Note archive: October, 2019

It’s a Halloween Homebrew Website Club at @Clearleft this evening from 6pm to 7:30pm!

You can frighten Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey by having your own website.

I’ll be in The Joker this evening for hot wings and craft beer, from about 8pm.

There’s also Homebrew Website Club at @68MiddleSt from 6pm to 7:30pm.

Neither are particularly Halloweeny though.

Oh, wait, I see: that is expected behaviour. But a transparent border shouldn’t render (but does create an extra pixel of space for the gradient to begin repeating …got it!).

If the ‘border’ is actually the gradient repeating …why does changing the border colour actually change the border colour?

border-bottom: 1px solid red;, for example

+1

I was revisiting this yesterday and thought of you:

https://www.nicolefenton.com/words-as-material/

Breitbart isn’t a news source.

That’s kinda the point.

That may be the worst take I have ever heard.

The spec is literally the reason why microformats2 didn’t end up using data-* attributes. It isn’t “advice” in the spec; it is the spec. It specifies how data-* attributes should and shouldn’t be used.

Or in the case of Facebook legitimising Breitbart…

Persuade your team to put commitment above alignment and trust it’ll end up being the alt-right decision.

Ba-doom tish!

What thread?

I would like to see it done without data-* attributes.

(But this isn’t about what I would like—it’s about implementing standards correctly.)

HTML isn’t short of existing extension mechanisms: microdata, class, etc.

…these attributes are not a generic extension mechanism for publicly-usable metadata.

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/dom.html#embedding-custom-non-visible-data-with-the-data-*-attributes

Wondering if I know anyone on the Google search team I can chat to about this abuse of data-* attributes:

https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robotsmetatag#data-nosnippet-attr

(this usage is explicitly forbidden in HTML).

Indeed it would! Thanks for that!

Happy 50th birthday, internet née ARPANET!

LO

“Talked to SRI Host to Host”

— IMP log, 1969-10-29 22:30, Charles S. Kline, Boelter Hall, UCLA

Congratulations!!

What!?

We’re having enchiladas!?

Woo-hoo!

• Kindred by Octavia Butler
• The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
• Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
• The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
• The Power by Naomi Alderman
• The Future Home Of The Living God by Louise Erdrich

Thank you, Sebastian! Here are some links to the resources mentioned:

https://adactio.com/journal/14697

I think you’re conflating hamburger menus with progressive disclosure: one is a subset of the other. Saying any progressive disclosure pattern is basically a hamburger menu is like saying all animals are basically fish. 🍔 🦒 🦔 🦓 🐟

If you’re saying that a hamburger icon is a common convention, the data from usability testing disagrees.

But good point about the positioning of the close icon—I’ve fixed that now (the open/close trigger is persistent). Thanks for that!

Oh, I thought that was loooong fixed!

This is the work of the graduates of the Plantin Institute of Typography:

https://plantininstitute.be/

A Mind At Play: How Claude Shannon Invented The Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman. I picked it up that time we were in Ada’s Technical Bookstore together in Seattle—I can bring it into the Clearleft studio on Monday if you like.

Reading 1666: Plague, War, and Hellfire by Rebecca Rideal.

Citation needed.

More on those ideas here:

https://indieweb.org

It would be fun to have an Indie Web Camp in Dublin some time!

It’s because I want to own my own data. I consider my site to be the canonical link and the Twitter version to be the copy. I include links in both directions.

You can do it with Wordpress too:

https://indieweb.org/WordPresswithBridgy

I use the Twitter API to post from my own website (and include a link back):

https://adactio.com/journal/6826

Going to Antwerp. brb

Ah, right!

Better support server-side rendering or better support rehydration?

( Feels like browsers have done a good job of supporting server-side rendering since http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html )

Awwww! ❤️

You got this!

See you there!

Reading The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal.

❤️

Ooh, and then the day after Indie Web Camp Brighton, it’s the revivalist Brighton Bloggers meetup!

https://brightondigitalfestival.co.uk/events/brighton-bloggers-meetup

Ah, memories!

https://www.flickr.com/groups/10359578@N00/pool/

Reminder: Indie Web Camp Brighton is this weekend:

https://indieweb.org/2019/Brighton

Sign up (for free) here:

https://ti.to/adactio/indie-webcamp-brighton-2019

It’s going to be inspiring, fun, and productive—guaranteed!

So… I just met Dieter Rams wandering around the market hall in Frankfurt.

I just about managed to stammer out something in German about being delighted to see him.

That was unexpected, awkward, and delightful in equal measure.

Congratulations!

Going to Frankfurt. brb

Rest in peace, spacewalker.

https://twitter.com/roscosmos/status/1182622690726830080

€★

Reading Motherfoclóir: Dispatches From A Not So Dead Language by Darach O’Séaghdha.

Going to Paris. brb

I’m still chasing payment from the @Confront _SE conference in Malmö—it’s been a year now.

If the link with rel="stylesheet" came before the links with rel="preload" would that make a difference?

For clearleft.com the font-loading strategy is to self-host woff2 with link rel="preload" as="font" in the HTML and font-display: fallback in the CSS.

For adactio.com the font-loading strategy is to not use web fonts. 🙂

Responsive implicitly means no such thing.

One Web 4 Life.

It’s not “nobody” but I agree that it’s Sturgeon’s Law in action; 90% of responsive sites are crap because 90% of websites are crap because 90% of everything is crap.

You shall have my sword!

(Seriously, I very much want never-slow mode to become a thing. Whatever the AMP team are paying/blackmailing the search team with, do that for never-slow sites!)

Mobile-first responsive design works.

The alternative is far worse—separate code bases; separate m. sites? Never again!

Fact-checking @SlightlyLate: it’s true that desktop-first responsive design didn’t work—that never worked—mobile-first responsive design has always been the smart move. Don’t tar all responsive design with a desktop brush.

Alas, the latest update to iOS buries “Add to Home Screen” even more …and it was already pretty hard to find if you don’t grok “rectangle icon with arrow sticking out the top”.

You’re welcome, Helvetica.

Citation: https://trentwalton.com/2014/03/10/device-agnostic/

That beautiful quote is from @TrentWalton:

https://trentwalton.com/2014/03/10/device-agnostic/

Here’s the source of that quote by @TrentWalton:

https://trentwalton.com/2014/03/10/device-agnostic/

I was quoting @Zeynep from the Web At 30 event earlier this year.

Oh, yes, Turbolinks is very exciting!

…at least until @JaffaTheCake’s proposal for navigation transitions becomes a reality:

https://github.com/jakearchibald/navigation-transitions

(and no, Portals definitely don’t cut it here).

I agree that Chrome has the edge on Firefox for JavaScript work (while Firefox definitely leads in CSS tooling) …but a little birdie from Mozilla told me that some exciting improvements are coming soon!

Oh, I see! I thought you were saying that an app shell is a prerequisite for any good progressive web app.

Totally agree that getting something on the screen as quickly as possible is a prerequisite …but an app shell is not the only way to do that. Conflating the two is confusing.

But if you agree it’s not the only way, why did you describe it as a prerequisite?

It’s 2019 and Safari only supports the CSS clip-path property with a -webkit prefix.

It has been this way for over five years now.

Death to vendor prefixes!

If the pinnacle of our ambition when building for the web on mobile is to imitate native apps, we have set our sights way too low.

https://adactio.com/journal/11130

Listening to @JoubranJad’s @FronteersConf talk, and I’m afraid I fundamentally disagree with his assertion that an app shell is a prerequisite for a good progressive web app. It’s one approach. Other excellent approaches are available.

Just had one last run-through with @Rem of our talk for @FronteersConf tomorrow: How We Built the World Wide Web in Five Days.

https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/

Thank you—glad you liked it!

But what does it mean!!??

See you soon!

Thank you so much! I think that might be my favourite talk I’ve ever given.

In the last 24 hours, #ViewSourceConf has provided me with two of my favourite tweets:

https://twitter.com/TejasKumar_/status/1178722987115237377

https://twitter.com/torgo/status/1179056621072334848

They really capture my soul, y’know?

Heartfelt thanks to @SandraPersing and @AliSpivak for putting together a great #ViewSourceConf—and to @Asignia for live-captioning it!

Is that Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? I think in Ubik he also invented 80% of the Internet Of Things with a door that demands payment before opening.

Feeling good about the closing keynote I just gave at #ViewSourceConf. The audience were very gracious, sticking around after two days of knowledge-packed talks by @Shrell, @SoMelanieSaid, @TejasKumar, @ASpittel, @HJChen, and more!

Here’s a list of links to the books and articles referenced in the talk:

https://adactio.com/journal/14697

I’ve read exactly one of those books (hint: it’s the one that’s a comic book).

@AnjanaVakil Here’s that edition of The History Of The Web newsletter about JavaScript, with some yummy references and citations:

https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/the-10-day-programming-language-is-a-myth/

So much fun!

I think the best panel discussion at #ViewSourceConf was me and @SlightlyLate having a lively debate by the cloakroom, like two weasels in a sack squealing about web standards.

But we agreed on a solution:

Step 1: destroy capitalism.

Fellow #ViewSourceConf attendees: as announced on the excellent standards panel, there’ll be an Indie Web Camp in Brighton, England on October 19th and 20th—you should come!

https://indieweb.org/2019/Brighton

I really appreciate your hard work—thank you!

@JoryDotCom Question for the panel: where does the money for standards work come from? (And does money buy influence?) #ViewSourceConf