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This is Not my Beautiful House: Examining the Desktop Metaphor, 1980-1995 | continent.

From Xerox PARC to the World Wide Web:

The internet did not use a visual spatial metaphor. Despite being accessed through and often encompassed by the desktop environment, the internet felt well and truly placeless (or perhaps everywhere). Hyperlinks were wormholes through the spatial metaphor, allowing a user to skip laterally across directories stored on disparate servers, as well as horizontally, deep into a file system without having to access the intermediate steps. Multiple windows could be open to the same website at once, shattering the illusion of a “single file” that functioned as a piece of paper that only one person could hold. The icons that a user could arrange on the desktop didn’t have a parallel in online space at all.

Request with Intent: Caching Strategies in the Age of PWAs – A List Apart

Aaron outlines some sensible strategies for serving up images, including using the Cache API from your service worker script.

Responsible JavaScript: Part III – A List Apart

This chimes nicely with my recent post on third-party scripts. Here, Jeremy treats third-party JavaScript at technical debt and outlines some solutions to staying on top of it.

Convenience always has a price, and the web is wracked by our collective preference for it. JavaScript, in particular, is employed in a way that suggests a rapidly increasing tendency to outsource whatever it is that We (the first party) don’t want to do. At times, this is a necessary decision; it makes perfect financial and operational sense in many situations.

But make no mistake, third-party JavaScript is never cheap. It’s a devil’s bargain where vendors seduce you with solutions to your problem, yet conveniently fail to remind you that you have little to no control over the side effects that solution introduces.

Building on Vimeo

Here’s the video of the opening talk I gave at New Adventures earlier this year. I think it’s pretty darn good!

Nothing Fails Like Success – A List Apart

On an individual and small collective basis, the IndieWeb already works. But does an IndieWeb approach scale to the general public? If it doesn’t scale yet, can we, who envision and design and build, create a new generation of tools that will help give birth to a flourishing, independent web? One that is as accessible to ordinary internet users as Twitter and Facebook and Instagram?

Accessibility for Vestibular Disorders: How My Temporary Disability Changed My Perspective · An A List Apart Article

This is a fascinating insight into what it’s like to use the web if you’ve got vertigo (which is way more common than you might think):

Really, there are no words to describe just how bad a simple parallax effect, scrolljacking, or even background-attachment: fixed would make me feel. I would rather jump on one of those 20-G centrifuges astronauts use than look at a website with parallax scrolling.

Every time I encountered it, I would put the bucket beside me to good use and be forced to lie in bed for hours as I felt the room spinning around me, and no meds could get me out of it. It was THAT bad.

Why Computer Programmers Should Stop Calling Themselves Engineers - The Atlantic

This article by Ian Bogost from a few years back touches on one of the themes in the talk I gave at New Adventures:

“Engineer” conjures the image of the hard-hat-topped designer-builder, carefully crafting tomorrow. But such an aspiration is rarely realized by computing. The respectability of engineering, a feature built over many decades of closely controlled, education- and apprenticeship-oriented certification, becomes reinterpreted as a fast-and-loose commitment to craftwork as business.

Responsible JavaScript: Part I · An A List Apart Article

As I pick apart yet another bundle not unlike a tangled ball of Christmas tree lights, it’s become clear that the web is drunk on JavaScript. We reach for it for almost everything, even when the occasion doesn’t call for it. Sometimes I wonder how vicious the hangover will be.

I love everything about this article and I can’t wait for part two.

What we tend to forget is that the environment websites and web apps occupy is one and the same. Both are subject to the same environmental pressures that the large gradient of networks and devices impose. Those constraints don’t suddenly vanish when we decide to call what we build “apps”, nor do our users’ phones gain magical new powers when we do so.

Needless to say, I endorse this message:

Whether you think of your site as an “app” or not, adding a service worker to it is perhaps one of the most responsible uses of JavaScript that exists today.

Programming as translation – Increment: Internationalization

Programming lessons from Umberto Eco and Emily Wilson.

Converting the analog into the digital requires discretization, leaving things out. What we filter out—or what we focus on—depends on our biases. How do conventional translators handle issues of bias? What can programmers learn from them?

“Evaluating Technology” by Jeremy Keith – An Event Apart video on Vimeo

This is a recording of my Evaluating Technology talk from An Event Apart in Denver just over a year ago. This was the last time I ever gave this talk, and I think you can tell that the delivery is well-practiced; I’m very happy with how this turned out.

In this 60-minute presentation recorded live at An Event Apart Denver 2017, Jeremy Keith helps you learn to evaluate tools and technologies in a way that best benefits the people who use the websites you design and develop.

Puzzle Montage Art by Tim Klein

Jigsaw puzzle companies tend to use the same cut patterns for multiple puzzles. This makes the pieces interchangeable, and I sometimes find that I can combine portions from two or more puzzles to make a surreal picture that the publisher never imagined. I take great pleasure in “discovering” such bizarre images lying latent, sometimes for decades, within the pieces of ordinary mass-produced puzzles.

Web Developer Representation in W3C · An A List Apart Article

This is an excellent initiative by the Dutch Fronteers group to have professional web developers represented in W3C working groups. In this particular case, they’re funding Rachel for the CSS working group. This sets a great precedent—I really hope the W3C goes for it!

Breaking the Deadlock Between User Experience and Developer Experience · An A List Apart Article

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Our efforts to measure and improve UX are packed with tragically ironic attempts to love our users: we try to find ways to improve our app experiences by bloating them with analytics, split testing, behavioral analysis, and Net Promoter Score popovers. We stack plugins on top of third-party libraries on top of frameworks in the name of making websites “better”—whether it’s something misguided, like adding a carousel to appease some executive’s burning desire to get everything “above the fold,” or something truly intended to help people, like a support chat overlay. Often the net result is a slower page load, a frustrating experience, and/or (usually “and”) a ton of extra code and assets transferred to the browser.

Even tools that are supposed to help measure performance in order to make improvements—like, say, Real User Monitoring—require you to add a script to your web pages …thereby increasing the file size and degrading performance! It’s ironic, in that Alanis Morissette sense of not understanding what irony is.

Stacking tools upon tools may solve our problems, but it’s creating a Jenga tower of problems for our users.

This is a great article about evaluating technology.

Why the Future of Data Storage is (Still) Magnetic Tape - IEEE Spectrum

It turns out that a whole lot of The So-Called Cloud is relying on magnetic tape for its backups.

Conversational Semantics · An A List Apart Article

I love, love, love all the little details of HTML that Aaron offers up here. And I really like how he positions non-visual user-agents like searchbots, screen readers, and voice assisants as headless UIs.

HTML is a truly robust and expressive language that is often overlooked and undervalued, but it has the incredible potential to nurture conversations with our users without requiring a lot of effort on our part. Simply taking the time to code web pages well will enable our sites to speak to our customers like they speak to each other. Thinking about how our sites are experienced as headless interfaces now will set the stage for more natural interactions between the real world and the digital one.

Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet · An A List Apart Article

This is a great description by Chris of the problems that webmentions aim to solve.

If you use Twitter, your friend Alice only uses Facebook, your friend Bob only uses his blog on WordPress, and your pal Chuck is over on Medium, it’s impossible for any one of you to @mention another. You’re all on different and competing platforms, none of which interoperate to send these mentions or notifications of them. The only way to communicate in this way is if you all join the same social media platforms, resulting in the average person being signed up to multiple services just to stay in touch with all their friends and acquaintances.

Given the issues of privacy and identity protection, different use cases, the burden of additional usernames and passwords, and the time involved, many people don’t want to do this. Possibly worst of all, your personal identity on the internet can end up fragmented like a Horcrux across multiple websites over which you have little, if any, control.

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.

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The Cult of the Complex · An A List Apart Article

I know that Jeffrey and I sound like old men yelling at kids to get off the lawn when we bemoan the fetishisation of complex tools and build processes, but Jeffrey gets to the heart of it here: it’s about appropriateness.

As a designer who used to love creating web experiences in code, I am baffled and numbed by the growing preference for complexity over simplicity. Complexity is good for convincing people they could not possibly do your job. Simplicity is good for everything else.

And not to sound like a broken record, but once again I’m reminded of the rule of least power.

The Slow Death of Internet Explorer and the Future of Progressive Enhancement · An A List Apart Article

Oliver Williams makes the case—and shows the code—for delivering only HTML to old versions of Internet Explorer, sparing them from the kind of CSS and JavaScript that they can’t deal with it. Seems like a sensible approach to me (assuming you’re correctly building in a layered way so that your core content is delivered in markup).

Rather than transpiling and polyfilling and hoping for the best, we can deliver what the person came for, in the most resilient, performant, and robust form possible: unadulterated HTML. No company has the resources to actively test their site on every old version of every browser. Malfunctioning JavaScript can ruin a web experience and make a simple page unusable. Rather than leaving users to a mass of polyfills and potential JavaScript errors, we give them a basic but functional experience.