Everyone’s been talking about font-display: swap as a way of taking the pain out of loading web fonts, but here Chris looks at font-display: optional and font-display: fallback as well.
Monica explains how Shadow DOM could be the perfect answer for scoping CSS:
We didn’t have style encapsulation, so we started naming things “the right way” with BEM, so that we didn’t accidentally stomp over each other’s styles. We wanted to be able to author CSS from inside a JavaScript component, so we started using CSS-in-JS. We needed all these tools, because “the platform” (read: the browsers that be) wasn’t there, and building these tools showed that there was a need to move forward. For style encapsulation, Shadow DOM is the platform moving forward.
Although, in a way, Shadow DOM is also another flavour of CSS-in-JS:
Before you complain that using a Shadow DOM and Web Components means that it absolutely requires JavaScript: this is true.
Here’s Zach’s style guide. But the real reason I’m linking to this is his lovely description of having a personal website that grows over time:
As my own little corner of the web unceremoniously turned ten years old this year, it’s really starting to feel more like a garden than a piece of software. I certainly enjoy tending to it. I can plant what I like and with proper care it can grow into something useful.
Paul goes into detail describing how he built a progressive web app that’s actually progressive (in the sense of “enhancement”). Most of the stuff about sharing code between server and client goes over my head, but I understood enough to get these points:
I’ve never been so excited by a single diff in a JSON file.
Service workers are coming to Safari.
Given my experience publishing Resilient Web Design as a web book, I think I should take a good look at this nascent spec.
What we envision for Packaged Web Publications is similar to the goals and techniques of Progressive Web Apps: breaking the boundaries between web sites and mobile apps, an emphasis on “offline” paradigms, and so on. The time is right to broaden the scope and power of the web to include publications.
Web developers aren’t going to shed many tears for Flash, but as Bruce rightly points out, it led the way for many standards that followed. Flash was the kick up the arse that the web needed.
He also brings up this very important question:
I’m also nervous; one of the central tenets of HTML is to be backwards-compatible and not to break the web. It would be a huge loss if millions of Flash movies become unplayable. How can we preserve this part of our digital heritage?
This is true of the extinction of any format. Perhaps this is an opportunity for us to tackle this problem head on.
I wrote this song while my colleague Tim Berners-Lee was inventing something called “The World Wide Web” a few offices away. The song was published in 1993, when less that 100 websites existed.
The first image ever published on the web was of this band, Les Horribles Cernettes …LHC.
Alex Kearney looks back on two years of owning her own data.
With a fully functional site up and running, I focused on my own needs and developed features to support how I wanted to use my site. In hind-sight, that’s probably the most indie thing I could’ve done, and how I should’ve started my indieweb adventure.
This really resonates with me.
One of the motivating features for joining the indieweb was the ability to keep and curate the content I create over time.
Terrific post!
Here’s to two more years.
Drew has been adding webmention support not just to his own site, but any site using Perch. This account of his process is a really good overview of webmentions.
The slides from Calum’s presentation about progressive web apps. There are links throughout to some handy resources.
A great short talk by Tim. It’s about performance, but so much more too.
This primer on progressive web apps starts by dispelling some myths:
- Your thing does not have to be an “Application” to be a PWA.
- Your thing does not have to be a Javascript-powered single page app.
- PWAs are not specifically made for Google or Android.
- PWAs are ready and safe to use today.
Then it describes the three-step programme for turning your thing into a progressive web app:
- The Manifest.
- Go HTTPS.
- The Service Worker.
You can help support the indie web community with their fairly modest costs: about $200 each month for hosting, domain names, and the like. Also:
We want IndieWeb events to be as accessible as possible, regardless of personal barriers. Because of this, we have offered a travel scholarship fund in the past to underrepresented groups thanks to our generous sponsors. Your support will allow us to continue to offer and expand this scholarship fund, helping make sure that IndieWebCamps represent everyone.
We’re building on a web littered with too-heavy sites, on an internet that’s unevenly, unequally distributed. That’s why designing a lightweight, inexpensive digital experience is a form of kindness. And while that kindness might seem like a small thing these days, it’s a critical one.
Tell it, brother!
PWAs don’t require you use a particular JavaScript framework or any JavaScript framework at all. You don’t need to be building a Single Page App either.
I frequently see web developers struggling to become better, but without a path or any indication of clear direction. This repository is an attempt to sharing my experiences, and any contributions, that can help provide such a direction.
It’s broken down into four parts:
I don’t necessarily agree with everything here (and I really don’t like the “rockstar” labelling), but that’s okay:
Anything written here is open to debate and challenges are encouraged.
Dave explains how Jekyll Includes are starting to convert him to web components. The encapsulation is nice and neat. And he answers the inevitable “but why not use React?” question:
Writing HTML that contains JavaScript, not JavaScript that contains HTML, feels good to me.
The key feature for me is that this approach doesn’t have to depend on JavaScript in the browser:
I like that Web Components are an entirely client-side technology but can be rendered server-side in existing tech stacks whether it’s Jekyll, Rails, or even some Enterprise Java system.
AMP is a symptom that someone, somewhere, thinks the web is failing so badly (so slow, so unresponsive) for a portion of the world that they want to take all the content and package it back up in a sterile, un-webby, branded box. That makes me so sad. PWAs, to me, are a potential treatment.
How the IETF redefined the process of creating standards.
To some visionary pioneers, such as Ted Nelson, who had been developing a purist hypertext paradigm called Xanadu for decades, the browser represented an undesirably messy direction for the evolution of the Internet. To pragmatists, the browser represented important software evolving as it should: in a pluralistic way, embodying many contending ideas, through what the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) calls “rough consensus and running code.”