In and Out of Style · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer
Some thoughts—and kind words—prompted by my recent talk, In And Out Of Style.
Link tags: web
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The Biggest Thing from WWDC 2022 - Webventures
Web Push on iOS will change the “we need to build a native app” decision.
Push notifications are definitely not the sole reason to go native, but in my experience, it’s one of the first things clients ask for. They may very well be the thing that pushes your client over the edge and forces them, you and the entire project to accept the logic of the app store model.
The Message Behind the Medium of a Personal Blog - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
- Each voice is individual and matters
- Slow is ok
- Diversified and independent is good
- Not fitting a pattern is ok
- Not being easily commodified is ok
Just Put Stuff Out There · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer
I’m honoured to mentioned in the same paragraph as Seth Godin and Chris Coyier (and I too have really been enjoying Chris’s writing).
Jeremy Keith | In And Out Of Style | CSS Day 2022 - YouTube
Here’s the video of my opening talk at this year’s CSS Day, which I thoroughly enjoyed!
It’s an exciting time for CSS! It feels like new features are being added every day. And yet, through it all, CSS has managed to remain an accessible language for anyone making websites. Is this an inevitable part of the design of CSS? Or has CSS been formed by chance? Let’s take a look at the history—and some alternative histories—of the World Wide Web to better understand where we are today. And then, let’s cast our gaze to the future!
Introducing Opportunities & Experiments: Taking the Guesswork out of Performance - WebPageTest Blog
WebPageTest just got even better! Now you can mimic the results of what would’ve previously required actually shipping, like adding third-party scripts, switching from a client-rendered to a server-rendered architecture and other changes that could potentially have a big effect on performance. Now you can run an experiment to get the results before actual implementation.
News from WWDC22: WebKit Features in Safari 16 Beta | WebKit
Good news and bad news…
The good news is that web notifications are coming to iOS—my number one wish!
The bad news is that it won’t happen until next year sometime.
Am I on the IndieWeb Yet? | Miriam Eric Suzanne
Miriam has a wishlist for scaling up the indie web approach:
What I would like to see is a tool that helps bring the entire system together in one place. Somewhere that non-technical people can:
- build their own site, with support for feeds/mentions
- see what feeds are available on other sites, and subscribe to them
- easily respond to other sites, and see the resulting threads
(Oh, and by linking to this post, this should show up as a bookmark—I’m also testing Miriam’s webmention setup.)
The ‘Form’ Element Created the Modern Web. Was It a Big Mistake? | WIRED
Paul Ford:
The web was born to distribute information on computers, but the technology industry can never leave well enough alone. It needs to make everything into software. To the point that your internet browser is basically no longer a magical book of links but a virtual machine that can simulate a full-fledged computer.
Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy
A well-written evisceration of cryptobollocks signed by Bruce Scheier, Tim Bray, Molly White, Cory Doctorow, and more.
If you’re a concerned US computer scientist, technologist or developer, you’ve got till June 10th to add your signature before this is submitted to congress.
Verevolf
Glenn Davis of Project Cool’s Cool Site Of The Day from waaaay back in the day is writing his online memoirs.
Depending on when you got online, this will either bring back a lot of memories or sound like something from a different century (which technically it is).
I Replaced My Native iOS App with a Cross-Platform Web App and No One Noticed
It turns out that in 2022, for a lot of apps, the dream of write once run anywhere has finally arrived.
Every year browsers and web technologies become more capable and more powerful. Every year there are more kinds of app that you can make cross platform.
So before you start your next project, why don’t you take a look at cross platform web apps. Maybe they aren’t right for your project, but maybe, like me, you’ll discover that you can code once and run everywhere. And I think that’s amazing.
Changing with the times · Chris Burnell
I think, with the sheer volume of functionality available to us nowadays on the front-end, it can be easy to forget how powerful and strong the functionality is that we get right off shelf with HTML. Yes, you read that right, functionality.
Cautionary Tales from Cryptoland
This quote from the brilliant Molly White is about web3/blockchain/cryptobollocks but it applies to evaluating technology in general (like, say, JavaScript frameworks):
I firmly believe that companies first need to identify and research the problem they are trying to solve, and then select the right technology to do it. Those technologies may not be the latest buzzword, and they may not cause venture capitalists to come crawling out of the woodwork, but choosing technologies with that approach tends to be a lot more successful in the long run — at least, assuming the primary goal is to actually solve a problem rather than attract VC money.
The Demise of the Mildly Dynamic Website
It me:
Broadly, these are websites which are still web pages, not web applications; they’re pages of essentially static information, personal websites, blogs, and so on, but they are slightly dynamic. They might have a style selector at the top of each page, causing a cookie to be set, and the server to serve a different stylesheet on every subsequent page load.
This rings sadly true to me:
Suppose a company makes a webpage for looking up products by their model number. If this page were made in 2005, it would probably be a single PHP page. It doesn’t need a framework — it’s one SELECT query, that’s it. If this page were made in 2022, a conundrum will be faced: the company probably chose to use a statically generated website. The total number of products isn’t too large, so instead their developers stuff a gigantic JSON file of model numbers for every product made by the company on the website and add some client-side JavaScript to download and query it. This increases download sizes and makes things slower, but at least you didn’t have to spin up and maintain a new application server. This example is fictitious but I believe it to be representative.
Also, I never thought about “serverless” like this:
Recently we’ve seen the rise in popularity of AWS Lambda, a “functions as a service” provider. From my perspective this is literally a reinvention of CGI, except a) much more complicated for essentially the same functionality, b) with vendor lock-in, c) with a much more complex and bespoke deployment process which requires the use of special tools.
In Defence of the Single Page Application | William Kennedy
This is very convincing.
Why blog? – Chuck Grimmett
Platforms come and go. Buy a domain and set up a permanent space on the web where others to find you and link back to. I have no idea what I put on Myspace back in the day, but everything I’ve published on this site since 2008 is still accessible and the links still work.
A personal website is a digital homestead that you can improve, tinker with, and live in for years to come. It is a home for your thoughts, musings, opinions, trials, and happenings, built in a way that suits you.
I like this little prompt:
What do you wish you had found via Google today but didn’t? Write that.
Why I don’t miss React: a story about using the platform - Jack Franklin
This is a great case study of switching from a framework mindset to native browser technologies.
Though this is quite specific to Jack’s own situation, I do feel like there’s something in the air here. The native browser features are now powerful and stable enough to make the framework approach feel outdated.
And if you do want to use third-party dependencies, Jack makes a great case for choosing smaller single-responsibility helpers rather than monolithic frameworks.
Replacing lit-html would be an undertaking but much less so than replacing React: it’s used in our codebase purely for having our components (re)-render HTML. Replacing lit-html would still mean that we can keep our business logic, ultimately maintaining the value they provide to end-users. Lit-Html is one small Lego brick in our system, React (or Angular, or similar) is the entire box.
Increasing the surface area of blogging
RSS is kind of an invisible technology. People call RSS dead because you can’t see it. There’s no feed, no login, no analytics. RSS feels subsurface.
But I believe we’re living in a golden age of RSS. Blogging is booming. My feed reader has 280 feeds in it.
RSS - Chris Coyier
How is all this social? It’s just slow social. If you want to respond to me, publish something linking to what I said. If I want to respond to you, I publish something linking to what you wrote. Old school. Good school. It’s high-effort, but I think the required effort is a positive thing for a social network. Forces you to think more.