Tags: web

Purists versus Pragmatists

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.”

And now, a brief definition of the web - The Verge

Analysing what the web is. It’s not the technology stack.

To count as being part of the web, your app or page must:

1. Be linkable, and
2. Allow any client to access it.

I think that’s a pretty good definition.

Mind you, I think this is a bit rich in an article published on The Verge:

The HTML web may be slow and annoying and processor intensive, but before we rush too fast into replacing it, let’s not lose what’s good about it.

Excuse me? Slow, annoying, processor-intensive web pages have nothing to do with the technology, and everything to do with publishers like The Verge shoving bucketloads of intrusive JavaScript trackers into every page view.

Still, we can agree on this:

Preserving the web, or more specifically the open principles behind it, means protecting one of the few paths for innovation left in the modern tech world that doesn’t have a giant company acting as a gatekeeper.

IndieWebifying my website: part 1, the why & how – AltPlatform

Richard MacManus begins to document the process of making his website part of the indie web.

The IndieWeb Movement Will Help People Control Their Own Web Presence?

A pretty good summary of some key indie web ideas.

An intro to web components with otters – Monica Dinculescu

A really great introduction to web components by Monica. But I couldn’t help but be disheartened by this:

Web components tend to have dependencies on other web components, so you need a package manager to herd all them cats.

For me, this kind of interdependence lessens the standalone nature of web components—it just doesn’t feel quite so encapsulated to me. I know that this can be solved with build tools, but now you’ve got two problems (and one more dependency).

HN PWA - Hacker News readers as Progressive Web Apps

Of all the sites to pick to demo progressive web apps, we get the cesspit that is Hacker News …I guess it is possible to polish a turd.

Anyway, here are some examples of using frameworks to create alternative Hacker News readers. So the challenge here is to display some text to read..

Four of them render absolutely no content without JavaScript.

In the Hall of Shame we have React, Preact, Angular, and Polymer.

In the Hall of Fame, we have the ones doing it right: React, Vue, and Viper.

That’s right: React appears in both. See, it’s not about the tools; it’s about how you use ‘em.

Responsive Design for Motion | WebKit

A really great overview of using prefers-reduced-motion to tone down CSS animations.

This post was written by James Craig, and I’m going to take this opportunity to say a big “thank you!” to James for all the amazing accessibility work he has been doing at Apple through the years. The guy’s a goddamn hero!

Micropub is a W3C Recommendation • Aaron Parecki

I was just talking about micropub …and now it’s officially a W3C spec. Great work!

If you’re building a blogging platform, you can allow your users choose from a wide variety of posting clients by implementing the Micropub spec.

If you’re building a posting client and want it to work with many different server backends instead of hard-coding it to Twitter or other proprietary APIs, implement the Micropub spec and you’ll quickly have people eager to start using the app!

The Apophenic Machine — Real Life

To navigate the web is to beat a path through a labyrinth of links left by others, and to thereby create associative links yourself, unspooling them like a guiding thread onto a floor already carpeted with such connections. Each thread of connection is unique, individualized: everyone draws their own map of the network as they navigate it.

Amber Wilson: IndieWebCamp

Amber’s report from Indie Web Camp Nuremberg last week. I was blown away by how much she got done in one day.

Programming Design Systems

This is a really intriguing book that combines design theory and programming—learn about contrast, colour, and shapes, with each lesson supported by code examples.

It’s still a work in progress but the whole thing is online for free. Yay for web books!

ongoing by Tim Bray · Still Blogging in 2017

This really resonates with me. Tim Bray duly notes that people are writing on Medium, and being shunted towards native apps, and that content is getting centralised at Facebook and other hubs, and then he declares:

But I don’t care.

Same.

Any­how, I’m not go­ing away.

Same.

A Case for Progressive Web Applications in 2017

If your company is or is planning on doing business in emerging markets, architecting your web applications for performance through progressive enhancements is one easy way to drastically improve accessibility, retention, and user experience.

This article uses “progressive enhancement” and “progressive web app” interchangeably, which would be true in an ideal world. This is the first of a three part series, and it sounds like it will indeed document how to take an existing site and enhance it into a progressive web app—a strategy I much prefer to creating a separate silo that only works for a subset of devices (the app-shell model being pushed by Google).

SpeedTracker

This is a great free service for doing a bit of performance monitoring on your site. It uses WebPageTest and you do all the set up via a Github repo that then displays the results using Github Pages.

It won’t give you the power or control of Calibre but it’s a handy option for smaller sites. Here are the results for adactio.com running on a Moto G over 3G.

Obrigado, Eduardo!

Progressive Web Apps - ILT  |  Web  |  Google Developers

A step-by-step guide to building progressive web apps. It covers promises, service workers, fetch, and cache, but seeing as it’s from Google, it also pushes the app-shell model.

This is a handy resource but I strongly disagree with some of the advice in the section on architectures (the same bit that gets all swoonsome for app shells):

Start by forgetting everything you know about conventional web design, and instead imagine designing a native app.

Avoid overly “web-like” design.

What a horribly limiting vision for the web! After all that talk about being progressive and responsive, we’re told to pretend we’re imitating native apps on one device type.

What’s really disgusting is the way that the Chrome team are withholding the “add to home screen” prompt from anyone who dares to make progressive web apps that are actually, y’know …webby.

@Mentions from Twitter to My Website

Chris gives a step-by-step walkthrough of enabling webmentions on a Wordpress site.

Reflections on Resilient Web Design - Scott Dawson

I’m genuinely touched that my little web book could inspire someone like this. I absolutely love reading about what people thought of the book, especially when they post on their own site like this.

This book has inspired me to approach web site building in a new way. By focusing on the core functionality and expanding it based on available features, I’ll ensure the most accessible site I can. Resilient web sites can give a core experience that’s meaningful, but progressively enhance that experience based on technical capabilities.

Recommended Reading: Resilient Web Design, a Free e-Book from Jeremy Keith – WordPress Tavern

A jolly nice review of Resilient Web Design.

After just a few pages in, I could see why so many have read Resilient Web Design all in one go. It lives up to all the excellent reviews.

A bit more on container queries. — Ethan Marcotte

Ethan wrote about container queries on his website. Paul wrote his counter-argument on his website. Now Ethan responds. It’s fun to watch two gentlemen engage in civilised discourse.

Blogs, man. They’re gonna big, I tells ya.

Cascading HTML Style Sheets — A Proposal

It’s fascinating to look back at this early proposal for CSS from 1994 and see what the syntax might have been:

A one-statement style sheet that sets the font size of the h1 element:

h1.font.size = 24pt 100%

The percentage at the end of the line indicates what degree of influence that is requested (here 100%).