Tags: ev

Defaulting on Single Page Applications (SPA)—zachleat.com

This isn’t an opinion piece. This is documentation.

You can’t JavaScript your way out of an excess-JavaScript problem.

The machines won’t save your design system — Hey Jovo Design

Every day, a new marketing email, Medium post, or VC who will leave Twitter when they’re cold in a body bag tells us that machine learning (ML, which they call AI because it sounds more expensive) is going to change the way we work. Doesn’t really matter what your job is. ML is going to read, write, code, and paint for us.

Naturally, the excitement around ML has found its way into the design systems community. There’s an apparent natural synergy between ML and design systems. Design systems practitioners are tantalized by the promise of even greater efficiency and scale. We wish a machine would write our docs for us.

We are all, every single one of us, huge fucking nerds.

Learn Privacy

Stuart has written this fantastic concise practical guide to privacy for developers and designers. A must-read!

1. Use just the data you need
2. Third parties
3. Fingerprinting
4. Encryption
5. Best practices

Why ChatGPT Won’t Replace Coders Just Yet

I’ve been using Copilot for over a year now, and this is more or less how I use it: To help me quickly blast through boilerplate code so I can more quickly get to the tricky bits.

There’s a more subtle problem with ChatGPT’s code generation, which is that it suffers from ChatGPT’s general “bullshit” problem.

When is :focus-visible visible? | bitsofcode

1. Has the user expressed a preference for always visible focus?
2. Does the focused element support keyboard input?
3. Is the user interacting with the focused element with a non-pointing device?
4. Did a script cause focus to move from a previously visibly-focused element?

The perfect link - The A11Y Collective

How do we write, design, and code a link that works for everyone on every device? Let’s dive into the world of creating the perfect link, without making a pig’s breakfast of it.

Preventing too-short final lines of blocks | Clagnut by Richard Rutter

Check out the demo that Rich has put together to go with Amelia’s proposed syntax.

Pixel Pioneers Bristol 2023 Speaker Spotlight: Jeremy Keith

Oliver asked me some questions about my upcoming talk at Pixel Pioneers in Bristol in June. Here are my answers.

Stochastic Parrots Day Tickets, Fri, Mar 17, 2023 at 8:00 AM | Eventbrite

This free event is running online from 3pm to 7pm UK time this Friday. The line-up features Emily Bender, Safiya Noble, Timnit Gebru and more.

Since the publication of On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?🦜 two years ago, many of the harms the paper has warned about and more, have unfortunately occurred. From exploited workers filtering hateful content, to an engineer claiming that chatbots are sentient, the harms are only accelerating.

Join the co-authors of the paper and various guests to reflect on what has happened in the last two years, what the large language model landscape currently look like, and where we are headed vs where we should be headed.

print-color-adjust - CSS: Cascading Style Sheets | MDN

I love print stylesheets but I was today years old when I found out that print-color-adjust exists.

Craft vs Industry: Separating Concerns by Thomas Michael Semmler: CSS Developer, Designer & Developer from Vienna, Austria

Call me Cassandra:

The way that industry incorporates design systems is basically a misappropriation, or abuse at worst. It is not just me who is seeing the problem with ongoing industrialization in design. Even Brad Frost, the inventor of atomic design, is expressing similar concerns. In the words of Jeremy Keith:

[…] Design systems take their place in a long history of dehumanising approaches to manufacturing like Taylorism. The priorities of “scientific management” are the same as those of design systems—increasing efficiency and enforcing consistency.

So no. It is not just you. We all feel it. This quote is from 2020, by the way. What was then a prediction has since become a reality.

This grim assessment is well worth a read. It rings very true.

What could have become Design Systemics, in which we applied systems theory, cybernetics, and constructivism to the process and practice of design, is now instead being reduced to component libraries. As a designer, I find this utter nonsense. Everyone who has even just witnessed a design process in action knows that the deliverable is merely a documenting artifact of the process and does not constitute it at all. But for companies, the “output” is all that matters, because it can be measured; it appeals to the industrialized process because it scales. Once a component is designed, it can be reused, configured, and composed to produce “free” iterations without having to consult a designer. The cost was reduced while the output was maximized. Goal achieved!

Why aren’t logical properties taking over everything? - Chris Coyier

Good question.

I think it’s mostly inertia.

Tech-last

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, talking and writing about evaluating technology and what Robin describes here is definitely a bad “code smell” that should ring alarm bells:

What’s really concerning is when everyone is consumed with the technology-first and the problem-last.

Unless you’re working in an R’n’D lab, start with user needs.

I’m certain now that if you want to build something great you have to see through the tech. And that’s really hard to do when this cool new thing is all that anyone is talking about. But that’s why this one specific thing is the hallmark of a great organization; they aren’t distracted by short-lived trends and instead focus on the problem-first. Relentlessly, through the noise.

When JavaScript Fails

So, if progressive enhancement is no more expensive to create, future-proof, provides us with technical credit, and ensures that our users always receive the best possible experience under any conditions, why has it fallen by the wayside?

Because before, when you clicked on a link, the browser would go white for a moment.

JavaScript frameworks broke the browser to avoid that momentary loss of control. They then had to recreate everything that the browser had provided for free: routing, history, the back button, accessibility features, the ability for search engines to read the page, et cetera iterum ad infinitum.

Some simple ways to make content look good - Set Studio

This is a terrific walkthrough from Andy showing how smart fundamentals in your CSS can give you a beautiful readable document without much work.

An end to typographic widows on the web | Clagnut by Richard Rutter

Rich explains what text-wrap:balance does …and what it doesn’t.

The Web Needs a Native .visually-hidden

I agree with the reasoning here—a new display value would be ideal.

Remote Synthesis | The Price Developers Pay for Loving Their Tools Too Much

• Don’t wrap too much of your identity in a tool.
• Every tool will eventually fade.
• Flexibility is a valuable skill
• Changing tools does not mean starting over.

I agree with pretty much every word of this article.