Paul finishes up his excellent three part series by getting down to the brass tacks of designing and building components on the web …and in cities. His closing provocation has echoes of Heydon’s rallying cry.
If you missed the other parts of this series, they are:
I understand how bloated and non-reusable code can get when a dozen people who don’t talk to each other work on it over a period of years. I don’t believe the problem is the principle of semantic markup or the cascade in CSS. I believe the problem is a dozen people working on something without talking to each other.
The video of Charlotte’s excellent pattern library talk that she presented yesterday in Berlin.
Here’s an epic brain dump by Vitaly on the challenges of putting together a pattern library and then maintaining it.
Sacrificing consistency for usability is fine. A slightly open-ended, inconsistent but heavily used pattern library is better than a perfectly consistent pattern library that is never used.
The Museum of Wi-Fi exists to preserve these vestiges of our neighbourhood battlefields.
Some are brilliantly smart, some are just purely gross. They all belong in the museum.
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.
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.
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.
A really terrific article from Dan on building pattern libraries. In summary:
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,)
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.
Tantek shares a fascinating history lesson from Tim Berners-Lee on how the IETF had him change his original nomenclature of UDI—Universal Document Identifier—to what we now use today: URL—Uniform Resource Locator.
I love that Tantek is as pedantic as I am …although I don’t think “pedantic” is exactly the right word.
The thought process behind trying to abstract class names that are used for layout in responsive designs (and can therefore refer to different widths depending on the context). Here, the author settles on letters. In the past, I’ve approached the same kind of abstraction by using latinised names.