I know the anxiety of sharing something with the world. I know there is a pressure to match the quality we see elsewhere on the web. But maybe we should stop trying to live up to somebody else’s standards and focus on just getting stuff out there instead. Maybe our “imperfect” things are already helpful to someone. Maybe this shouldn’t be so hard.
Frank is redesigning in the open. Watch this space:
By writing about it, it may help both of us. I can further develop my methods by navigating the friction of explaining them. I’ve been looking for a way to clarify and share my thoughts about typography and layout on screens, and this seems like a good chance to do so. And you? Well, perhaps the site can offer a clearly explained way of working that’s worth considering. That seems to be a rare thing on the web these days.
I’m really enjoying this end-of-the-year round-up from people speaking their brains. It’s not over yet, but there’s already a lot of thoughtful stuff to read through.
There are optimistic hopeful thoughts from Sam and from Ire:
Only a few years ago, I would need a whole team of developers to accomplish what can now be done with just a few amazing tools.
And I like this zinger from Geoff:
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: it’s still the best cocktail in town.
Then there are more cautious prognostications from Dave and from Robin:
The true beauty of web design is that you can pick up HTML, CSS, and the basics of JavaScript within a dedicated week or two. But over the past year, I’ve come to the conclusion that building a truly great website doesn’t require much skill and it certainly doesn’t require years to figure out how to perform the coding equivalent of a backflip.
What you need to build a great website is restraint.
It came to my attention after writing my blog post about how we choose the web we want that the pessimism is about not being able to make a living from blogging.
Brent gives an in-depth response to this concern about not making a living from blogging. It’s well worth a read. I could try to summarise it, but I think it’s better if you read the whole thing for yourself.
You can entertain, you can have fun, you can push the boundaries of the form, if you want to. Or you can just write about cats as you develop your voice. Whatever you want!
I couldn’t agree more with this sentiment:
You choose the web you want. But you have to do the work.
A lot of people are doing the work. You could keep telling them, discouragingly, that what they’re doing is dead. Or you could join in the fun.
That unusual behaviour I wrote about with the Web Share API in Safari on iOS is now officially a bug—thanks, Tess!
Max describes how he does bookmarking on his own site—he’s got a bookmarklet for sharing links, like I do. But he goes further with a smart use of the “share target” section in his web app manifest, as described by Aaron.
By the way, Max’s upcoming talk at the Web Clerks conference in Vienna sounds like it’s going to be unmissable!
I implemented the Web Share API over on The Session back when it was first available in Chrome in Android. It’s a nifty and quite straightforward API that allows websites to make use of the “sharing drawer” that mobile operating systems provide from within a web browser.
I already had sharing buttons that popped open links to Twitter, Facebook, and email. You can see these sharing buttons on individual pages for tunes, recordings, sessions, and so on.
I was already intercepting clicks on those buttons. I didn’t have to add too much to also check for support for the Web Share API and trigger that instead:
if (navigator.share) {
navigator.share(
{
title: document.querySelector('title').textContent,
text: document.querySelector('meta[name="description"]').getAttribute('content'),
url: document.querySelector('link[rel="canonical"]').getAttribute('href')
}
);
}
That worked a treat. As you can see, there are three fields you can pass to the share() method: title, text, and url. You don’t have to provide all three.
Earlier this year, Safari on iOS shipped support for the Web Share API. I didn’t need to do anything. ‘Cause that’s how standards work. You can make use of APIs before every browser supports them, and then your website gets better and better as more and more browsers add support.
But I recently discovered something interesting about the iOS implementation.
When the share() method is triggered, iOS provides multiple ways of sharing: Messages, Airdrop, email, and so on. But the simplest option is the one labelled “copy”, which copies to the clipboard.
Here’s the thing: if you’ve provided a text parameter to the share() method then that’s what’s going to get copied to the clipboard—not the URL.
That’s a shame. Personally, I think the url field should take precedence. But I don’t think this is a bug, per se. There’s nothing in the spec to say how operating systems should handle the data sent via the Web Share API. Still, I think it’s a bit counterintuitive. If I’m looking at a web page, and I opt to share it, then surely the URL is the most important piece of data?
I’m not even sure where to direct this feedback. I guess it’s under the purview of the Safari team, but it also touches on OS-level interactions. Either way, I hope that somebody at Apple will consider changing the current behaviour for copying Web Share data to the clipboard.
In the meantime, I’ve decided to update my code to remove the text parameter:
if (navigator.share) {
navigator.share(
{
title: document.querySelector('title').textContent,
url: document.querySelector('link[rel="canonical"]').getAttribute('href')
}
);
}
If the behaviour of Safari on iOS changes, I’ll reinstate the missing field.
By the way, if you’re making progressive web apps that have display: standalone in the web app manifest, please consider using the Web Share API. When you remove the browser chrome, you’re removing the ability for users to easily share URLs. The Web Share API gives you a way to reinstate that functionality.
Frank yearns for just-in-time computing:
With each year that goes by, it feels like less and less is happening on the device itself. And the longer our work maintains its current form (writing documents, updating spreadsheets, using web apps, responding to emails, monitoring chat, drawing rectangles), the more unnecessary high-end computing seems. Who needs multiple computers when I only need half of one?
The web embodies principles of openness and portability and access that best align with the needs, and frankly the purpose, of the cultural heritage sector.
Aaron’s talk from the 2019 Museums and the Web conference.
In 2019 the web is not “sexy” anymore and compared to native platforms it can sometimes seems lacking, but I think that speaks as much to people’s desire for something “new” as it does to any apples to apples comparison. On measure – and that’s the important part: on measure – the web affords a better and more sustainable framework for the cultural heritage to work in than any of the shifting agendas of the various platform vendors.
Editing is hard because you realize how bad you are. But editing is easy because we’re all better at criticizing than we are at creating.
Relatable:
My essay was garbage. But it was my garbage.
This essay is most definitely not garbage. I like it very much.
Some time ago I was going through the backlog of around 90 unread articles on Design Systems. About 80 of those were Medium articles and about 40 of those took me to either their user-hostile “you ready a lot and we like that” pop-up or their money-grabbing “you’ve read lots this month, pay us to read some more.”, it turns out that Medium only likes you reading things when you give money to do so.
Therefore I’ve started to add a little warning notice to each article that’s on Medium.
You can’t criticize Twitter on Twitter. It just doesn’t work. The medium is the message.
Nolan’s plea for sanity.
Write blog posts. Use RSS. Use micro.blog. Use Mastodon. Use Pleroma. Use whatever you want, as long as it isn’t manipulating you with algorithms or selling access to your data to advertisers.
Nick Cave, like Ana, is blogging about the inner critic:
The truth is that virtually anybody who is trying to do anything worthwhile at all, especially creatively, has seated in his or her brain, a horrible homunculus that blows a dreadful little trumpet, and only knows one song – a song that goes, “You are not good enough. Why bother?” This evil little gnome is full of bad jazz, and is, in the words of author Sam Harris, “an asshole.” The enemy of aspiration, this atrocious inner voice demands you turn away from whatever your higher calling may be and become a second-rate, cut-price version of yourself. As your very own personal detractor it is deeply persuasive in its dark business.
Lots and lots of programming advice. I can’t attest to the veracity and efficacy of all of it, but this really rang true:
If you have no idea how to start, describe the flow of the application in high level, pure English/your language first. Then fill the spaces between comments with the code.
And this:
Blogging about your stupid solution is still better than being quiet.
You may feel “I’m not start enough to talk about this” or “This must be so stupid I shouldn’t talk about it”.
Create a blog. Post about your stupid solutions.
I really admire Ana’s honesty here in confronting her inner critic (who she calls “side B Ana”).
For me, I do find that Webmentions are really enhancing linking—by offering a type of bidirectional hyperlink. I think if they could see widespread use, we’d see a Renaissance of blogging on the Web. Webmentions are just so versatile—you can use them to commment, you an form ad-hoc directories with them, you can identify yourself to a wider community. I really feel like they are a useful modernization.
My website has my words, my interviews, my photos, and my identity — what it doesn’t have, as far as I’m concerned, is “content.” Looking at it from the other side, for platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, everything is “content” regardless of its provenance. Each creation is merely an object, only valuable for its ability to increase our time spent on their platforms, allowing them to sell more advertising.
Bullet comments, or 弹幕 (“danmu”), are text-based user reactions superimposed onto online videos: a visual commentary track to which anyone can contribute.
A fascinating article by Christina Xu on this overwhelming collaborative UI overlaid on Chinese video-sharing sites:
In the West, the Chinese internet is mostly depicted in negative terms: what websites and social platforms are blocked, what keywords are banned, what conversations and viral posts are scrubbed clean from the web overnight. This austere view is not inaccurate, but it leaves out what exactly the nearly 750 million internet users in China do get up to.
Take a look at bullet comments, and you’ll have a decent answer to that question. They represent the essence of Chinese internet culture: fast-paced and impish, playfully collaborative, thick with rapidly evolving inside jokes and memes. They are a social feature beloved by a generation known for being antisocial. And most importantly, they allow for a type of spontaneous, cumulative, and public conversation between strangers that is increasingly rare on the Chinese internet.
This is a really great, balanced profile of the Indie Web movement. There’s thoughtful criticism alongside some well-deserved praise:
If we itemize the woes currently afflicting the major platforms, there’s a strong case to be made that the IndieWeb avoids them. When social-media servers aren’t controlled by a small number of massive public companies, the incentive to exploit users diminishes. The homegrown, community-oriented feel of the IndieWeb is superior to the vibe of anxious narcissism that’s degrading existing services.