page Applications With Progressive Enhancement – Smashing Magazine

Some really great thinking here by Heydon on how to make single page apps but using HTML for the views instead of relying on client-side JavaScript for the rendering. He explains the code he’s using, but what really matters here isn’t the specific solution; it’s the approach. Smart!

Simply Jonathan: Multiple values for checkboxes

Following on from the post by Aaron that I linked to, more details about sending (and receiving) values from multiple checkboxes with the same name.

12 Little-Known CSS Facts (The Sequel)

I somehow missed this when it was first published last Summer: a collection of twelve obscure CSS knowledge grenades.

You learn something new every day. I just learned twelve somethings.

The Problem with Progressive Enhancement by Alex Lande

I think that “Do we want to support users without JS?” is the wrong question. Progressive enhancement has benefits that reach far beyond that user group.

Specifically:

1. Performance—”Progressively enhanced behaviors like using links that point to real URLs, or server-side form submission handling, allow users to perform important actions before JavaScript loads.”
2. Resilience—”If users can perform critical tasks when your JS breaks, it’s a minor inconvenience instead of a show stopper.”
3. Business, Business, Business.

Affirming User Choice With Checkboxes, From the Notebook of Aaron Gustafson

Well, this is timely! Just today I was having a really good natter with Charlotte about using checkboxes, specifically sending multiple values to the server:

You’ll notice that the name given to each of these checkbox input elements is the same: “reservation-requested-device[]”. The square brackets (“[]”) at the end of the name are the magic bit that allows the values of each chosen “reservation-requested-device” checkbox to be submitted as the value of “reservation-requested-device”.

See, I wasn’t sure whether that was just a PHP thing (the only server-side input-handling I’ve had much experience of) or whether it was a more general way of sending multiple values.

Update: It seems that the square brackets are indeed a PHP thing. Multiple values will be sent in any case. See this test case.

ScrollReveal

A nice self-contained script for animating items into view as the document scrolls.

I’d like be interested to hear what Graham thinks of this code—he’s my go-to person for smooth scroll-based animations.

(I’m very confused by the tagline for ScrollReveal—”Easy scroll animations for web and mobile browsers”—eh? Mobile browsers are web browsers …”web” is not a synonym for “desktop”.)

Content and Display Patterns | Brad Frost

Brad follows up with his thoughts on Dan’s article, emphasising the importance of a developer’s role in not just slavishly recreating what’s in a static comp, but seeing through to the underlying pattern beneath:

It’s so incredibly crucial to treat development as a key part of the design process.

“Content & Display Patterns,” an article by Dan Mall

A really terrific article from Dan on building pattern libraries. In summary:

1. Naming things is hard,
2. Separation of content and presentation is A Good Thing.

There are some really good insights here into getting just the right level of abstraction for a component—not too tightly tied to a specific visual display, but also not too tightly tied to a specific kind of content type:

When thinking about patterns, content strategists are primarily thinking about Content patterns, designers are primarily thinking about Display patterns, and front-end developers are responsible for bringing the two together.

(And it’s great to see Charlotte’s excellent article get a shout-out in the “Related reading” section at the end,)

Simple inline error message pattern

This is my go-to method for adding validation messages to forms—I think I first heard about it from Derek—so it’s nice to see it corroborated by Steve:

Add the error message as a child of the label element associated with an input.

jordanmoore/Modern-Default-HTML

This is so weird—Jordan Moore’s boilerplate responsive HTML template is exactly the same as mine! What are the odds‽

(I was once asked to contribute a boilerplate starter for

The Website Obesity Crisis

As promised, Maciej has posted the transcript of his excellent Web Directions talk on performance.

So, so good.

The App-ocalypse: Can Web standards make mobile apps obsolete? | Ars Technica

I really, really want to like this article—it’s chock full of confirmation bias for me. But it’s so badly-written …I mean like, just the worst.

Here’s an actual sentence:

So with a capable, HTML-based platform and a well-designed program that makes good use of CSS, one site could support phones, tablets, PCs, and just about anything else with one site.

So, yeah, I’m still linking to it, but instead of it being for the content, it’s because I want to lament the dreadful state of technology writing.

JavaScript: 2015 in Review

Use a framework if you must but never presume it’s viable over the long-term. Newer and better alternatives will appear before you’re half-way through your project. Never forget frameworks are an option — you don’t have to use one.

Touch Keyboard Type ‘Cheat Sheet’ - Labs - Baymard Institute

A useful primer on which combinations of attributes and values work best for which form fields: type, autocomplete, autocorrect, and autocapitalize.

getify/You-Dont-Know-JS

Graham—whose opinion I trust completely—has been raving about these books. And Kyle Simpson is a super-smart guy. So I reckon I should make these JavaScript tomes my holiday reading.

Photo upload and progressive enhancement for FixMyStreet / mySociety

Matthew describes a very nice bit of progressive enhancement for drag’n’drop file uploads (similar to the CSS Tricks article I linked to recently).

It uses the Dropzone JS which looks like it aligns nicely with the progressive enhancement approach.

Building the UX London website by Charlotte Jackson

Charlotte talks through some of the techniques she used when she was building the site for this year’s UX London, with a particular emphasis on improving perceived performance.

More Responsive Tapping on iOS | WebKit

This solution to the mobile tap delay by the WebKit team sounds like what I was hoping for:

Putting touch-action: manipulation; on a clickable element makes WebKit consider touches that begin on the element only for the purposes of panning and pinching to zoom. This means WebKit does not consider double-tap gestures on the element, so single taps are dispatched immediately.

It would be nice to know whether this has been discussed with other browser makers or if it’s another proprietary addition.

Interactive Storytelling | Codrops

I think this might be the most tasteful, least intrusive use of scroll events to enhance a Snowfallesque story. It’s executed superbly.

You can read all about the code. Interestingly, it’s using canvas to render the maps even though the maps themselves are being stored as SVG.

(There’s a caveat saying: “This is a highly experimental project and it might not work in all browsers. Currently there is no IE support.” I don’t think that’s true: the story works just in IE …that browser just doesn’t get the mapping enhancements.)

What Progressive Web Apps Mean for the Web - Telerik Developer Network

A hands-on look at building a progressive web app with Service Workers, manifest files, HTTPS, and all that good stuff. This is nice and balanced, extolling the virtues but also warning about the potential difficulties in implementing this stuff.

One nitpick though: there’s talk of graceful degradation, and while I get that that’s the outcome, I think it’s better to think in terms of progressive enhancement, which is the approach.

Maciej Ceglowski - The Website Obesity Crisis on Vimeo

A superb talk on performance, advertising, and the future of the web. No doubt a transcript will appear in due time on Maciej’s site and when it does, I will enjoy it all over again.

Trust me: you’ll want to watch this.

The web accessibility basics – Marco’s Accessibility Blog

Marco gives a run-down of the basics of getting accessibility right on the web. Nothing here is particularly onerous but you’d surprised how often developers get this wrong (or simply aren’t aware of it).

He finishes with a plea to avoid unnecessary complexity:

If there’s one wish I have for Christmas from the web developer community at large, it is this: Be good citizens of the web, and learn proper HTML before you even so much as touch any JavaScript framework. Those frameworks are great and offer a lot of features, no doubt. But before you use hundreds of kilobytes of JavaScript to make something clickable, you may want to try if a simple button element doesn’t do the trick just as fine!

Simplified JavaScript Jargon

An A-Z of JavaScript jargon (although some of the “explanations” could do with de-jargonifying themselves).

HIKE - Introduction to accessibility concepts for the Web

It really isn’t hard to get the basics of accessibility right on the web …and yet those basics are often neglected.

Here’s a handy shortlist to run through, HIKE:

• H stands for headings and semantic markup.
• I stands for images and labels.
• K stands for keyboard navigation.
• E asks for you to ACT with a little extra love for custom components and more.

(ACT = ARIA, Colour Contrast, Text Size)

IonicaBizau/gridly

Grid frameworks don’t get much more minimal than this—eleven lines of CSS:

.row { display: flex; }
.col { flex: 1; }
@media (max-width: 48em) {
    .row { flex-direction: column; }
    .col { flex: 0 0 100%; }
}
.col-tenth { flex: 0 0 10%; }
.col-fifth { flex: 0 0 20%; }
.col-quarter { flex: 0 0 25%; }
.col-third { flex: 0 0 33.3333334%; }
.col-half { flex: 0 0 50%; }

Should’ve been a gist really.

Putting My Patterns through Their Paces ◆ 24 ways

Ethan demonstrates progressive enhancement at the pattern level using flexbox.

I’ve found that thinking about my design as existing in broad experience tiers – in layers – is one of the best ways of designing for the modern web.

HTML Developers: Please Consider | HTML5 Doctor

The best ARIA role is the one you don’t need to use.

Autumn-Earth/serviceWorker.js

Here’s a really nice addition to my Service Worker script—opportunistically add non-critical CSS, JavaScript, and fonts to a cache as you go.

Progressive Enhancement—Ain’t Nobody Got Time for that | GlückPress

Two sides of a debate on progressive enhancement…

Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko wrote Progressive enhancement — JS sites that work:

If your content website breaks down from JavaScript issue — it is broken.

Joe Hoyle disagrees:

Unlike Rarst, I don’t value progressive enhancement very highly and don’t agree it’s a fundamental principle of the web that should be universally employed. Quite frankly, I don’t care about not supporting JavaScript, and neither does virtually anyone else. It’s not that it doesn’t have any value, or utility - but in a world where we don’t have unlimited resources and time, one has to prioritise what we’ll support and not support.

Caspar acknowledges this:

I don’t have any problem buying into pragmatism as the main and often pressing reason for not investing into a no-JS fallback. The idealistic nature of a design directive like progressive enhancement is very clear to me, and so are typical restrictions in client projects (budgets, deadlines, processes of decision making).

But concludes that by itself that’s not enough reason to ditch such a fundamental technique for building a universal, accessible web:

Ain’t nobody got time for progressive enhancement always, maybe. But entirely ditching principle as a compass for resilient decision making won’t do.

See also: Mike Little’s thoughts on progressive enhancement and accessibility.

briangonzalez/fontprep

The missing font generator for Mac OS X.

Very handy for subsetting fonts for the web. It doesn’t (yet) export WOFF2 unfortunately.

The web will always be a moving target : Eclectic Dreams

Caution:

It would be convenient to think that because we live in a world where people’s browsers are regularly updating, that we live in a world where the web is in a reliable state.

Reminder:

The web is a continually moving target. It probably changed in the time it took me to write this. If you work with web stuff you need to embrace this fact. It will be the only constant in your career.

Do not panic:

On the web progressive enhancement is and will always be, the methodology of choice. It makes your site robust to the shifting sands of the web front end.

Cutting the Mustard Revisited — sixtwothree.org

Jason revisits some cutting-the-mustard techniques, as started by the BBC and refined by Jake. This kind of feature-testing is indispensable for progressive enhancement.

Personally though, I’m still uncomfortable with the assumptions baked into equating particular features with particular browsers …maybe I’ve known PPK too long.

I much prefer to cut the mustard on a case-by-case basis by feature testing the actual APIs I’m about to use in a script. I realise that might be harder to scale, and it’s more verbose, but it’s the only way to be absolutely sure.

The “Blur Up” Technique for Loading Background Images | CSS-Tricks

Quite a few moving parts in this technique from Emil, but it’s very clever.

Learn to Code HTML & CSS - Beginner & Advanced

This looks like a great resource for anyone setting out to learn how to make websites.

Gethtml - all the html elements

The A-Z of HTML, with an example for each and every element. Comprehensive and impressive.

philipwalton/flexbugs

A list of known bugs (and workarounds) in flexbox implementations. This is going to be handy to refer back to.

Bliss.js — Heavenly JavaScript!

A small little JavaScript helper from Lea.

The helper library for people who don’t like helper libraries.

Flexbox Grid Finesse | HeydonWorks

Great tips from Heydon on building a real design system using flexbox. Perfect for those times when you can’t predict the amount of content that will be in layout …so, pretty much always.

There’s even a trick in here that kinda sorta gives us element queries.

Universal React ◆ 24 ways

I have no hands-on experience with React, but this tutorial by Jack Franklin looks like a great place to start. Before the tutorial begins he succinctly and clearly outlines the perfect architecture for building on the web today:

• The user visits www.yoursite.com and the server executes your JavaScript to generate the HTML it needs to render the page.
• In the background, the client-side JavaScript is executed and takes over the duty of rendering the page.
• The next time a user clicks, rather than being sent to the server, the client-side app is in control.
• If the user doesn’t have JavaScript enabled, each click on a link goes to the server and they get the server-rendered content again.

YES!!!

Y’know, I had a chance to chat briefly with Jack at the Edge conference in London and I congratulated him on the launch of a Go Cardless site that used exactly this technique. He told me that the decision to flip the switch and make it act as a single page app came right at the end of the project. I think that points to a crucial mindset that’s reiterated here:

Now we’ll build the React application entirely on the server, before adding the client-side JavaScript right at the end.

Progressive enhancement needs better advocacy • Zetafleet

A rousing call to arms for progressive enhancement. I agree with the sentiment, but I’m less comfortable making assumptions about the reasons why developers don’t use progressive enhancement:

However, what’s actually happening is that “universal access to content” is being subversively replaced with “universal access for a limited subset of users that I care about”.

Honestly, I think that plenty of developers just aren’t thinking about it—especially if they’re relying on a particular tool or framework to save them time and effort (which is not a crime). So that’s why I agree with the title of this piece: let’s talk about this more; let’s make sure developers understand what they’re doing when they make JavaScript a requirement for basic functionality.

I particularly like the point in here about content blockers like NoScript:

In fact, it’s probably more likely that a user will try browsing the Web today without scripting than at any other time since the 1990s.

WTF is Solid?- Solid

The new style guide and pattern library for Buzzfeed.

It all looks pretty reasonable on the surface but if you poke around in the CSS, you’ll find 1157 uses of !important. Yikes!

The whole point of having an agreed-upon codebase in a pattern library is so that developers need never reach for nuclear options like !important, so I’m afraid, for me, this is a demonstration of what not to do (in terms of CSS—the output of the HTML in the styleguide looks perfectly fine).

Solid uses immutable, atomic CSS classes…

CSS is “mutable”. By design. I don’t think we should be working against that.

Performance Calendar » Reducing Single Point of Failure using Service Workers

This is a nifty use of Service Workers—using a cache to mitigate unresponsive Content Delivery Networks.

The stuff in here about Promise.race is particularly useful for “lie-fi” scenarios: instead of thinking about the network connection in a binary way (either it’s available or it isn’t), considering the scenario of a crappy network connection seems more realistic.

Creating a Web Type Lockup | CSS-Tricks

A really great idea from Chris: using SVG to create the web equivalent of type lockups that can scale with all the control you want, while still maintaining accessibility.

Speaking of accessibility, Emil’s comment is very useful indeed.

Flexbox’s Best-Kept Secret

I’m filing this one away for future reference: combining flexbox with margin:auto is a magical combination.

Using auto margins with Flexbox is an effective way to get all of the flexibility of css floats, without the nastiness of breaking elements out of the document’s normal flow.

Remember this, future self!

Flexbox Froggy - A game for learning CSS flexbox

This is superb!

Flexbox can be tricky to get your head around, but this exercise does a great job of walking you through each step in a fun way. I highly recommend trying all 24 levels.

Drag and Drop File Uploading | CSS-Tricks

This is a terrific example of progressive enhancement in action: going from a simple file input to a lovely interactive drag’n’drop interface.

The code uses jQuery but it could be easily adapted to vanilla JavaScript, and anyway, it’s not so much the code that matters, it’s the approach.

Blocked! - O’Reilly Radar

Following on from that Wired article I linked to about disabling JavaScript, Simon St. Laurent brings in another factor—content blockers on iOS:

Apple offers its users the power to turn off much of the Web: fonts, styles, scripts, and more.

He rightly points out that the answer to building a robust, resilient web has been here all along:

Turning off web fonts, CSS, and images will frustrate designers and limit user interface possibilities, but turning off JavaScript might mean that we have to reconsider the architecture of our applications. Without JavaScript, the Web returns to its foundations of HTTP requests returning pages, with links and form submissions as the backbone of application structure.

HTML5: The New Flash

A new presentation from the wonderfully curmudgeonly Steven Pemberton, the Nosferatu of the web. Ignore the clickbaity title.

I don’t agree with everything he says here, but I strongly agree with his preference for declarative solutions over (or as well as) procedural ones. In short: don’t make JavaScript for something that could be handled in markup.

This part really, really resonated with me:

The web is the way now that we distribute information. We will need the web pages we create now to be readable in 100 years time, just as we can still read 100-year-old books.

Requiring a webpage to depend on a particular 100-year-old implementation of Javascript is not exactly evidence of future-thinking.

Troubleshooting rendering performance issues - YouTube

Harry packs a lot of great tips and tricks into one short video about performance troubleshooting. It’s also a great lesson in unlocking some handy features in Chrome’s developer tools.

Great stuff!

A look at detecting, pinpointing, measuring, and fixing rendering performance issues.

Five Goofy Things Medium Did That Break Accessibility — Medium Engineering

Some mea culpas from a developer at Medium. They share so that we may learn.

Tips for Creating and Exporting Better SVGs for the Web

Sara enumerates some handy tips aimed squarely at designers exporting SVGs. It focuses on Illustrator in particular but I’m sure a lot of this could equally apply to Sketch.

Instant Loading Web Apps With An Application Shell Architecture | Web Updates - Google Developers

Outlining the architectural thinking required to create what the Google devrel folks are calling progressive apps.

Browsers without service worker support should always be served a fall-back experience. In our demo, we fall back to basic static server-side rendering…

Yay!

…but this is only one of many options.

Hmmm. In my opinion, sending usable HTML on first request isn’t an implementation detail—it’s crucial. But on the whole, this approach is very sensible indeed.

Google+ | Google Web Showcase - Google Developers

Paul gives the lowdown on the Google+ responsive relaunch. They set themselves this performance budget:

• 60K of HTML,
• 60K of CSS,
• 60K of JavaScript,
• 60 frames per second animations, and
• 0.6 seconds latency.

And this bit is crucial:

One of our major rules was that all our pages needed to be both server-side and client-side rendered. With server-side rendering we make sure that the user can begin reading as soon as the HTML is loaded, and no JavaScript needs to run in order to update the contents of the page.

Aerotwist - The Cost of Frameworks

Here’s Paul’s write-up of his excellent talk at FF Conf.

Previously I’ve used the term “developer convenience” when describing the benefits of using a framework. Paul uses the term “ergonomics” to describe those benefits. I like that. I worry sometimes that the term “developer convenience” sounds dismissive, which isn’t at all my intention—making our lives as developers less painful is hugely important …but it’s just not as important as improving the lives of the end users (in my opinion …and Paul’s).

As I look at frameworks, I see the ergonomic benefits (and those are important, I agree!), but I can’t help but feel that, for many developers, investing in knowledge of the web platform itself is the best long-term bet. Frameworks come and go, it just seems to be the ebb and flow of the web, and, as I said above, they do contribute ideas and patterns. But if you ever find that the one you use no longer works for you, or has a bug that remains unfixed, being able to understand the platform that underpins it will help enormously.

You should use [insert library/framework], it’s the bestestest! / Paul Lewis - YouTube

This was one of favourite talks at this year’s FF Conf. But I will readily admit there’s a hefty dollop of confirmation bias in my enjoyment.

Best viewed with - Velocity Amsterdam 2015 // Speaker Deck

Are we doomed to see history repeat itself? With the amount of client-side MVC frameworks and the upcoming implementation of the ES6 syntax, will we soon be seeing a repeat of the “browser wars.” Will more websites only work in a select number of browsers with the capabilities to run their code?

Three years with CSS Grid Layout

Rachel outlines the history of the CSS Grid Layout spec so far:

The process works, as slow as it may seem to us who wait anxiously to be able to take advantage of these techniques. I am happy that we are waiting for something that I really believe has the ability to completely change how we do layout on the web.

An Offline Experience with Service Workers | Brandon Rozek

A great walkthrough of setting up a Service Worker for a blog. The code is here but more importantly, as Brandon says:

I wouldn’t be able to implement this myself if it wasn’t for some of the awesome people I mentioned earlier sharing their experience. So share, share, share!

Moodboard — a small JavaScript library for presenting image moodboards on the web

A lovely little script from Nat to create a nice montage of images. It works by progressively enhancing a regular series of images in the markup.

jonathantneal/mdcss

A tool for generating a pattern library from Markdown comments in CSS. This isn’t the way that I tend to work, but I can see how it would be quite handy.

Making a Simple Site Work Offline with ServiceWorker | CSS-Tricks

Another clear explanation by Nicolas of using Service Worker, this time on CSS Tricks.

NC.gov Styleguide

The comprehensive style guide and pattern library for North Carolina.

From Pages to Patterns: An Exercise for Everyone · An A List Apart Article

I’m so proud of Charlotte right now: last week she gave a conference talk and today she has an article published in A List Apart. Superb work on both fronts!

She does a great job of talking through a collaborative exercise to help teams move from thinking in pages to thinking in patterns.

Delivering Responsibly

The full transcript of Scott’s excellent presentation on performance and progressive enhancement.

<input> I ♡ you, but you’re bringing me down – Monica Dinculescu

The sad history of input elements.

I wish I could share in the closing optimism:

Now imagine the future where Web Components are supported natively, and someone else is allowed to write a <better-input>, an element that is a real, encapsulated DOM element, and not just a div soup. Imagine using this <better-input> that isn’t implemented differently in each browser, that looks the same everywhere, and that probably also knows how to bake you a cherry pie.

But I all I can think is:

Now imagine the future where Web Components are supported natively, and everyone is allowed to write a million variations of <my-idea-of-a-better-input>, an element that is an inaccessible div soup under the hood.

Using Quantity Queries to write content-aware CSS - tomango

Another take on the kind of quantity queries that Charlotte has been experimenting with for a while now. It all goes back to the nth-child stuff that Heydon was talking about at Responsive Day Out

The State of JavaScript on Android in 2015 is… poor - Discourse Meta

There’s something quite Kafkaesque about reading through the comments on Jeff Atwood’s request for an alternative to Ember.js …for rendering some text on a screen.

Every now and then someone pipes up with “server-rendered HTML?”, there’s a pause, and then a response of “naahhhhh.”

Surreal.

Accelerated Mobile Pages - I’ve Got More Questions than Answers by Andy Davies

Andy examines Google’s AMP project from a performance perspective and is left puzzled by its reliance on JavaScript and custom elements for rendering media.

But he shares my hope that AMP could serve as a demo of what the web could be if we developers had the will and political clout to see it through:

I wonder if what AMP really does is remind us how we’ve failed to build a performant web… we know how to, but all too often we just choose not to (or lose the argument) and fill our sites with cruft that kills performance, and with it our visitors’ experience.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Deprecating our AJAX crawling scheme

It’s official: hash bang URLs are an anti-pattern, and if you want your content indexed by Google, use progressive enhancement:

Since the assumptions for our 2009 proposal are no longer valid, we recommend following the principles of progressive enhancement.

Performance Budget Calculator

A handy little for calculating your performance budget based on how long you want your page to take to load on a particular connection.

Responsive News — AMP and Responsive Web Design

Tom’s thoughts on what AMP means for developers and publishers. He was initially sceptical but now he’s cautiously optimistic. Like me, he’s hoping that AMP can force the hand of those third-party advertisers to get their act together.

Publisher’s development teams are very capable of creating fast experiences for mobile users, but they don’t have the clout to coordinate all the additional cruft that is added to the page. However, if all the different publishers dev team’s got together and put their weight behind a single implementation, then we can force third parties to change their habits.

Responsive Field Day

All the videos from the excellent Responsive Field Day are now available. Even better, the audio is also available for your huffduffing pleasure!

All the presentations and panels were great. Sophie Shepherd’s terrific talk has really stuck with me.

Jeremy Keith - Responsive Field Day 2015 - YouTube

Here’s the 20 minute talk I gave at the inaugural Responsive Field Day in Portland.

Miranj: Collateral Damage

Websites should not come with minimum software requirements.

18F — Introducing the U.S. Web Design Standards

The story behind the newly-released pattern library for the US government.

The anatomy of responsive images - JakeArchibald.com

This is the best moment to write a blog post:

I just had my responsive images epiphany and I’m writing it all down before I forget everything.

Writing something down (and sharing it) while you’re still figuring it out is, in my opinion, more valuable than waiting until you’ve understood something completely—you’ll never quite regain that perspective on what it’s like to have beginner’s mind.

The tough truth of reality by Chris Taylor

Progressive enhancement is not about “what if users turn JavaScript off” but “what happens when the page is loaded in sub-optimal circumstances”.

Where to Put Your Search Role by Adrian Roselli

This is a very handy tip. I had been putting form role="search" all over The Session. Turns out that’s overriding the default role of “form”. Oops!

GOV.UK elements

I really like the clear styling of checkboxes and radio buttons in the GDS pattern library. Fitts’s law in action.

Lightning Design System

A nice combination of style guide and pattern library, with plenty of documentation.

A fictional conversation about progressive enhancement

So a web app is defined as a system that requires the JavaScript excesses for it to work. And the argument for the JavaScript excesses is that we need it to build web apps. That sounds a teeny bit circular to me.

Thinking Responsively: A Framework for Future Learning · An A List Apart Article

Very thoughtful and sensible thinking from Paul.

180: Panel on “Inline Styles” - ShopTalk on Huffduffer

Shop Talk Show is trying a new panel format. They got me on to join in the discussion about adding inline styles with JavaScript instead of using Cascading Style Sheets.

Doing Science On The Web – Infrequently Noted

Alex recounts the sordid history of vendor prefixes and looks to new ways of allowing browsers to ship experimental features without causing long-term harm.

Making Charts with CSS | CSS-Tricks

What a lovely bit of progressive enhancement—styling data tables to display as charts.

CSS element() function - Vincent De Oliveira

Fire up Firefox and try out these demos: the CSS element value is pretty impressive (although there are currently some serious performance issues).

To put it simply, this function renders any part of a website as a live image. A. Live. Image!

CSS counter property By Charlotte Jackson

This is nifty little piece of CSS for numbering nested lists. I don’t think I’ve come across the counter value or the counter-reset and counter-increment properties before (or if I did, I’ve completely forgotten about it).

Confidence and Overwhelm

Following on from her great conversation with Jen on The Web Ahead podcast, Rachel outlines a strategy to avoid feeling overwhelmed by the deluge of tools, frameworks, libraries, and techniques inundating front-end developers every day:

Learn your core skills well. Understand HTML and CSS, be able to build a layout without leaning on a framework. Get a solid understanding of how a website actually gets from the server to a browser, an understanding of security and accessibility. These are the basics, the constants. These things change slowly. These things sit underneath all the complexity and the tooling, the CMSs and the noise of thousands of people all trying to make their mark on this industry.

She also makes this important point:

As you are doing this don’t forget to share what you know.

Dave Shea – – beyond tellerrand DÜSSELDORF 2015 on Vimeo

A wonderful, wonderful history of the web from Dave at this year’s Beyond Tellerrand conference. I didn’t get to see this at the time—I was already on the way back home—so I got Dave to give me the gist of it over lunch. He undersold it. This is a fascinating story, wonderfully told.

So gather round the computer, kids, and listen to Uncle Dave tell you about times gone by.

Performance update #2: Electric Boogaloo | Vox Product Blog

It’s really great to see the performance improvements being made by the Vox team. This is the one that I think will make the most difference:

Our Revenue Team is increasing focus on the impact our advertising has on user experience and overall performance. One of their biggest initiatives has been to change the way ads load from synchronous to asynchronous, which has been underway for several months and is nearing deployment.

The Language of Modular Design · An A List Apart Article

Alla has taken the ideas she presented in her superb talk at Responsive Day Out and published them as a great article in A List Apart.

Designing for Performance by Lara Callender Hogan

Lara’s fantastic book is now available online in HTML for free. Have a read and then order a copy of the print book for your library.

Stephen Hay | The Back(side) of the Class | CSS Day on Vimeo

A great presentation from Stephen. He takes a thoughtful look at our processes and tools.

Styleguide

Huge have released their tool for generating front-end style guides.

Efficient Web Type, c. 1556

A long zoom and then a deep dive into web typography.

NTH-TEST | nth-child and nth-of-type Tester

A tool for getting instant visual feedback on your nth-child selectors. Considering that the way I figure out nth-child selectors is to try randomly changing numbers until it works, this should be quite useful for me.

You might not need jQuery plugins

From the people who brought you youmightnotneedjquery.com comes youmightnotneedjqueryplugins.com.

Don’t get me wrong—jQuery is great (some of the plugins less so) but the decision about whether to use it or not on any particular project should be an informed decision made on a case-by-case basis …not just because that’s the way things have always been done.

These sites help to inform that decision.

The Ushahidi Platform ~ Pattern Library

A really nicely-documented pattern library.

Edge Conference 2015 - 5 Progressive Enhancement - YouTube

Here’s the video of the panel I participated in at Edge conference, expertly moderated by Lyza.

Thanks to the video editing, you can’t see the face I’m making when the guy from Facebook talks about user-agent sniffing as a totally cool and reliable way of working.

Designing with Progressive Enhancement — sixtwothree.org

The full text of Jason’s great talk at this year’s CSS Summit. It’s a great read, clearing up many of the misunderstandings around progressive enhancement and showing some practical examples of progressive enhancement working at each level of the web’s technology stack

Contextual Styling: UI Components, Nesting, and Implementation Detail by Harry Roberts

Smart thinking from Harry here on a common issue when it comes to naming and styling. As he points out, the solution is not technical, but lies in how you form your mental model:

The design issue here is solved by subtly inverting the problem.

tota11y – an a11y visualization toolkit

A handy little bookmarklet for doing some quick accessibility checks.

Thriving in Unpredictability - TimKadlec.com

This is the way to approach building for the web:

I want to make as few of those assumptions as possible. Because every assumption I make introduces fragility. Every assumption introduces another way that my site can break.

It’s progressive enhancement, but like Stuart, Tim is no longer planning to use that term.

as days pass by — Availability

Stuart writes up his thoughts on progressive enhancement following the great discussions at Edge Conf:

So I’m not going to be talking about progressive enhancement any more. I’m going to be talking about availability. About reach. About my web apps being for everyone even when the universe tries to stop it.

When Responsive Images Get Ugly by Taylor Hunt on CodePen

This is a deep, deep dive into responsive images and I can only follow about half of it, but there are some really useful suggestions in here (I particularly like the ideas for swapping out images for print).

Practical Questions around Web Components - Ian Feather

An in-depth look at where web components stand today, together with some very good questions about where they might be heading tomorrow.

The W3C Mobile Checker

A new handy little performance testing tool from the W3C along the lines of Page Speed Insights.

A Practical Guide to SVGs on the web

Handy tips for creating, optimising, and using SVG on the web, be it in CSS or HTML.

Tiny two way data binding

I really like this approach that Remy is taking: write some code to one thing, and just one thing. I much prefer my JavaScript to be small pieces loosely joined rather than monolithic.

More of this kind of thing, please!

Progressive Apps: Escaping Tabs Without Losing Our Soul – Infrequently Noted

I really like Alex’s framing of best-of-breed progressively enhanced websites as “progressive apps” (although Bruce has some other ideas about the naming).

It’s a shame that the add-to-homescreen part isn’t standardised yet though.

A Complete Guide to SVG Fallbacks | CSS-Tricks

An up-to-date round-up of the various techniques available when you want to provide a fallback for SVG.

Viewport vs Percentage Units - bitsofco.de

A comparison of when to use percentages and when to use vw/vh in your CSS.

A Practical Guide to Flexbox: Don’t Forget about flex-shrink by Noah Blon on CodePen

A deceptively simple but powerful use of flexbox.

Dev.Opera — Making websites that work well on Opera Mini

Using Progressive Enhancement makes your site better for all users and enables the 275 million users of Opera Mini worldwide.

How we built the new gocardless.com — GoCardless Blog

A classic example of the holy grail of web performance and robustness—start with regular HTML sent from the server, enhance once it’s in the browser …if the browser is capable of it. In this case, it’s using JavaScript (React) on both the server and the browser.

Supercharging page load (100 Days of Google Dev) - YouTube

A straight-faced Jake talks us through the step-by-step iterations for turning a JavaScript-required web thang into a progressively enhanced zippy experience, supercharged with Service Worker.

A few quick links and thoughts on big web problems – Baldur Bjarnason

The system makes the website. Don’t blame the web developer, blame the organisation. A web developer embedded in a large system isn’t the one making the websites.

To make a progressively enhanced website that performs well and loads quickly even on slow connections, you need to first make an organisation that values those qualities over others.

The web is fast by default, let’s keep it fast | hiddedevries.nl

Apart from the best practices that can often be automated, there are many human decisions that have impact on page speed. A way to make page speed part of the conversation and optimising it part of a website’s requirement, is to set a performance budget.

Making a difference with performance by Jaime Caballero

This is a great blow-by-blow account of making an agency website perform better.

I love the side-by-side comparisons with other agencies, including Clearleft—the gauntlet has been thrown down!

Style Guides with Jeremy Keith

I had a lot of fun chatting with Brad and Anna for the final episode of their small batch podcast on style guides and pattern libraries.

Instant Web · An A List Apart Column

More thoughts on the lack of a performance culture, prompted by the existence of Facebook Instant:

In my experience, the biggest barrier to a high-performance web is this: the means of production are far removed from the means of delivery. It’s hard to feel the performance impact of your decisions when you’re sitting on a T3 line in front of a 30 inch monitor. And even if you test on real devices (as you should), you’re probably doing it on a fast wifi network, not a spotty 3G connection. For most of us, even the ones I would describe as pro-performance, everything in the contemporary web design production pipeline works against the very focus required to keep the web fast.

15 Years Ago in ALA: Much Ado About 5K · An A List Apart Blog Post

Zeldman looks back at Stewart Butterfield’s brilliant 5K contest. We need more of that kind of thinking today:

As one group of web makers embraces performance budgets and the eternal principles of progressive enhancement, while another (the majority) worships at the altar of bigger, fatter, slower, the 5K contest reminds us that a byte saved is a follower earned.

The JavaScript-Dependency Backlash: Myth-Busting Progressive Enhancement

Progressive Enhancement remains the best option for solving web development issues such as wide-ranging browser support, maintenance and future-proofing your application.

The Many Faces of The Web

Instead of coming up with all these new tools and JavaScript frameworks, shouldn’t we try to emphasize the importance of learning the underlying fundamentals of the web? Teach those who are just stepping to this medium and starting their careers. By not making our stack more and more complex, but by telling about the best practices that should guide our work and the importance of basic things.

Killer page load performance – Async

This Async event at 68 Middle Street on June 11th looks like it’s going to good (and relevant to my interests).

keyboard (div) ✿ dabblet.com

Here’s a really nifty use of the :checked behaviour pattern that Charlotte has been writing about—an interface for choosing a note from a piano keyboard. Under the hood, it’s a series of radio buttons and labels.

Everyone has JavaScript, right?

And that’s why you always use progressive enhancement!

Accessibility and Low-Powered Devices | Brad Frost

Brad points out the importance of supporting—which is not the same as optimising for—the non-shiny devices out there.

I really like using the Kindle’s browser as a good baseline for checking that information is available and readable.

Progressive enhancement with handlers and enhancers | hiddedevries.nl

I like this declarative approach to associating JavaScript behaviours with HTML elements.

Keeping it simple: coding a carousel by Christian Heilmann

I like this nice straightforward approach. Instead of jumping into the complexities of the final interactive component, Chris starts with the basics and layers on the complexity one step at a time, thereby creating a more robust solution.

If I had one small change to suggest, maybe aria-label might work better than offscreen text for the controls …as documented by Heydon.

Let Links Be Links · An A List Apart Article

A superb piece by Ross Penman on the importance of being true to the spirit of the web.

With a spoonful of flexbox by Charlotte Jackson, Front-end developer

Charlotte has experimenting with a nice discrete bit of flexbox on her personal site. Here she documents what she did, and what the fallback is.

Playing With Flexbox and Quantity Queries, From the Notebook of Aaron Gustafson

Aaron documents his process of implementing Heydon’s clever quantity queries in CSS.

I am really looking forward to hearing Heydon’s talk at Responsive Day Out.

Purple: A UI kit for Heroku’s web interfaces

Hot on the heels of Github’s pattern library, here’s Heroku’s.

Home · Primer

Github’s pattern library.

As always, it’s great to see how other organisations are tackling modular reusable front-end code (though I can’t imagine why anyone other than Github would ever want to use it in production).

Responsive News — We’ve made it.

The responsive BBC News site is live! Hurrah!

Here’s a look at the highs and lows of the site’s story, emphasising the importance of progressive enhancement and all that enables: feature detection (by “cutting the mustard”), conditional loading, and a mobile-first approach.

Experiment: Using Flexbox Today - Chris Wright

Practical examples showing where you can use flexbox right now, along with some strategies on how to start doing it.

What Does My Site Cost?

A terrific little tool from Tim that puts performance into perspective by measuring how much money users are spending just to view your website on a mobile device.

A JS framework on every table - Allen Pike

The Tower of JavaScript Babel.

The Path to Performance // Speaker Deck

The slides from Katie’s recent talk.

Performance is a rising requirement for building successful websites, but successful performance begins far earlier than development. So how do you get your entire team excited by it, specifically aesthetic-heavy designers?

Quantity Queries for CSS · An A List Apart Article

A terrific bit of smart CSS thinking from Heydon Pickering.

You know he’s speaking at Responsive Day Out, right?

localFont - A localStorage solution for web font loading

A quick drag’n’drop way to base 64 encode your web fonts so you can stick ‘em in local storage.

Harnessing Flexbox For Today’s Web Apps - Smashing Magazine

More flexbox!

This time it’s a great article by Karen Menezes filled with practical examples showing where you can use flexbox today.

flexbox in 5 minutes

A really handy interactive intro to flexbox. Playing around with the properties and immediately seeing the result is a real help.

Access Optional - TimKadlec.com

It will come as no surprise that I agree with every single word that Tim has written here.

Awesomplete: Ultra lightweight, highly customizable, simple autocomplete, by Lea Verou

Lea wasn’t happy with the lack of styling and extensibility of the datalist element, so she rolled her own lightweight autocomplete/type-ahead widget, and she’s sharing it with the world.

Who Should Pay?, From the Notebook of Aaron Gustafson

When I look around, I see our community spending a lot of time coming up with new tools and techniques to make our jobs easier. To ship faster. And it’s not that I’m against efficiency, but I think we need to consider the implications of our decisions. And if one of those implications is making our users suffer—or potentially suffer—in order to make our lives easier, I think we need to consider their needs above our own.

Progressive Enhancement is not about JavaScript availability. | Christian Heilmann

A great description of progressive enhancement.

Progressive enhancement in its basic form means not making assumptions

Making the case for Progressive Javascript — The Millstone — Medium

I think we can all agree that “isomorphic JavaScript” is a terrible name for a good idea. I quite like calling it “portable JavaScript”, but here’s a good case for calling it “progressive JavaScript.”

(Right up until the end when the author says “But mainly, it’s pretty safe to assume JavaScript will just work. Everywhere.” …which is precisely the kind of unfounded assumption that leads to the very problems that isomorphic/portable/progressive JavaScript can help fix.)

Better SVG Fallback and Art Direction With The <picture> Element

Smart thinking from Sara on providing a PNG fallback to browsers that don’t support SVG. Although, actually what I like about this solution is that it’s less about providing PNG as a fallback, and more about treating PNG as the baseline and SVG as the enhancement (an approach that the picture element is perfect for).

Grid by Example

We were discussing the CSS3 grid layout module in the Clearleft office today, so naturally Rachel’s name came up. This is such a great resource for diving into this stuff.

Progressive Enhancement and Data Visualizations | CSS-Tricks

A nice little pattern for generating a swish timeline in SVG from a plain ol’ definition list in HTML.

The Practical Case for Progressive Enhancement — sixtwothree.org

You know what? Just go and read everything that Jason writes, okay?

Ruddy good stuff.

Designing Experience Layers — sixtwothree.org

The engineering benefits of building websites with a layered approach.

Why, yes, I am talking about progressive enhancement yet again! Why do you ask?

The “Web Application” Myth — Medium

Sensible words from Christian.

Web applications don’t follow new rules.

And frameworks will not help:

A lot of them are not really fixing fundamental problems of the web. What they do is add developer convenience. … This would be totally OK, if we were honest about it.

Responsible Social Share Links — Jonathan Suh

If you insist on having “social” sharing buttons, here’s a way to avoid bloating your page unnecessarily.

But you might want to reconsider whether you need them at all.

Experience Development pt. 2: Progressive Enhancement with Jeremy Keith on Huffduffer

I really enjoyed chatting with the guys on the The Dirt podcast about progressive enhancement, but my goodness; it certainly sounds like I need to switch to decaf! Yappity-yapity-yap!

Over It by Brad Frost

So keep things simple. Build to standards. Use progressive enhancement. Don’t try to send wheelbarrows full of JavaScript down the pipes unless you have to. Don’t make assumptions.

A Long Journey Reaches a Happy Conclusion: The Uncertain Web is Out In All Formats

Rob Larsen was published a book with O’Reilly called “The Uncertain Web: Web Development in a Changing Landscape”. I like it:

A refreshingly honest look at the chaotic, wonderful world of web development, with handy, practical advice for making future-friendly, backward-compatible websites.

The Shifting Definition of Front-End Developer

I don’t agree with the conclusion of this post:

Let’s define “front-end” to mean the parts of the app relating to user interface, rather than those that happen to be running in the browser’s JavaScript VM.

But I think the author definitely taps into a real issue:

The real problem is the perception that any code running in the browser is front-end code.

Let’s face it: programming something in Angular and Ember has much more in common with programming something in Rails or Django than it has with writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

This is something we’re running into at Clearleft: we’ve never done backend programming (by choice), but it gets confusing if a client wants us to create something in Angular or Ember, “because that’s front end code, right?”

Front end and back end - QuirksBlog

This!

The difference between back-enders and front-enders is that the first work in only one environment, while the second have to work with myriad of environments that may hold unpleasant surprises.

Yes!

I feel that the subconscious assumption that a complex JavaScript-driven web site or web app will run in only one monolithic environment is the root cause of many problems front-enders see in back-end-driven web-based projects.

The challenge for web designers in 2015 (or how to cheat at the future)

Designing primarily in a laptop web browser and testing with a mouse rather than fingers may come to look very out of date soon.

The problem with Angular - QuirksBlog

I have doubts about Angular 1.x’s suitability for modern web development. If one is uncharitably inclined, one could describe it as a front-end framework by non-front-enders for non-front-enders.

How we use web fonts responsibly, or, avoiding a @font-face-palm by Filament Group

Smart thinking here on the eternal dilemma with loading web fonts. Filament Group have thought about how the initial experience of the first page load could be quite different to subsequent page loads.

Sass Guidelines

Advice for writing Sass. I don’t necessarily agree with everything, but on the whole, this is a solid approach.

It’s worth bearing Chris’s advice in mind.

CSS: Just Try and Do a Good Job

Good advice from Chris, particularly if you’re the one who has to live with the CSS you write.

As Obi-Wan Kenobi once said, “You must do what you feel is right, of course.”

Taking Chrome DevTools outside of the browser. — Kenneth Auchenberg

Kenneth has isolated Chrome’s dev tools into its own app. This is a big step towards this goal:

Why are DevTools still bundled with the browsers? What if clicking “inspect element” simply started an external DevTools app?

With DevTools separated from one specific browser, a natural next step would be making the DevTools app work with other browsers.

Poor Man’s Styleguide | A frontend styleguide for the pragmatic

A handy starting point for creating a front-end styleguide: a single document of HTML elements.

Implement Server-Side Rendering for SEO · Issue #9938 · emberjs/ember.js

The motivation seems entirely misplaced to me (SEO? Really?) but never mind: the end result could be the holy grail of JavaScript MVC frameworks — code that runs on the server and the client. That would get you the reach and initial rendering speed of progressive enhancement, combined with the power of client-side application logic once the page has loaded.

Watch this space.

Responsive Enhancement ◆ 24 ways

My contribution to this year’s edition of the web’s best advent calendar.

Websites of Christmas Past, Present and Future ◆ 24 ways

A superb article by Josh on planning for progressive enhancement—clearly laid out and carefully explained.

Bruce Lawson’s personal site  : On the accessibility of web components. Again.

I completely share Bruce’s concern about the year-zero thinking that’s accompanying a lot of the web components marketing:

Snarking aside, why do so few people talk about extending existing HTML elements with web components? Why’s all the talk about brand new custom elements? I don’t know.

Hear, hear!

I’m a fan of web components. But I’m increasingly worried about the messaging surrounding them.

Performance Budget Metrics - TimKadlec.com

Some good practical advice from Tim on setting a performance budget.

Use rule-based metrics to make sure you haven’t overlooked simple optimizations.

Use quantity-based metrics as guides to help designers and developers make better decisions about what goes onto a page.

Mobile Last?

This isn’t a scientific data sample, but Jonathan’s anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that most web designers and developers are still thinking with a desktop-first mentality. Which is crazy.

Style Guide Resources

A very handy collection from Anna: articles, books, talks, podcasts, and examples of front-end style guides. If something’s missing, feel free to add it.

You’re So Smart You Turned JavaScript into XHTML

Web developers overwhelmingly rejected the draconian error-handing of XML …and yet today, web developers are embracing that very same error-handling model by rendering everything with JavaScript.

I don’t think it’s the way of the web to have your site fail and show a blank screen because some third-party dependency doesn’t load, JavaScript is turned off or because your developer left a trailing comma in a JavaScript object and didn’t test in Internet Explorer.

Overwhelmed by Code · An A List Apart Blog Post

Focus on what you want to learn; not what you think you should learn.

There is a lot of pressure out there: to learn new things, to spend all your time coding, to be the super developer. I now believe that to be impossible and unhealthy. It means you aren’t living a balanced life and it also means that you’re living under constant stress and pressure.

Responsive Images in Practice · An A List Apart Article

A great primer on using srcset and picture. I think I’ll be referring back to this a lot.

7 Principles of Rich Web Applications

High-level design principles for JavaScript on the web.

ARIA Quicktip: Labelledby vs. Describedby, From the Notebook of Aaron Gustafson

Yesterday, Aaron gave a great talk at BD Conf about forms. In one example, he was using aria-describedby. I was a bit confused by the differences between aria-describedby and aria-labelledby, so Aaron has very helpfully clarified the distinction.

Stop Breaking the Web

Angry, but true.

Don’t lock yourself into a comprehensive technology that may just die within the next few months and leave you stranded. With progressive enhancement you’ll never go wrong. Progressive enhancement means your code will always work, because you’ll always focus on providing a minimal experience first, and then adding features, functionality, and behavior on top of the content.

JS Bin: Vertical centering is impossible in CSS lol!

Four different techniques for vertical centring in CSS, courtesy of Jake.

Replacing Radio Buttons Without Replacing Radio Buttons

A great technique from Heydon for styling radio buttons however you want.

Solved By Flexbox — Cleaner, hack-free CSS

Documenting common layout issues that can be solved with Flexbox. I like the fact that some of these can be used as enhancements e.g. sticky footer, input add-ons …the fallback in older browsers is perfectly acceptable.

The boring front-end developer - Adam Silver, Front end developer, based in London

My name is Jeremy and I am a boring front-end developer.

Progressive Enhancement Basics

Some thoughts on progressive enhancement, although I disagree with the characterisation of progressive enhancement as being the opposite choice to making “something flashy that pushes the web to it’s limits”—it’s entirely possible to make the flashiest, limit-pushing sites using progressive enhancement. After all…

it’s much more a mindset than a particular development technique.

56 Experts reveal 3 beloved front-end development tools

Turns out that Brian LeRoux and I gave the same answer to this question:

1. HTML
2. CSS
3. JavaScript

I think I just saved you a click.

Using ServiceWorker in Chrome today - JakeArchibald.com

It’s very early days for ServiceWorker, but Jake is on hand with documentation and instructions on its use. To be honest, most of this is over my head and I suspect it won’t really “click” until I try using it for myself.

Where it gets really interesting is in the comments. Stuart asks “What about progressive enhancement?” And Jake points out that because a ServiceWorker won’t be installed on a first visit, you pretty much have to treat it as an enhancement. In fact, you’d have to go out of your way to make it a requirement:

You could, of course, throw up a splash screen and wait for the ServiceWorker to install, creating a ServiceWorker-dependant experience. I will hunt those people down.

A Fundamental Disconnect, From the Notebook of Aaron Gustafson

I think Aaron is spot-on here. There’s a tendency to treat web development these days as just the same as any other kind of software development—which is, on the one hand, great because it shows just how far JavaScript and browsers have come …but on the other hand, that attitude is missing a crucial understanding of the fundamental nature of the web’s technology stack (that we should be treating HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as layers; not as one big ball of webby, timey-wimey stuff).

Extensible Web Summit Berlin 2014: my lightning talk on Web Components | soledad penadés

Soledad Penadés also went to the Extensible Web Summit in Berlin, where she gave a lightning talk. Sounds like it was really good.

This also includes some good advice that, again, Alex might want to consider before denouncing any disagreement on Web Components as “piffle and tosh”:

If the W3C, or any other standardisation organisation wants to attract “normal” developers to get more diverse inputs, they/we should start by being respectful to everyone. Don’t try to show everyone how superclever you are. Don’t be a jerk. Don’t scare people away, because then only the loud ones stay, and the quieter shy people, or people who have more urgent matters to attend (such as, you know, having a working business website even if it’s not using the latest and greatest API) will just leave.

Notes on notes (of smart people) about web components

Steve Faulkner responds to Alex’s response to my post about Web Components.

Steve shares my concerns …but he still refers to my post as “piffle”.

I can’t win.

Uncomfortably Excited – Infrequently Noted

Alex’s response to my post about Web Components, in which he ignores my excitement and dismisses my concerns as “piffle and tosh.”

I gotta say: I think cautious optimism and nervous excitement are healthy attitudes to have about any technology. For Alex to dismiss them so summarily makes me even more worried. Apparently you’re either with Web Components or you’re against them. Heaven forbid that you might voice any doubts or suggest any grey areas.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

A device agnostic approach to inlining CSS | Blog | Decade City

I very much agree with Orde’s framing here: I don’t think it makes much sense to talk about “above the fold” CSS …but it makes a lot of sense to talk about critical CSS.

And, yeah, it’s another example of progressive enhancement.

Improving accessibility on GOV.UK search | Technology at GDS

Alice Bartlett shares her experience of getting aria-live regions to work in a meaningful way.

CSS Guidelines – High-level advice and guidelines for writing sane, manageable, scalable CSS

Harry has written down his ideas and recommendations for writing CSS.

Tablesaw - A Flexible Tool for Responsive Tables

Those lovely people at Filament Group share some of their techniques for making data tables work across a range of screen sizes.

We Work in a World of Assumptions – The Pastry Box Project

Dan Donald gets to the heart of progressive enhancement:

Assumptions in themselves don’t have to be inherently bad but let’s recognise them for what they are. We know very little but that can hopefully enable us to be far more flexible and understanding in what we create.

How we make RWD sites load fast as heck

Scott shares the code that Filament Group are using to determine which style declarations are critical (and can be inlined) and which are non-critical (and can be loaded asynchronously). It makes quite a difference in perceived performance.

By the way, I really, really like the terminology of “critical” and “non-critical” CSS, rather than “above the fold” and “below the fold” CSS.

RWD Bloat - daverupert.com

Dave wanted to figure out if having a responsive site necessarily meant taking a performance hit, so he ran the numbers on his own site. It turns out all of performance-related issues are not related to responsive design.

Code Responsibly

Ten facets of web development that you can choose to focus on. One of them is from me …but other nine are worth paying attention to.

Full-width pinned layouts with flexbox

Zoe uses one little case study to contrast two different CSS techniques: display-table and flexbox. Flexbox definitely comes out on top when it comes to true source-order independence.

Simplicity

I can relate to every single word that Bastian has written here.

The longer I look at boilerplates, build tools, frameworks and ways to make my life as a developer easier, the more I long for the basics.

Let’s Talk About RTL

Some very handy techniques for working with right-to-left text.

A Maintainable Style Guide - Ian Feather

The challenges of maintaining a living breathing front-end style guide for an always-evolving product (the Lonely Planet website in this case).

The Developer’s Dystopian Future – The Pastry Box Project

My interest in rich client-side apps has almost entirely reversed, and now I’m more interested in doing good ol’ server rendering with the occasional side of progressive enhancement, just like we did it in 2004.

This post resonates with me 100%.

Where will I be in 10 years? I don’t know. I hope I still will have some in-demand skills to pay the bills. But it feels like all I see are DevOps and JavaScript, and I know less and less every day about those things.

What it means to be a Front-end Developer in 2014 – The Pastry Box Project

I can very much relate to what Dan is talking about here. I have no idea what I do any more.

No doubt we’ll always feel we’re behind the curve as there always seems like more to learn. That’s OK. No-one knows it all, but it is hard knowing what people expect of you.

Data attributes and progressive enhancement - Simply Accessible

Derek’s excellent advice on avoiding over-reliance on data attributes has this brilliant nugget of insight:

In the web front-end stack — HTML, CSS, JS, and ARIA — if you can solve a problem with a simpler solution lower in the stack, you should. It’s less fragile, more foolproof, and just works

Aerotwist - Web Components and the Three Unsexy Pillars

A healthy dose of scepticism about Web Components, looking at them through the lenses of accessibility, security, and performance.

I share some of this concern: Web Components might look like handy ready-made out-of-the-box solutions, but the truth is that web developers have to do much more of the hard graft that was traditionally left to the browser.

Robin Rendle › A Visual Lexicon

Some great thoughts in here about web development workflow and communication between designers and developers.

I believe that the solution is made up of a variety of tools that encourage conversation and improve our shared lexicon. Tools such as styleguides, pattern libraries, elemental and modular systems that encourage access not only by developers, but by designers, shareholders and editors as well.

Getting Started With Pattern Libraries ∙ An A List Apart Blog Post

A great post from Anna on the front-end styleguides she’s worked on for A List Apart and Code for America. ‘Twas a pleasure working with her on the Code for America project.

A-mer-ica! Fuck yeah!

A List Apart Pattern Library

Another front-end style guide for the collection. This time it’s from A List Apart. Lovely stuff!

Why is Progressive Enhancement so unpopular? — All in the head

Like Drew, I’ve noticed some real hostility to the idea of progressive enhancement recently. Like Drew, I don’t really understand where this attitude comes from. It’s not like progressive enhancement prevents you from doing anything you would do otherwise: it’s just another way of approaching the way you build for the web.

I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect that some developers are letting their tools dictate their principles—the tail wagging the dog (where the tail is Angular, Ember, etc.).

Pattern Library | MailChimp

The markup for the patterns that Mailchimp use on their products. I love getting a glimpse of how companies handle this kind of stuff internally.

Is HTML Relevant in the Age of Web Apps? by John Allsopp

John addresses the price of increasing complexity in front-end development.

Yes, tooling can make our life easier. We type fewer keystrokes, and commit more code. But as software engineers learned a long time ago, most of the life of an applications is not in its initial development. It’s in maintaining it. This is something we on the web have had the luxury of being able to largely ignore up to now. After all, how many of the things you build will last years, decades?

I know jQuery. Now what?

A terrific piece by Remy—based on a talk he gave—on when he uses jQuery and, more importantly, when he doesn’t. His experiences and conclusions pretty much mirror my own, but of course Remy is far more thoughtful and smart than I.

Really good stuff.

A List Apart Issue № 371

This issue of A List Apart is a great double-whammy. Lara Swanson has a ton of practical tips for front-end performance enhancements, and Brian dives deep into making your own icon fonts.

The Vanilla Web Diet by Christian Heilman

I like the sound of the book that Chris is writing for Smashing Magazine. It sounds like a very future-friendly approach to front-end development.

A primer to front-end SVG hacking by David Bushell – Web Design & Front-end Development

Everything you ever wanted to know about using SVG today.

Front-end performance for web designers and front-end developers by Harry Roberts

A really good introduction to front-end performance techniques. Most of this was already on my radar, but I still picked up a handy tip or two (particularly about DNS prefetching).

At this stage it should go without saying that you should be keeping up with this kind of thing: performance is really, really, really important.

Front-end London - A New London Based Meetup for Front-end Developers, hosted by Made by Many

This looks like being an excellent (free) event in London featuring three talks related to front-end web development.

The inaugural event this month features a talk on responsive design, a talk on data visualisation, and a talk on accessibility.

Andy Hume: CSS for Grownups, SXSW 2012 - YouTube

The slides and audio from Andy’s exceptional talk earlier this year at Southby, combined into one video.

It really is excellent, although he does make the mistake of pulling the “dogma” card on those who woud disagree with him, and he really doesn’t need to: his argument is strong enough to stand on its own.

The Vanilla Web Diet | Smashing Coding

I wholeheartedly agree with Christian’s diagnosis of the average web page: it’s overweight to the point of obesity. Fortunately Dr. Heilmann has some remedies.

Fear and Coding in Brighton : Full Frontal 2012

A terrific write-up of this year’s Full Frontal conference, with a descriptive rundown of each talk.

isolani - Web Standards: Web App Mistakes: Condemned to repeat

Some great thoughts from Mike Davies about the strengths of the web, prompted by some of the more extreme comments made by James Pearce at Full Frontal last week.

I should point out that James was being deliberately provocative in order to foment thought and discussion and, judging from this blog post, he succeeded.

The Web’s independence from the hardware and software platform people use is a feature. It’s better than cross-platform frameworks which are constantly criticised for not producing exact native-feeling apps on the multitude of platforms they run on. The Web is above that pettiness.

Trimming the Fat — Paul Robert Lloyd

A great in-depth description by Paul of how he optimised his site. More of this please!

Base CSS | Pasteup | Guardian News

The Guardian’s front-end patterns library. The modules section contains their equivalent of a pattern primer. Very nice!

Accessibility – what is it good for? | Marco’s accessibility blog

A worrying look at how modern web developers approach accessibility. In short, they don’t.

Easy Fixes to Common Accessibility Problems | Yahoo! Accessibility Library

The low-hanging fruit of accessibility fixes; it’s worth bearing these in mind.

Q&A with Jeremy Keith - Charlotte Front-End Developers (Charlotte, NC) - Meetup

Do you live in Charlotte, North Carolina? If so, you might be interested in this event that I’ll be Skyping into.

A Front End Engineer’s Manifesto

Y’know, I’m on board with pretty much every item in this manifesto.

Creating a Mobile-First Responsive Web Design - HTML5 Rocks

A great step-by-step tutorial from Brad on developing a responsive site with a Content First mindset.

Modern Web Development Part 1 – The Webkit Inspector

This is a very in-depth look at how to become a power user of the Web Inspector in Webkit browsers. I’m sitting down with a nice cup of tea to go through all of this.

Cream of tag soup - Ramblings about frontend stuff

Jake Archibald has a blog now. Subscribed.

Registration | Frontend 2011

A nice Huffduffer-style mad libs form gives this registration form a friendly quality.