A post by Clearleft on LinkedIn
This is design engineering.
This is design engineering.
All along, from the frothy 1990s to the percolating 2000s to the frozen 2010s to today, the web has been the sure thing. All along, it’s been growing and maturing, sprouting new capabilities. From my vantage point, that growth has seemed to accelerate in the past five years; CSS, in particular, has become incredibly flexible and expressive. Maybe even a bit overstuffed — but I’ll take it.
For people who care about creating worlds together, rather than getting rich, the web is the past and the web is the future. What luck, that this decentralized, permissionless system claimed a position at the heart of the internet, and stuck there. It’s limited, of course; frustrating; sometimes maddening. But that’s every creative medium. That’s life.
View source on this bit of tongue-in-cheek fun from Terence.
I really enjoyed Laurie’s talk in Berlin a few weeks back. I must blog my thoughts on it.
But I must admit that something didn’t sit quite right about the mocking tone he took on the matter of “the fundamentals” (whatever that may mean). Chris shares my misgivings:
Those websites that don’t load on slow connections, or break completely when a JS file fails to load, or don’t work for people with visual or physical impairments?
That’s not an issue of time. It’s an issue of fundamentals.
I think I agree with Laurie that there’s basically no such thing as fundamental technologies (and if there is such a thing, the goalposts are constantly moving). But I agree with Chris with that there is such a thing as fundamental concepts. On the web, for example, accessibility is a core principle of its design that should, in my opinion, be fundamental.
This, basically:
Do I wanna see teenagers building frivolous websites? Absolutely. But when people are getting paid well to build our digital world, they have a responsibility to ensure the right to engage with that world for everyone.
It me:
Broadly, these are websites which are still web pages, not web applications; they’re pages of essentially static information, personal websites, blogs, and so on, but they are slightly dynamic. They might have a style selector at the top of each page, causing a cookie to be set, and the server to serve a different stylesheet on every subsequent page load.
This rings sadly true to me:
Suppose a company makes a webpage for looking up products by their model number. If this page were made in 2005, it would probably be a single PHP page. It doesn’t need a framework — it’s one SELECT query, that’s it. If this page were made in 2022, a conundrum will be faced: the company probably chose to use a statically generated website. The total number of products isn’t too large, so instead their developers stuff a gigantic JSON file of model numbers for every product made by the company on the website and add some client-side JavaScript to download and query it. This increases download sizes and makes things slower, but at least you didn’t have to spin up and maintain a new application server. This example is fictitious but I believe it to be representative.
Also, I never thought about “serverless” like this:
Recently we’ve seen the rise in popularity of AWS Lambda, a “functions as a service” provider. From my perspective this is literally a reinvention of CGI, except a) much more complicated for essentially the same functionality, b) with vendor lock-in, c) with a much more complex and bespoke deployment process which requires the use of special tools.
I’m glad that Heydon has answered this question once and for all.
I’m sure that’ll be the end of it now.
Despite their name, most design systems aren’t all that much like systems. Granted, they are designed according to a system, and there’s a logical consistency to how their components and tokens are defined, but really, most design systems work like a dictionary: look up a component, get the instructions for using that component.
Mathew goes on to advocate moving towards a more function-centred approach to systematic design. It makes a lot of sense.
By the way, this isn’t directly related—other than metaphor being used—but I wrote about web standards, dictionaries, and design systems a while back.
Like Wordle, but for geography instead of words.
Every day, there is a new Mystery Country. Your goal is to guess the mystery country using the fewest number of guesses. Each incorrect guess will appear on the globe with a colour indicating how close it is to the Mystery Country.
Eric has a written a clear and measured explanation that I hope Alex and Jake will read, given their petty snarky reactions to Webkit shipping a feature (reactions that do more harm than good to their cause—refuting their bullshit has taken time and energy away from the legitimate criticisms of Apple’s rendering engine monopoly on iOS; this whole debacle has been one big distraction from far more important browser bugs).
Many of us are mad at Apple for a lot of good reasons, but please don’t let the process of venting that anger tar the goals and achievements of Open Prioritization.
This is fun (and addictive)! With every new entry pulled from Wikipedia, you’ve got to arrange it onto a timeline correctly.
This is an excellent initiate spearheaded by Nicole and Sarah at Google! They want to fund research into important web UI work: accessibility, form controls, layout, and so on. If that sounds like something you’ve always wanted to do, but lacked the means, fill in the form.
This is so in-depth! Movies and TV shows from within movies and TV shows. All of them are real …I mean, they’re not real, they’re fake—that’s but the point—but they’re all from real movies and TV …ah, never mind.
Keep refreshing until you find your next job title.
As part of my content buddying process, I am henceforth going to typeset all drafts in this font. I just tested it with this sentence:
We can leverage the synergy of a rich immersive user paradigm shift.
This is a fun drag’n’drop way to make websites. And I like the philosophy:
Websites shouldn’t all look the same. We prefer campy, kitschy, messy, imperfect.
I remember discussing this with Tantek years ago:
There are a few elements who need to be placed inside of another specific element in order to function properly.
If I recall, he was considering writing “HTML: The Good Parts”.
Anyway, I can relate to what Eric is saying here about web components. My take is that web components give developers a power that previous only browser makers had. That’s very liberating, but it should come with a commensurate weight of responsibility. I fear that we will see this power wielded without sufficient responsibility.
chef’s kiss!
(you know my opinion of Adam Curtis’s documentaries
)
Chindogu gone wild.
Heydon is back on his bullshit, making extremely entertaining and occassionally inappropriate short videos about web stuff.
WEBBED BRIEFS are brief videos about the web, its technologies, and how to make the most of them. They’re packed with information, fun times™, and actual goats. Yes, it’s a vlog, but it isn’t on Youtube. Unthinkable!
The pilot episode is entitled “What Is ARIA Even For?”
Puntastic!