djinn and juice : The Best Debugging Story I’ve Ever Heard
Cassie and I were swapping debugging stories. I shared the case of the 500 mile email with her. She shared this with me.
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Angular, Autoprefixer, IE11, and CSS Grid Walk into a Bar… - daverupert.com
Dave on the opaqueness of toolchains:
As toolchains grow and become more complex, unless you are expertly familiar with them, it’s very unclear what transformations are happening in our code. Tracking the differences between the input and output and the processes that code underwent can be overwhelming. When there’s a problem, it’s increasingly difficult to hop into the assembly line and diagnose the issue.
There’s a connection here to one of the biggest issues with what’s currently being labelled “AI”:
In the same way AI needs some design to show its work in how it came to its final answer, I feel that our automated build tools could use some help as well.
I really like this suggestion for making the invisble visible:
I sometimes wonder if Webpack or Gulp or [Insert Your Build Tool Here] could benefit from a Scratch-like interface for buildchains.
HTML+ Discussion Document: Images
Back in 1993, David Raggett wrote up all the proposed extensions to HTML that were being discussed on the www-talk mailing list. It was called HTML+, which would’ve been a great way of describing HTML5.
Twenty five years later, I wish that the proposed IMAGE element had come to pass. Unlike the IMG element, it would’ve had a closing tag, allowing for fallback content between the tags:
The IMAGE element behaves in the same way as IMG but allows you to include descriptive text, which can be shown on text-only displays.
Yeah, I know we have the alt attribute, but that’s always felt like an inelegant bolt-on to me.
History of the Web, Volume I by Jay Hoffmann [PDF/iPad/Kindle]
The first two years of the excellent History Of The Web newsletter is now available as a digital book. It’s volume one of …we’ll see how many.
Buried inside you’ll find fascinating narrative threads from the web’s history, starting all the way from the beginning and straight on through to the very first browsers, the emergence of web design, to the evolving landscape of our online world.
Elemental haiku
An ode for every element in the periodic table, in the form of a haiku.
365 RFCs — Write.as
April 7th, 2019 is going to be the 50 year anniversary of the first ever Request for Comments, known as an RFC.
Darius Kazemi is going to spend the year writing commentary on the first 365 Request For Comments from the Internt Engineering Task Force:
In honor of this anniversary, I figured I would read one RFC each day of 2019, starting with RFC 1 and ending with RFC 365. I’ll offer brief commentary on each RFC.
The Elements of UI Engineering - Overreacted
These are good challenges to think about. Almost all of them are user-focused, and there’s a refreshing focus away from reaching for a library:
It’s tempting to read about these problems with a particular view library or a data fetching library in mind as a solution. But I encourage you to pretend that these libraries don’t exist, and read again from that perspective. How would you approach solving these issues?
Carson: Textured fluid type - Steve Honeyman
I reckon it’s time for distressed type to make a comeback—CSS is ready for it.
A New Mailing List, Goodbye Instagram?, Future Book Hello Again — Roden Explorers Archive
Craig’s slow walk away from Instagram:
I want to have a place very far apart from that, where I can post photos on my own terms. Not have an algorithm decide which of my posts is best (have you noticed Instagram making the second photo in series appear first in the carousel?). And I don’t want to be rewarded for being anodyne, which is what these general algorithms seem to optimize for: things that are easily digestible, firmly on the scale of “fine, just fine.” It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the more boring stuff we shove into our eyeballs, the more boring our taste becomes.
The 100 Year Web (In Praise of XML)
I don’t agree with Steven Pemberton on a lot of things—I’m not a fan of many of the Semantic Web technologies he likes, and I think that the Robustness Principle is well-suited to the web—but I always pay attention to what he has to say. I certainly share his concern that migrating everything to JavaScript is not good for interoperability:
This is why there are so few new elements in HTML5: they haven’t done any design, and instead said “if you need anything, you can always do it in Javascript”.
And they all have.
And they are all different.
Read this talk transcript, and even if you don’t agree with everything in it today, you may end up coming back to it in the future. He’s playing the long game:
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.
The ‘Future Book’ Is Here, but It’s Not What We Expected | WIRED
Craig writes about reading and publishing, from the memex and the dynabook to the Kindle, the iPhone, and the iPad, all the way back around to plain ol’ email and good old-fashioned physical books.
We were looking for the Future Book in the wrong place. It’s not the form, necessarily, that needed to evolve—I think we can agree that, in an age of infinite distraction, one of the strongest assets of a “book” as a book is its singular, sustained, distraction-free, blissfully immutable voice. Instead, technology changed everything that enables a book, fomenting a quiet revolution. Funding, printing, fulfillment, community-building—everything leading up to and supporting a book has shifted meaningfully, even if the containers haven’t. Perhaps the form and interactivity of what we consider a “standard book” will change in the future, as screens become as cheap and durable as paper. But the books made today, held in our hands, digital or print, are Future Books, unfuturistic and inert may they seem.
We Should Replace Facebook With Personal Websites - Motherboard
Facebook isn’t really all that much better or more convenient than having your own website, or sending emails or chats. But for some reason, Facebook (and Instagram) are where we post now.
The 15 Web Design Books of 2018 You Can’t Afford to Miss
How lovely! Going Offline is in very good company in this list, and Oliver has some nice words to say about it:
Starting with no assumption of JavaScript knowledge, Jeremy explains the latest strategies, the ins and outs of fetching and caching, how to enhance your website’s performance, and more.
Extremely beginner-friendly and approachable, it can be read in half a day and will help you get Service Workers up and running in no time.
But all I want for Christmas is for Shopify to stop enabling Breitbart.
Oh Hello Ana - Blogging and me
A personal history of personal publishing from Ana—it’s wonderful!
When I was feeling low and alone I would recall how happy I used to be before I was working in tech. I would remember my silly fan sites, my experiments, my blogs and everything that I loved so much that made me become a developer.
Browser diversity starts with us. | Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design
Hear, hear!
When one company decides which ideas are worth supporting and which aren’t, which access problems matter and which don’t, it stifles innovation, crushes competition, and opens the door to excluding people from digital experiences.
So how do we fight this? We, who are not powerful? We do it by doubling down on cross-browser testing. By baking it into the requirements on every project, large or small. By making sure our colleagues, bosses, and clients know what we’re doing and why.
Design process for the messy in-between » cog & sprocket
Designing your design process:
- Know your strengths and focus resources on your weaknesses.
- Learn to identify the immovable objects.
- What has to be perfect now and what can be fixed later?
Drupal’s commitment to accessibility | Dries Buytaert
Shots fired!
I’ve come to believe that accessibility is not something you do for a small group of people. Accessibility is about promoting inclusion. When the product you use daily is accessible, it means that we all get to work with a greater number and a greater variety of colleagues. Accessibility benefits everyone.
Four Days Trapped at Sea With Crypto’s Nouveau Riche
A brilliantly written piece by Laurie Penny. Devestating, funny, and sad, featuring journalistic gold like this:
John McAfee has never been convicted of rape and murder, but—crucially—not in the same way that you or I have never been convicted of rape or murder.
WALL·E | Typeset In The Future
A deep dive into Pixar’s sci-fi masterpiece, featuring entertaining detours to communist propaganda and Disney theme parks.
Create Landmark Timing Slides - Notist
This is something I do in my presentations. I have speaker notes scattered throughout the slide deck with the “beats” of the talk—10 minutes, 20 minutes, etc.
If I hit one of those slides and I’m ahead of schedule, I can go on a few more tangents. If I hit one of those slides and I’m behind schedule, I can cut to the chase. Either way, having those decision points spread throughout the talk really helps to keep things smooth.
One thing that can really help in the delivery is knowing if you’re running fast or slow before you crash into the end of your talk. That way you can make adjustments as you go along by glossing over smaller points to speed up or expanding more on your ideas to slow down.