There’s no sugar-coating it—AMP components are dreadfully inaccessible:
We’ve reached a point where AMP may “solve” the web’s performance issues by supercharging the web’s accessibility problem, excluding even more people from accessing the content they deserve.
Hidde gives an in-depth explanation of the Accessibility Object Model, coming soon to browsers near you:
In a way, that’s a bit like what Service Workers do for the network and Houdini for style: give developers control over something that was previously done only by the browser.
This looks like a sensible approach to creating a modular architecture for a complex client-side JavaScript codebase.
I know a lot of people swear by ES6 imports, but this systems worked really well for us. It gave us a simple, modular, extensible framework we can easily build on in the future.
The good folks at Sparkbox ran a survey on design systems. Here are the results, presented in a flagrantly anti-Tufte manner.
Remy has an excellent improvement on that article I linked to yesterday on using srcdoc with iframes. Rather than using srcdoc instead of src, you can use srcdoc as well as src. That way you can support older browsers too!
Harry takes a deep dive into the performance metric of “time to first byte”, or TTFB if you using initialisms that take as long to say as the thing they’re abbreviating.
This makes a great companion piece to Drew’s article on server timing headers.
This is a clever use of the srcdoc attribute on iframes.
The title is somewhat misleading—currently it’s about native lazy-loading for Chrome, which is not (yet) the web.
I’ve just been adding loading="lazy" to most of the iframes and many of the images on adactio.com, and it’s working a treat …in Chrome.
This is about designing forms that everyone can use and complete as quickly as possible. Because nobody actually wants to use your form. They just want the outcome of having used it.
I love React. I love how server side rendering React apps is trivial because it all compiles down to vanilla HTML rather than web components, effectively turning it into a kickass template engine that can come alive. I love the way you can very effectively still do progressive enhancement by using completely semantic markup and then letting hydration do more to it.
I also hate React. I hate React because these behaviours are not defaults. React is not gonna warn you if you make a form using divs and unlabelled textboxes and send the whole thing to a server. I hate React because CSS-in-JS approaches by default encourage you to write completely self contained one off components rather than trying to build a website UI up as a whole. I hate the way server side rendering and progressive enhancement are not defaults, but rather things you have to go out of your way to do.
An absolutely brilliant post by Laura on how the priorites baked into JavaScript tools like React are really out of whack. They’ll make sure your behind-the-scenes code is super clean, but not give a rat’s ass for the quality of the output that users have to interact with.
And if you want to adjust the front-end code, you’ve got to set up all this tooling just to change a div to a button. That’s quite a barrier to entry.
In elevating frontend to the land of Serious Code we have not just made things incredibly over-engineered but we have also set fire to all the ladders that we used to get up here in the first place.
AMEN!
I love React because it lets me do my best work faster and more easily. I hate React because the culture around it more than the library itself actively prevents other people from doing their best work.
Chris broke both his arms just to avoid speaking at the JAMstack conference in London. Seems a bit extreme to me.
Anyway, to make up for not being there, he made a website of his talk. It’s good stuff, tackling the split.
It’s cool to see the tech around our job evolve to the point that we can reach our arms around the whole thing. It’s worthy of some concern when we feel like complication of web technology feels like it’s raising the barrier to entry
Charlie’s thoughts on dev perception:
People speak about “the old guard” and “stupid backwards techniques”, forgetting that it’s real humans, with real constraints who are working on these solutions. Most of us are working in a “stupid backwards way” because that “backwardsness” WORKS. It is something that is proven and is clearly documented. We can implement it confident that it will not disappear from fashion within a couple of years.
Tough, but fair.
This is a fascinating look at how you can get the benefits of React and npm without using React and npm.
Here’s an accompanying article on the same topic.
What a wonderfully in-depth and clear tutorial from Cassie on how she created the animation for her nifty SVG logo!
Also: Cassie is on the indie web now, writing on her own website—yay!
Did you know about console.time() and console.timeEnd()? I did not.
It’s fantastic that our web plumbing has gotten more powerful—tooling today is capable of so much. But all too often, that power comes with increased complexity that negatively impacts developer efficiency. Sometimes that’s unavoidable. The simplest approach doesn’t always win. But that should be the goal—to make things as simple as possible while still accomplishing what needs to be done. Like excellent plumbing, these systems should be as mostly invisible—chugging along, doing what we need them to do without getting in our way.
My main concern about this new generation of tools is that they require a specific toolchain in order to function. “If you just use this version of React and just use this styling library and configure things in exactly this way, your designers can play around with coded components.” It worries me that teams would end up choosing (and subsequently holding onto) specific tools not because they’re the best choices for our users but because the designers’ and developers’ workflow depends on a specific toolchain to work properly.
Dave enumerates the things about Vue that click for him. The component structure matches his mental model, and crucially, it’s relative straightforward to add Vue to an existing project instead of ripping everything out and doing things a certain way:
In my experience Angular, React, and a lot of other frameworks ultimately require you to go all in early and establish a large toolchain around these frameworks.
This post was originally written in 2015, but upon re-reading it today, it still (just about) holds up, so I finally hit publish.