Tags: language

“It turns out” « the jsomers.net blog

It turns out that “it turns out” is a handy linguistic shortcut for making an unsubstaniated assertion.

Readable Code without Prescription Glasses | Ocasta

I saw Daniel give a talk at Async where he compared linguistic rules with code style:

We find the prescriptive rules hard to follow, irrespective of how complex they are, because they are invented, arbitrary, and often go against our intuition. The descriptive rules, on the other hand, are easy to follow because they are instinctive. We learned to follow them as children by listening to, analysing and mimicking speech, armed with an inbuilt concept of the basic building blocks of grammar. We follow them subconsciously, often without even knowing the rules exists.

Thus began some thorough research into trying to uncover a universal grammar for readable code:

I am excited by the possibility of discovering descriptive readability rules, and last autumn I started an online experiment to try and find some. My experiment on howreadable.com compared various coding patterns against each other in an attempt to objectively measure their readability. I haven’t found any strong candidates for prescriptive rules so far, but the results are promising and suggest a potential way forward.

I highly recommend reading through this and watching the video of the Async talk (and conference organisers; get Daniel on your line-up!).

I’m a Web Designer - Andy Bell

Something that I am increasingly uncomfortable with is our industry’s obsession with job titles. I understand that the landscape has gotten a lot more complex than when I started out in 2009, but I do think the sheer volume and variation in titles isn’t overly helpful in communicating what people actually do.

I share Andy’s concern. I kinda wish that the title for this open job role at Clearleft could’ve just said “Person”.

The Great Divide | CSS-Tricks

An excellent thorough analysis by Chris of the growing divide between front-end developers and …er, other front-end developers?

The divide is between people who self-identify as a (or have the job title of) front-end developer, yet have divergent skill sets.

On one side, an army of developers whose interests, responsibilities, and skill sets are heavily revolved around JavaScript.

On the other, an army of developers whose interests, responsibilities, and skill sets are focused on other areas of the front end, like HTML, CSS, design, interaction, patterns, accessibility, etc.

Use the :lang pseudo-class over the lang attribute selector for language-specific styles

This is a great explanation of the difference between the [lang] and :lang CSS selectors. I wouldn’t even have thought’ve the differences so this is really valuable to me.

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.

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.

Stop Learning Frameworks – Lifehacks for Developers by Eduards Sizovs

It’s a terribly clickbaity (and negatively phrased) title, but if you turn it around, there’s some good advcie in here for deciding where to focus when it comes to dev technology:

• Programming languages are different, but design smells are alike.
• Frameworks are different, but the same design patterns shine through.
• Developers are different, but rules of dealing with people are uniform.

Big ol’ Ball o’ JavaScript | Brad Frost

Backend logic? JavaScript. Styles? We do that in JavaScript now. Markup? JavaScript. Anything else? JavaScript.

Historically, different languages suggested different roles. “This language does style.” “This language does structure.” But now it’s “This JavaScript does style.” “This JavaScript does structure.” “This JavaScript does database queries.”

Great Leap Years - Official site of Stephen Fry

I just binge-listened to the six episodes of the first season of this podcast from Stephen Fry—it’s excellent!

It covers the history of communication from the emergence of language to the modern day. At first I was worried that it was going to rehash some of the more questionable ideas in the risible Sapiens, but it turned out to be far more like James Gleick’s The Information or Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet (two of my favourite books on the history of technology).

There’s no annoying sponsorship interruptions and the whole series feels more like an audiobook than a podcast—an audiobook researched, written and read by Stephen Fry!

᚛ᚈᚑᚋ ᚄᚉᚑᚈᚈ᚜ and ᚛ᚑᚌᚐᚋ᚜ - YouTube

When is a space not a space?

Tom talks about ogham stones and unicode.

Use the words normal people use

When you’re struggling to write something that sounds clear and sounds human (two of the essential basics of a good blog post, I’d argue), just use the words normal people would use.

John Spencer: “There’s no bullshit like design bullshit” - Design Week

If we use jargon, we reveal our insecurity. If we use pretentious language, we expose our arrogance. But if we use language that anyone can understand, people are much more likely to value what we do.

Letterform Archive – From the Collection: Blissymbolics

The fascinating story of Charles K. Bliss and his symbolic language:

The writing system – originally named World Writing in 1942, then Semantography in 1947, and finally Blissymoblics in the 1960s – contains several hundred basic geometric symbols (“Bliss-characters”) that can be combined in different ways to represent more complex concepts (“Bliss-words”). For example, the Bliss-characters for “house” and “medical” are combined to form the Bliss-word for “hospital” or “clinic”. The modular structure invites comparison to the German language; the German word for “hospital ” – “krankenhaus” – translates directly to “sick house”.

PWA: Progressive Web All-the-things - Tales of a Developer Advocate by Paul Kinlan

Very valuable observations from Paul on his travels, talking to developers and business people about progressive web apps—there’s some confusion out there.

My personal feeling is that everyone is really hung up on the A in PWA: ‘App’. It’s the success and failure of the branding of the concept; ‘App’ is in the name, ‘App’ is in the conscious of many users and businesses and so the associations are quite clear.

Seriously, though. What is a progressive web app? – Amberley Romo – Medium

What an excellent question! And what an excellent bit of sleuthing to get to the bottom of it. This is like linguistic spelunking on the World Wide Web.

Oh, and of course I love the little sidenote at the end.

A better metaphor for technology - The Verge

The ideas and images that come to mind when you think of technology as an instrument are more useful than if you think of it as a tool. Instruments — I’m specifically talking about musical instruments — are a way to create culture.

You approach instruments with a set of expectations and associations that are more humane. It’s built into their very purpose. Instruments are meant to make something for other people, not making things. When you use an instrument, you have an expectation that it is going to take effort to use it well. Using an instrument takes practice. You form a relationship with that object. It becomes part of your identity that you make something with it. You tune it. You understand that there’s no such thing as a “best” guitar in the same way that there’s not necessarily a “best” phone.

Insult Generator

Testing the theory that putting the word “total”, “complete”, or “absolute” in front of any noun automatically makes for an excellent insult.

Preserving mother tongues

Hui Jing describes her motivation for creating the lovely Penang Hokkien site:

People who grew up their whole lives in a community that spoke the same mother tongue as themselves would probably find this hard to relate to, but it really was something else to hear my mother tongue streaming out of the speakers of my computer.

She ends with an impassioned call for more local language websites:

If the Internet is meant to enhance the free flow of information and ideas across the world, then creation of content on the web should not largely be limited to English-speaking communities.

Resilient, Declarative, Contextual

This is really good breakdown of what’s different about CSS (compared to other languages).

These differences may feel foreign, but it’s these differences that make CSS so powerful. And it’s my suspicion that developers who embrace these things, and have fully internalized them, tend to be far more proficient in CSS.