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.
Tags: ie
2751
Tuesday, March 28th, 2023
Saturday, March 25th, 2023
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.
Friday, March 24th, 2023
Hello, internet | Sam O’Neill
I have been reminded time and time again of the utility of writing. How it is a way to turn messy thoughts into coherent ideas, and how – as we all know – practice makes perfect. So I’m going to give it a go.
Welcome to the indie web, Sam!
Thursday, March 23rd, 2023
Learn Privacy
Stuart has written this fantastic concise practical guide to privacy for developers and designers. A must-read!
Smoke screen | A Working Library
The story that “artificial intelligence” tells is a smoke screen. But smoke offers only temporary cover. It fades if it isn’t replenished.
Monday, March 20th, 2023
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.
Tuesday, March 14th, 2023
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.
Guessing
The last talk at the last dConstruct was by local clever clogs Anil Seth. It was called Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality. It’s well worth a listen.
Anil covers a lot of the same ground in his excellent book, Being You. He describes a model of consciousness that inverts our intuitive understanding.
We tend to think of our day-to-day reality in a fairly mechanical cybernetic manner; we receive inputs through our senses and then make decisions about reality informed by those inputs.
As another former dConstruct speaker, Adam Buxton, puts it in his interview with Anil, it feels like that old Beano cartoon, the Numskulls, with little decision-making homonculi inside our head.
But Anil posits that it works the other way around. We make a best guess of what the current state of reality is, and then we receive inputs from our senses, and then we adjust our model accordingly. There’s still a feedback loop, but cause and effect are flipped. First we predict or guess what’s happening, then we receive information. Rinse and repeat.
The book goes further and applies this to our very sense of self. We make a best guess of our sense of self and then adjust that model constantly based on our experiences.
There’s a natural tendency for us to balk at this proposition because it doesn’t seem rational. The rational model would be to make informed calculations based on available data …like computers do.
Maybe that’s what sets us apart from computers. Computers can make decisions based on data. But we can make guesses.
Enter machine learning and large language models. Now, for the first time, it appears that computers can make guesses.
The guess-making is not at all like what our brains do—large language models require enormous amounts of inputs before they can make a single guess—but still, this should be the breakthrough to be shouted from the rooftops: we’ve taught machines how to guess!
And yet. Almost every breathless press release touting some revitalised service that uses AI talks instead about accuracy. It would be far more honest to tout the really exceptional new feature: imagination.
Using AI, we will guess who should get a mortgage.
Using AI, we will guess who should get hired.
Using AI, we will guess who should get a strict prison sentence.
Reframed like that, it’s easy to see why technologists want to bury the lede.
Alas, this means that large language models are being put to use for exactly the wrong kind of scenarios.
(This, by the way, is also true of immersive “virtual reality” environments. Instead of trying to accurately recreate real-world places like meeting rooms, we should be leaning into the hallucinatory power of a technology that can generate dream-like situations where the pleasure comes from relinquishing control.)
Take search engines. They’re based entirely on trust and accuracy. Introducing a chatbot that confidentally conflates truth and fiction doesn’t bode well for the long-term reputation of that service.
But what if this is an interface problem?
Currently facts and guesses are presented with equal confidence, hence the accurate descriptions of the outputs as bullshit or mansplaining as a service.
What if the more fanciful guesses were marked as such?
As it is, there’s a “temperature” control that can be adjusted when generating these outputs; the more the dial is cranked, the further the outputs will stray from the safest predictions. What if that could be reflected in the output?
I don’t know what that would look like. It could be typographic—some markers to indicate which bits should be taken with pinches of salt. Or it could be through content design—phrases like “Perhaps…”, “Maybe…” or “It’s possible but unlikely that…”
I’m sure you’ve seen the outputs when people request that ChatGPT write their biography. Perfectly accurate statements are generated side-by-side with complete fabrications. This reinforces our scepticism of these tools. But imagine how differently the fabrications would read if they were preceded by some simple caveats.
A little bit of programmed humility could go a long way.
Right now, these chatbots are attempting to appear seamless. If 80% or 90% of their output is accurate, then blustering through the other 10% or 20% should be fine, right? But I think the experience for the end user would be immensely more empowering if these chatbots were designed seamfully. Expose the wires. Show the workings-out.
Mind you, that only works if there is some way to distinguish between fact and fabrication. If there’s no way to tell how much guessing is happening, then that’s a major problem. If you can’t tell me whether something is 50% true or 75% true or 25% true, then the only rational response is to treat the entire output as suspect.
I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding behind the design of these chatbots that goes all the way back to the Turing test. There’s this idea that the way to make a chatbot believable and trustworthy is to make it appear human, attempting to hide the gears of the machine. But the real way to gain trust is through honesty.
I want a machine to tell me when it’s guessing. That won’t make me trust it less. Quite the opposite.
After all, to guess is human.
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.
Monday, March 6th, 2023
The past is a foreign country
I tried watching a classic Western this weekend, How The West Was Won. I did not make it far. Let’s just say that in the first few minutes, the Spencer Tracy voiceover that accompanies the sweeping vistas sets out an attitude toward the indigenous population that would not fly today.
It’s one thing to be repulsed by a film from another era, but it’s even more uncomfortable to revisit the films from your own teenage years.
Tim Carmody has written about the real hero of Top Gun:
Iceman’s concern for Maverick and the safety of his fighter unit is totally understandable. He tries, however awkwardly, to discuss Goose’s death with Maverick. There’s no discussion of blame. And when they’re assigned to fly into combat together, Iceman briefly and discreetly raises the issue of Maverick’s fitness to fly with his superior officer and withdraws his concern once a decision is made.
I know someone who didn’t watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off until they were well into adulthood. Their sympathies lay squarely with Dean Rooney.
And I think we can all agree in hindsight that Walter Peck was completely correct in his assessment of the dangers in Ghostbusters.
Oh, and The Karate Kid was the real bully.
This week, George wrote I’ve fallen out of love with Indiana Jones. Indy’s attitude of “it belongs in a museum” is the same worldview that got the Parthenon Marbles into the British Museum (instead of, y’know, the Parthenon where they belong).
Adrian Hon invites us to imagine what it would be like if the tables were turned. He wrote a short piece of speculative fiction called The Taking of Stonehenge:
We selected these archaeological sites based on their importance to our collective understanding of human and galactic history, and their immediate risk of irreparable harm from pollution, climate change, neglect, and looting. We are sympathetic to claims that preserving these sites in their “original” context is important, but our duty of care outweighs such emotional considerations.
I doubled-down on RSS – Eric Bailey
In which Eric says:
Jeremy Keith, you magnificent son of a bitch.
I’ll take it.
Appropriately enough, I read this post in my feed reader.
Sunday, March 5th, 2023
Light Years Ahead | The 1969 Apollo Guidance Computer - YouTube
This video was in my “Watch Later” queue for ages but I finally got ‘round to watching it this weekend. It’s ace! Great content, great narrative, great delivery—would’ve made a good dConstruct talk.
Thursday, March 2nd, 2023
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.
Redefining Developer Experience — Begin Blog
Perhaps most problematic of all is the effect that contemporary developer experience has on educational programs (be they traditional classes, bootcamps, workshops, or anything in between). Such a rapidly expanding and ever changing technological ecosystem necessarily means that curricula struggle to keep up, and that the fundamentals of web development (e.g. HTML, CSS, HTTP, browser APIs…) are often glossed over in favor of getting students into the technologies more likely to land them jobs (like React and its many pals). This leads to an outpouring of early career developers who may speak confidently about things like React hooks or Redux state reducers, but who also lack any concept about the nature of HTML semantics or the most basic accessibility considerations. To be clear, I’m not throwing shade at those developers — they have been failed by an industry obsessed with the new and shiny at the expense of foundational practices and end user experiences.
And so, I ask: what exactly are we buying when we are sold ‘developer experience’ today? Who is benefiting from it? And if it is indeed something many of us aren’t too excited about (to put it kindly), how can we change it for the better?
I agree with pretty much every word of this article.
The Great Gaslighting of the JavaScript Era | The Spicy Web
We were told writing apps with an HTML-first, SSR-first, progressively enhanced mindset, using our preferred language/tech stack of choice, was outdated and bad for users.
That was a lie.
We were told writing apps completely using frontend-y JavaScript would make our lives easier.
That also was a lie.
I agree with pretty much every word of this article.
Wednesday, March 1st, 2023
On Container Queries, Responsive Images, and JPEG-XL – Cloud Four
Container queries can’t be used in the sizes attribute for responsive images. Here, Jason breaks down why that is (spoiler: it’s the lookahead pre-parser) and segues into a truly long term solution: a “magical” image format.
If you’ve ever thought it felt weird to put media conditions inside the HTML for responsive images, this will resonate.
Thursday, February 23rd, 2023
What framework should I use? | Go Make Things
If you’re top priority is paid employment, right now, React is a great choice for that.
True. But…
If your priority is long-term resilience and maintainability, vanilla JS (probably with a light build process on top of it) is the ideal choice.
It will never become obsolete, or suffer from a breaking version change. It’s fast and performant, results in less code sent over the wire, and generally has a smaller footprint of things to break.