How to progressively enhance a nav menu | Go Make Things
A lot of folks assume that progressive enhancement means having to write the same code twice, but often, it can be as simple as extending the pattern you already have once the JS loads.
Link tags: nav
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Reflecting on My Own Experience Using the Web to Get the Vaccine - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
I click the link. The page loads fast. I navigate the surprisingly sparse yet clear form inputs. And complete the whole thing in less than thirty seconds.
Oh, how I wish this experience weren’t remarkable!
Simple forms with clear labels. Little to no branding being shoved down my throat. No array of colors, big logos, or overly-customized UI components.
The Healing Power of Javascript | WIRED
I can very much relate to what Craig is saying here.
In Praise of the Unambiguous Click Menu | CSS-Tricks
What’s important is that you test it with real users… and stop using hover menus.
Strong agree!
Skipping skip links ⚒ Nerd
Vasilis offers some research that counters this proposal.
It makes much more sense to start each page with the content people expect on that page. Right? And if you really need navigation (which is terribly overrated if you ask me) you can add it in the footer. Which is the correct place for metadata anyway.
That’s what I’ve done on The Session.
One Year Since The #IndieWeb Homebrew Website Club Met In Person And Other Last Times - Tantek
Expect more poignant one-year anniversary memories this March.
We reached our disembarkation stop and stepped off. I put my mask away. We hugged and said our goodbyes. Didn’t think it would be the last time I’d ride MUNI light rail. Or hug a friend without a second thought.
2021 is when lockdown will stop mattering (Interconnected)
First you cope and then you adapt. The kicker: once you adapt, you may not want to go back.
Burnt out? - The Midult
It me.
And yet now, in this moment of semi-stillness, the pause button may have slowed down our geographical dashing, but it has only accelerated our inner flounder. The dull thrum of imprecise apprehension. The gratitude for semi-safety made weird by the ever-blooming realisation that there is little to get excited about.
100words — 🐙 woohooctopus
Well, this is impressive (and brave)—competing a 100 words for 100 days during lockdown …with a baby.
And remember, this isn’t writing and publishing at least 100 words every day; it’s writing and publishing exactly 100 words (that’s the hard part).
If I got made king of web browsers, here’s what I’d do (Interconnected)
I guess, because browser-makers tend to be engineers so they do engineering-type things like making the browser an app-delivery platform able to run compiled code. Or fight meaningless user experience battles like hiding the URL, or hiding View Source – both acts that don’t really help early users that much, but definitely impede the user path from being a consumer to being a fully-fledged participant/maker.
4 Design Patterns That Violate “Back” Button Expectations – 59% of Sites Get It Wrong - Articles - Baymard Institute
Some interesting research in here around user expecations with the back button:
Generally, we’ve observed that if a new view is sufficiently different visually, or if a new view conceptually feels like a new page, it will be perceived as one — regardless of whether it technically is a new page or not. This has consequences for how a site should handle common product-finding and -exploration elements like overlays, filtering, and sorting. For example, if users click a link and 70% of the view changes to something new, most will perceive this to be a new page, even if it’s technically still the same page, just with a new view loaded in.
Pandemic Time: A Distributed Doomsday Clock - NOEMA
A meditative essay on the nature of time.
The simultaneous dimming of Betelgeuse and the global emergence of COVID-19 were curiously rhyming phenomena: disruptions of familiar, reassuring rhythms, both with latent apocalyptic potential.
Time and distance are out of place here.
We will have left a world governed by Chronos, the Greek god of linear, global, objective time measured by clocks, and arrived into a world governed by Kairos, the Greek god of nonlinear, local, subjective time, measured by the ebb and flow of local patterns of risk and opportunity. The Virus Quadrille is not just the concluding act of pandemic time but the opening act of an entire extended future.
Why I hate the log graph, and you should too - Geek in Sydney
I must admit I’ve been wincing a little every time I see a graph with a logarithmic scale in a news article about COVID-19. It takes quite a bit of cognitive work to translate to a linear scale and get the real story.
Why is this interesting? - The Transmission Edition
Looking at COVID-19 through the lens of pace layers.
…a citizen could actually play a part that was as important as a vaccine, but instead of preventing transmission of the virus into another cell at the ACE receptor level, it’s preventing transmission of the virus at the social network level. So we’re actually adopting a kind of behavioral vaccine policy, by voluntarily or otherwise self-isolating.
window.location Cheatsheet - DEV Community 👩💻👨💻
Everything you ever wanted to know about window.location in JavaScript, clearly explained.
It’s OK.
This is for everyone at Clearleft, but I’m sharing it here for you too.
ongoing by Tim Bray · Bye, Amazon
May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.
Fair play, Tim Bray!
The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people; here are some of their names: Courtney Bowden, Gerald Bryson, Maren Costa, Emily Cunningham, Bashir Mohammed, and Chris Smalls.
I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?
‘The stakes feel higher but, with good practice, it need not be scary’ – NHS.UK design lead on responding to coronavirus | PublicTechnology.net
This isn’t the time to get precious about your favourite design and development tools. Use progressive enhancement as your philosophy. Your service might have to be accessed on old devices in hospitals with outdated tech or unsupported operating systems. HTML+CSS is your best bet to ensure that the service can be accessed in unlikely scenarios you’ve never even considered. Do you want to take that risk at a time like this? Nope, me neither.
Save the React squabbles for another time. Make it accessible and robust from day one.
Prioritizing users in a crisis: Building the California COVID-19 response site
This is a great case study of the excellent California COVID-19 response site. Accessibility and performance are the watchwords here.
Want to know their secret weapon?
A $20 device running Android 9, with no contract commitment has been one of the most useful and effective tools in our effort to be accessible.
Leaner, faster sites benefit everybody, but making sure your applications run smoothly on low-end hardware makes a massive difference for those users.
Looking at coronavirus.data.gov.uk - Matthew Somerville
I worry that more and more nowadays, people jump to JavaScript frameworks because that is what they know or have been taught, even though they are entirely inappropriate for a wide array of things and can often produce poor results.
Last week I wrote about the great work that Matthew did and now he’s written up his process:
The important thing is to have a resilient base layer of HTML and CSS, and then to enhance that with JavaScript.