Paul Ford marks two decades of publishing on his own site.
Some days I want to erase this whole thing—much of the writing is sloppy and immature, and I was, too. But why bother to hit the red button? The path of the Internet has seen fit to do that for me.
Dave has redesigned his site. Now it’s extra Dave-y.
I quite like the idea of broadcasting my URL from a friendchip bracelet.
A web book with interactive code examples.
How can we capture the unpredictable evolutionary and emergent properties of nature in software? How can understanding the mathematical principles behind our physical world help us to create digital worlds? This book focuses on the programming strategies and techniques behind computer simulations of natural systems using Processing.
Simon has revived his blog …and he’s importing his writings from not-his-blog too.
A massively in-depth study of boundary-breaking music, recreated through the web audio API.
You don’t have to be a musician or an expert in music theory to follow this guide. I’m neither of those things. I’m figuring things out as I go and it’s perfectly fine if you do too. I believe that this kind of stuff is well within reach for anyone who knows a bit of programming, and you can have a lot of fun with it even if you aren’t a musician.
One thing that definitely won’t hurt though is an interest in experimental music! This will get weird at times.
One of the things we’d hoped to enable via Web Components was a return to ctrl-r web development. At some level of complexity and scale we all need tools to help cope with code size, application structure, and more. But the tender, loving maintainance of babel and webpack and NPM configurations that represents a huge part of “front end development” today seems…punitive. None of this should be necessary when developing one (or a few) components and composing things shouldn’t be this hard. The sophistication of the tools needs to get back to being proportional with the complexity of the problem at hand.
I completely agree with Alex here. But that’s also why I was surprised and disheartened when I linked to Monica’s excellent introduction to web components that a package manager seemed to be a minimum requirement.
Following on from Amber’s introduction, here’s a really in-depth look at image formats, compression and optimisation techniques from Addy.
This is a really nicely put together little web book released under a Creative Commons licence.
Here’s the flow that eBay use for the font-loading. They’ve decided that on the very first page view, seeing a system font is an acceptable trade-off. I think that makes sense for their situation.
Interestingly, they set a flag for subsequent visits using localStorage rather than a cookie. I wonder why that is? For me, the ability to read cookies on the server as well as the client make them quite handy for situations like this.
The BBC has been experimenting with some alternative layouts for some articles on mobile devices. Read on for the details, but especially for the philosophical musings towards the end—this is gold dust:
Even the subtext of Google’s marketing push around Progressive Web Apps is that mobile websites must aspire to be more like native apps. While I’m as excited about getting access to previously native-only features such as offline support and push notifications as the next web dev, I’m not sure that the mobile web should only try to imitate the kind of user interfaces that we see on native.
Do mobile websites really dream of being native apps, any more than they dreamt of being magazines?
Five years ago, Hixie outlined the five metrics that a competitor to the web would have to score well in:
You come at the king, you best not miss.
Excellent presentation slides on all things Indie Web.
There’s a lot of misinformation on the internet as to how to build a PWA and how “appy” and SPA-y one must be.
Yes!
This simply isn’t true. Disappointingly, It is what most of the documentation, blog posts and public discourse seem to imply.
Preach it!
I’m so, so happy to see some pushback against the misinformation that progressive web apps automatically imply client-side rendered single page apps built from scratch. There’s so much value to be had in turbo-charging an existing site into a progressive web app.
But what we don’t need is yet another TLA like Alien Web Apps.
This could be a one-word article: don’t.
More specifically, don’t design websites for any specific device. That way lies pain (and it is not the way of the web).
But read on for a textbook example of how not to introduce new CSS properties. Apple proposed the new syntax that they’re shipping. Now it’s getting standardised …with a different name. So basically Apple are shipping the equivalent of a vendor-prefixed property without the vendor prefix.
Another deep dive into web history, this time on JavaScript. The timeline of JS on the web is retroactively broken down into four eras:
Nice to see “vanilla” JavaScript making a resurgence in that last one.
It’s 2017, the JavaScript ecosystem is both thriving and confusing as all hell. No one seems to be quite sure where it’s headed, only that it’s going to continue to grow and change. The web’s not going anywhere, which means JS isn’t going anywhere, and I’m excited to see what future eras bring us.
A great bit of web history spelunking in search of the first websites that allowed users to interact with data on a server. Applications, if you will. It’s well written, but I take issue with this:
The world wide web wasn’t supposed to be this fun. Berners-Lee imagined the internet as a place to collaborate around text, somewhere to share research data and thesis papers.
This often gets trotted out (“the web was intended for scientists sharing documents”), but it’s simply not true that Tim Berners-Lee was only thinking of his immediate use-case; he deliberately made the WWW project broad enough to allow all sorts of thitherto unforeseen uses. If he hadn’t …well, the web wouldn’t have been able to accommodate all those later developments. It’s not an accident that the web was later used for all sorts of unexpected things—that was the whole idea.
Anyway, apart from that misstep, the rest of the article is a fun piece, well worth reading.
You can use navigator.storage.estimate() to get a (vague) idea of how much space is available on a device for your service worker caches.
Two of my favourite things together at last: pattern libraries and service workers. Infusion is a tool for generating pattern libraries that also work offline.
Thinking about it, it makes total sense that a pattern library should be a progressive web app.
There are some great service worker optimisation tips in these slides.
Rob has redesigned his site and it’s looking lovely. Here’s the first part of a three-part series on the rationale behind the relaunch:
I don’t pretend everything I do or say online is worthy of preservation. But while I’m still breathing, I want to be the one who decides what gets preserved and what doesn’t. And I want it all to be available in one place. Owning and operating my own site is the only way.
Hell, yeah!