Link tags: stand

Tailwind, and the death of web craftsmanship

CSS is better now. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than its ever been, and it’s better than tailwind. Give it another try. Don’t reach for big globs of libraries to paper over the issues you think it has.

This is why it’s so important to re-evaluate technology decisions.

I’ve seen people, lead and principal engineers, who refuse to learn modern JS, insisting that since it was bad in 2006 its bad today. Worse still is some of these people have used their leadership positions to prevent the use of modern JS.

File over app — Steph Ango

In the fullness of time, the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last.

A Blog Post With Every HTML Element by Patrick Weaver

I enjoyed this self-documenting journey of exploration.

WTF is the Lean Web, anyways? | Go Make Things

Three principles:

1. Embrace the platform
2. Favor small, modular tools
3. Build a web for everyone

CSS { In Real Life } | Thoughts From CSS Day

It’s clear that companies don’t value CSS skills in the same way as, say Javascript — which is reflected in pay disparity, bootcamp priorities, and the lack of visibility in job descriptions. It’s not uncommon to see front end job specifications listing React, Redux, Typescript and more, with barely a passing mention of HTML and CSS, despite being core web technologies. New developers are encouraged to learn just enough CSS to get by, rather than cultivate a deep knowledge and appreciation for the language, and that’s reflected in the messy, convoluted code, riddled with bad practices, that many of us have to clear up afterwards.

The continuing tragedy of CSS: thoughts from CSS Day 2023 · Paul Robert Lloyd

With new or expanded modules for layout, typography, animation, audio (though sadly not speech) and more, it’s possible to specialise in a subset of CSS. Yet when aspects of frontend development not involving JavaScript are seen as ignorable by employers, few will get this opportunity.

Paul shares his big-picture thoughts after CSS Day:

But one CSS conference isn’t enough. This language is now so broad and deep, its implementation across browsers never more stable and complete, that opportunities to grow the community abound.

First Experiments with View Transitions for Multi-page Apps

Some great ideas for view transitionts in here! Also:

If you look at any of the examples on a browser that does not support them, the pages still function just fine. The transitions are an extra that’s layered on top if and when your browser supports them. Another concrete example of progressive enhancement in practice.

Jack Franklin – Abstractions, complexities and off-ramps – All Day Hey! 2023 - YouTube

This is a terrific talk by Jack on how to deal with the tooling involved in modern front-end development:

• Maintaining control,
• Dependency awareness,
• Lean on browser primitives,
• Have an exit strategy.

Building a Frontend Framework; Reactivity and Composability With Zero Dependencies

The thinking behind the minimal JavaScript framework, Strawberry:

Even without specialized syntax, you can do a lot of what the usual frontend framework does—with similar conciseness—just by using Proxy and WebComponents.

ActivityPub is the next big thing in social networks - The Verge

After nearly two decades of fighting for this vision of the internet, the people who believed in federation feel like they’re finally going to win. The change they imagine still requires a lot of user education — and a lot of work to make this stuff work for users. But the fundamental shift, from platforms to protocols, appears to have momentum in a way it never has before.

The search element | scottohara.me

I’ve already add the search element to thesession.org, but while browser support is still rolling out, I’m being extra verbose:

<search role="search">
 ...
</search>

Brought to you by the department of redunancy department.

I’ll remove the ARIA role once browsers are all on board. As Scott says:

Please be aware that this element landing in the HTML spec today does not mean it is available in browsers today. Issues have been filed to implement the search element in the major browsers, including the necessary accessibility mappings. Keep this in mind before you get all super excited and willy nilly add this new element to your pages.

Podcast Standards Project | Advocating for open podcasting

A new organisation with the stated goal of keeping podcasting open.

Their first specification is a consolidation of what already exists. That’s good. We don’t want a 927 situation.

My only worry is that many of the companies behind this initiative are focused on metrics and monetization—I hope they don’t attempt to standardise tracking and surveillance in podcasts.

The Podcast Standards Project, a grassroots coalition working to establish modern, open standards, to enable innovation in the podcast industry.

Define “innovation”.

In Search of Lost Time, by Tom Vanderbilt

Temporal standards bodies.

When is :focus-visible visible? | bitsofcode

1. Has the user expressed a preference for always visible focus?
2. Does the focused element support keyboard input?
3. Is the user interacting with the focused element with a non-pointing device?
4. Did a script cause focus to move from a previously visibly-focused element?

Preventing too-short final lines of blocks | Clagnut by Richard Rutter

Check out the demo that Rich has put together to go with Amelia’s proposed syntax.

Artificial Guessing

Artificial Intelligence sounds much more impressive than Artificial Guessing in a slide deck.

Robin picks up on my framing.

Instead of brainstorming, discussing, iterating, closely inspecting a product to understand it and figure out what to show on a page, well, we can just let the machines figure it out for us! This big guessing machine can do our homework and we can all pack up and go to the beach.

The Web Needs a Native .visually-hidden

I agree with the reasoning here—a new display value would be ideal.

Remote Synthesis | The Price Developers Pay for Loving Their Tools Too Much

• Don’t wrap too much of your identity in a tool.
• Every tool will eventually fade.
• Flexibility is a valuable skill
• Changing tools does not mean starting over.

I agree with pretty much every word of this article.

Redefining Developer Experience — Begin Blog

Perhaps most problematic of all is the effect that contemporary developer experience has on educational programs (be they traditional classes, bootcamps, workshops, or anything in between). Such a rapidly expanding and ever changing technological ecosystem necessarily means that curricula struggle to keep up, and that the fundamentals of web development (e.g. HTML, CSS, HTTP, browser APIs…) are often glossed over in favor of getting students into the technologies more likely to land them jobs (like React and its many pals). This leads to an outpouring of early career developers who may speak confidently about things like React hooks or Redux state reducers, but who also lack any concept about the nature of HTML semantics or the most basic accessibility considerations. To be clear, I’m not throwing shade at those developers — they have been failed by an industry obsessed with the new and shiny at the expense of foundational practices and end user experiences.

And so, I ask: what exactly are we buying when we are sold ‘developer experience’ today? Who is benefiting from it? And if it is indeed something many of us aren’t too excited about (to put it kindly), how can we change it for the better?

I agree with pretty much every word of this article.

The Great Gaslighting of the JavaScript Era | The Spicy Web

We were told writing apps with an HTML-first, SSR-first, progressively enhanced mindset, using our preferred language/tech stack of choice, was outdated and bad for users.

That was a lie.

We were told writing apps completely using frontend-y JavaScript would make our lives easier.

That also was a lie.

I agree with pretty much every word of this article.