share-button-type/explainer.md
If you’ve been following my recent blog posts about a declarative option for the Web Share API, you might be interested in this explainer document I’ve put together. It outlines the use case for button type="share".
Link tags: web
1280
Aegir.org | Canvassing
Strong same:
I’m glad I have this site to play with things, almost all web development and ‘front-end’ stuff leaves me cold these days. It’s all so process driven, so full of unnecessary complexities and dependencies, it’s as if the entire industry wants you to forget you can write HTML by hand and upload it somewhere and it’s a working website. It’s complexity for complexity’s sake, like what accountancy software companies did to the tax code: “Oh this is too complex you need to pay us lots of money to sort it out.” Annoying. I can see some resistance to it and there are still people making blogs and playing around with stuff, so hopefully the professional professionals will calm the fuck down at some point.
Chris Ferdinandi: The Lean Web | July 2020 - YouTube
A great presentation on taking a sensible approach to web development. Great advice, as always, from the blogging machine that is Chris Ferdinandi.
The web is a bloated, over-engineered mess. And, according to developer and educator Chris Ferdinandi, many of our modern “best practices” are actually making the web worse. In this talk, Chris explores The Lean Web, a set of principles for a simpler, faster world-wide web.
The failed promise of Web Components – Lea Verou
A spot-on summary of where we’ve ended up with web components.
Web Components had so much potential to empower HTML to do more, and make web development more accessible to non-programmers and easier for programmers.
But then…
Somewhere along the way, the space got flooded by JS frameworks aficionados, who revel in complex APIs, overengineered build processes and dependency graphs that look like the roots of a banyan tree.
Alas, that’s true. Lea wonders how this can be fixed:
I’m not sure if this is a design issue, or a documentation issue.
I worry that is a cultural issue.
Using a custom element from the directory often needs to be preceded by a ritual of npm flugelhorn, import clownshoes, build quux, all completely unapologetically because “here is my truckload of dependencies, yeah, what”.
Indexing My Blog’s Links - Jim Nielsen’s Weblog
You might not think this is a big deal, and maybe it’s not, but I love the idea behind the indie web: a people-focused alternative to the corporate web. Seeing everything you’ve ever linked to in one place really drives home how much of the web’s content, made by individuals, is under corporate control and identity.
Why Do We Interface?
A short web book on the past, present and future of interfaces, written in a snappy, chatty style.
From oral communication and storytelling 500,000 years ago to virtual reality today, the purpose of information interfaces has always been to communicate more quickly, more deeply, to foster relationships, to explore, to measure, to learn, to build knowledge, to entertain, and to create.
We interface precisely because we are human. Because we are intelligent, because we are social, because we are inquisitive and creative.
We design our interfaces and they in turn redefine what it means to be human.
15 years of blogging (and 3 reasons I keep going) - Austin Kleon
Why keep blogging? For me, there are at least 3 good reasons:
- To leave a trace.
- To figure out what I have to say.
- Because I like it.
Kokorobot — leanerweb
The problem is that most websites will adapt to the ever faster connections, which makes them gradually inaccessible for people with slower connections. Today, most websites are impossible to download with a dial-up connection, because they have become too corpulent.
This speaks to me:
Everything we do to make it harder to create a website or edit a web page, and harder to learn to code by viewing source, promotes that consumerist vision of the web.
Pretending that one needs a team of professionals to put simple articles online will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Overcomplicating the web means lifting up the ladder that used to make it possible for people to teach themselves and surprise everyone with unexpected new ideas.
There’s a list of links at the end of this piece to help you reach this goal:
It is vital that the web stay participatory. That means not just making sites small enough so the whole world can visit them, but small enough so that people can learn to build their own, by example. Bloat makes the web inaccessible.
What is the Value of Browser Diversity? - daverupert.com
I’ve thought about these questions for over a year and narrowed my feelings of browser diversity down to two major value propositions:
- Browser diversity keeps the Web deliberately slow
- Browser diversity fosters consensus and cooperation over corporate rule
The land before modern APIs – Increment: APIs
This is a wonderful tale of spelunking into standards from Darius Kazemi—I had no idea that HTTP status codes have their origin in a hastily made decision in the days of ARPANET.
20 people got together at MIT in 1972 for a weekend workshop. On the second day, a handful of people in a breakout session decided it would be a good idea to standardize error messages between two services for transferring data, even though those two services had not necessarily planned to speak to one another. One thing led to another, and now 404 is synonymous with “I can’t find the thing.”
This story is exactly the kind of layering of technologies that I was getting at in the first chapter of Resilient Web Design.
HTTP status codes are largely an accident of history. The people who came up with them didn’t plan on defining a numerical namespace that would last half a century or work its way into popular culture. You see this pattern over and over in the history of technology.
Why you should hire a frontend developer - Technology in government
This is a really good description of the role of a front-end developer.
That’s front end, not full stack.
Autonomy Online: A Case For The IndieWeb — Smashing Magazine
A wonderful introduction to the indie web—Ana really conveys her sense of excitement!
About Feeds | Getting Started guide to web feeds/RSS
Matt made this website to explain RSS to people who are as-ye unfamilar with it.
Гибкий веб-дизайн
Well, this is just wonderful! Students from Moscow Coding School are translating Resilient Web Design into Russian. Three chapters done so far!
This is literally the reason why I licensed the book with a Creative Commons Attribution‐ShareAlike license.
Chapter 1: Birth | CSS-Tricks
This is wonderful! A whole series on the history of the web from Jay Hoffman, the creator of the similarly-themed newsletter and timeline.
This first chapter is right up my alley, looking at the origins of hypertext, the internet, and the World Wide Web.
In a Land Before Dev Tools | Amber’s Website
A great little history lesson from Amber—ah, Firebug!
Kissa. Book. Launch. — Roden Explorers Archive
Own. Your. Nook. There’s power in owning your nook of the ‘net — your domain name, your design, your archives — and it’s easier than ever to do so, and run a crowdfunding campaign at the same time.
The things of everyday design || Matthew Ström: designer & developer
The evolution of affordances on the web:
The URL for a page goes at the top. Text appears in a vertically scrolling column. A dropdown menu has a downward-pointing triangle next to it. Your mouse cursor is a slanted triangle with a tail, and when you hover over a link it looks like Mickey Mouse’s glove.
Most of these affordances don’t have any relationship to the physical characteristics of the interaction they mediate. But remove them from a website, application, or interface, and users get disoriented, frustrated, and unproductive.
How would I improve RSS? Three ideas (Interconnected)
Matt has thoughts on RSS:
My sense is that RSS is having a mini resurgence. People are getting wary of the social media platforms and their rapacious appetite for data. We’re getting fatigued from notifications; our inboxes are overflowing. And people are saying that maybe, just maybe, RSS can help. So I’m seeing RSS being discussed more in 2020 than I have done for years. There are signs of life in the ecosystem.
ongoing by Tim Bray · Meta Blog
But aren’t blogs dead? · Um, nope. For every discipline-with-depth that I care about (software/Internet, politics, energy economics, physics), if you want to find out what’s happening and you want to find out from first-person practitioners, you end up reading a blog.
Dense information from real experts, delivered fast. Why would you want any other kind?