Tags: web

A Webring Kit | Max Böck - Frontend Web Developer

Inspired by Charlie, here’s a straightforward bit of code for starting or joining your own webring.

Goodbye Google Analytics, Hello Fathom - daverupert.com

Dave stops feeding his site’s visitors data to Google. I wish more people (and companies) would join him.

There’s also an empowering #indieweb feeling about owning your analytics too. I pay for the server my analytics collector runs on. It’s on my own subdomain. It’s mine.

Webrings | sonniesedge

Charlie muses on ol’ fashioned web rings …and the cultural needs they fulfilled.

We suffer from homogenous dirge in most of our contemporary web presences. Having a personal website has become a rarer and rarer thing in this time of social media profile pages.

However, recent months have seen a surge in personal websites and blogging amongst some members of the web tech community. This is something that we urgently need to encourage!

Nothing Fails Like Success – A List Apart

On an individual and small collective basis, the IndieWeb already works. But does an IndieWeb approach scale to the general public? If it doesn’t scale yet, can we, who envision and design and build, create a new generation of tools that will help give birth to a flourishing, independent web? One that is as accessible to ordinary internet users as Twitter and Facebook and Instagram?

Web Components will replace your frontend framework

I’ve often said that the goal of a good library should be to make itself redundant. jQuery is the poster child for that, and this article points to web components as the way to standardise what’s already happening in JavaScript frameworks:

Remember when document.querySelector first got wide browser support and started to end jQuery’s ubiquity? It finally gave us a way to do natively what jQuery had been providing for years: easy selection of DOM elements. I believe the same is about to happen to frontend frameworks like Angular and React.

The article goes on to give a good technical overview of custom elements, templates, and the Shadow DOM, but I was surprised to see it making reference to the is syntax for extending existing HTML elements—I’m pretty sure that that is, sadly, dead in the water.

Some Unsolicited Blogging Advice - daverupert.com

When you greet a stranger, look at his shoes.

Keep your money in your shoes.

Put your trouble behind.

When you greet a stranger, look at her hands.

Keep your money in your hands.

Put your travel behind.

How Google warped the hyperlink | WIRED UK

Ignore the ludicrously clickbaity title. This is a well-considered look at thirty years of linking on the World Wide Web.

A progressive disclosure component - Andy Bell

This is a really nice write-up of creating an accessible progressive disclosure widget (a show/hide toggle).

Where it gets really interesting is when Andy shows how it could all be encapsulated into a web component with a progressive enhancement mindset

Yet Another JavaScript Framework | CSS-Tricks

This is such a well-written piece! Jay Hoffman—author of the excellent History Of The Web newsletter—talks us through the JavaScript library battles of the late 2000’s …and the consequences that arose just last year.

The closing line is perfect.

Idiosyncrancies of the HTML parser - The HTML Parser Book

This might just be the most nerdily specific book I’ve read and enjoyed. Even if you’re not planning to build a web browser any time soon, it’s kind of fascinating to see how HTML is parsed—and how much of an achievement the HTML spec is, for specifying consistent error-handling, if nothing else.

The last few chapters are still in progress, but you can read the whole thing online or buy an ePub version.

City life | Trys Mudford

Not only does the differentiation of terms create a divide within the industry, the term ‘web app’ regularly acts as an excuse for corner cutting and the exclusion of users.

Straight-talkin’ Trys:

We kid ourselves into thinking we’re building groundbreakingly complex systems that require bleeding-edge tools, but in reality, much of what we build is a way to render two things: a list, and a single item. Here are some users, here is a user. Here are your contacts, here are your messages with that contact. There ain’t much more to it than that.

CERN Hack days – Chiteri’s Blog

Martin gives a personal history of his time at the two CERN hack projects …and also provides a short history of the universe.

Benjamin Parry Home-brew

I love the way that Benjamin is documenting his activities at Homebrew Website Club Brighton each week:

Another highly productive 90 mins.

Homebrew website club is on every Thursday evening 6.00-7.30pm at Clearleft. You should come along!

CSS { In Real Life } | Building a dependency-free site in 2019

I think we’re often guilty of assuming that because our tools are great solutions for some things, they’re automatically the solution for everything.

WWW:BTB — History (Overview)

This history of the World Wide Web from 1996 is interesting for the way it culminates with …Java. At that time, the language seemed like it would become the programmatic lingua franca for the web. Brendan Eich sure upset that apple cart.

Always Own Your Platform

Stop giving away your work to people who don’t care about it. Host it yourself. Distribute it via methods you control. Build your audience deliberately and on your own terms.

Who has the fastest website in F1? - JakeArchibald.com

I think I physically winced on more than one occassion as I read through Jake’s report here.

He makes an interesting observation at the end:

However, none of the teams used any of the big modern frameworks. They’re mostly Wordpress & Drupal, with a lot of jQuery. It makes me feel like I’ve been in a bubble in terms of the technologies that make up the bulk of the web.

Yes! This! Contrary to what you might think reading through the latest and greatest tips and tricks from the front-end community, the vast majority of sites out there on the web are not being built with React, Vue, webpack or any other “modern” tools.

Gutenberg and the Internet

Steven Pemberton’s presentation on the printing press, the internet, Moore’s Law, and exponential growth.

Benjamin Parry Offline Homebrewing

Two of my favourite things: indie web and service workers.

This makes me so happy. I remember saying when my book came out, that the best feedback I could possibly get would be readers making their websites work offline. The same can be said for the talk of the book.

Competing by mimicking - Andy Bell

In my mind, the only way to “compete” with native apps is to do better than native apps—and with the web platform consistently improving and enabling us to produce app-like experiences, with Service Workers, ES6+ JavaScript, modern CSS and Web Components: we are very much on the path to do better than native apps.