A great in-depth report from Alice on creating, running, and most importantly, selling an in-house design system. This makes a great companion piece to her Patterns Day talk.
Where internal teams seem to go wrong is not appreciating that the thing they’re building is still a product and so it needs to compete with other products on the market.
24 Ways is back! Yay! This year’s edition kicks off with a great article by Hui Jing on using @supports:
Chances are, the latest features will not ship across all browsers at the same time. But you know what? That’s perfectly fine. If we accept this as a feature of the web, instead of a bug, we’ve just opened up a lot more web design possibilities.
Smashing Magazine has launched its lovely new design, but more importantly, it has launched its lovely new business model. Ads are gone. Patronage is in. This is a resource worth supporting.
We’re getting rid of advertisers and digging back to our roots: community-based, community-built, and determinedly non-commercial.
I approve!
A List Apart has given me so, so much over the years that becoming a supporter is quite literally the least I can do.
Oh, how I wish I could’ve been at Web Directions Code in Melbourne to see this amazing presentation by Charlotte. I can’t quite get over how many amazing knowledge bombs she managed to drop in just 20 minutes!
Donate money to support Codebar:
By donating to codebar you are helping to promote diversity in the tech industry so that more women, LGBTQA and other underrepresented folks will be able to get started with programming and raise their skills to the next level.
Thanks to jQuery, you probably don’t need jQuery. Just look at all these methods that started life in jQuery, that are now part of the standardised DOM API:
remove()prepend()before()replaceWith()closest()This resonates a lot—we’ve been working on something similar at Clearleft, for very similar reasons:
We rode the folk knowledge train until it became clear that it was totally unscaleable and we struggled to effectively commute know-how to the incoming brains.
At Made By Many, they’ve sliced it into three categories: Design, Technology, and Product Management & Strategy. At Clearleft, we’re trying to create a skills matrix for each of these disciplines: UX, UI, Dev, Research, Content Strategy, and Project Management. I’m working on the Dev matrix. I’ll share it once we’ve hammered it into something presentable. In the meantime, it’s good to see exactly the same drivers are at work at Made By Many:
The levels give people a scaffold onto which they can project their personalised career path, reflecting their progression, and facilitating professional development at every stage.
You can help support the indie web community with their fairly modest costs: about $200 each month for hosting, domain names, and the like. Also:
We want IndieWeb events to be as accessible as possible, regardless of personal barriers. Because of this, we have offered a travel scholarship fund in the past to underrepresented groups thanks to our generous sponsors. Your support will allow us to continue to offer and expand this scholarship fund, helping make sure that IndieWebCamps represent everyone.
Rachel uncovers a great phrase for dealing with older browsers:
It isn’t your fault, but it is your problem.
She points to multiple ways of using CSS Grid today while still providing a decent experience for older browsers.
Crucially, there’s one message that hasn’t changed in fifteen years:
Websites do not need to look the same in every browser.
It’s crazy that there are still designers and developers who haven’t internalised this. And before anyone starts claiming that the problem is with the clients and the bosses, Rachel has plenty of advice for talking with them too.
Your job is to learn about new things, and advise your client or your boss in the best way to achieve their business goals through your use of the available technology. You can only do that if you have learned about the new things. You can then advise them which compromises are worth making.
Oh, how I wished everyone approached building for the web the way that Rachel does. Smart, sensible, pragmatic, and exciting!
I heard nothing but good things about this talk from the Fronteers conference. There’s some great stuff in here—I really like its historical perspective.
Charlotte is a big fan of feature queries.
Eric walks through a really nice use of CSS shapes and @supports on a page of the An Event Apart site.
It’s a nice little illustration of how we can use advanced features of CSS right now, without the usual wait for widespread support.
A thorough explanation of @supports from Jen, with plenty of smart strategies for using it in your CSS today.
Paul argues that the biggest problems for interoperability on the web don’t come from support (or lack of support) for entire features, but from the frustrating inconsistencies when features land in different browsers at different times with different implementations:
- Platform inconsistencies hurt us more than big feature differences, we should start to try and prioritize aligning the platform
- We need better tools to help us understand what the inconsistencies are and guidance on how to manage them
- Developers should raise more issues to keep browser vendors accountable when there are differences
If you’re planning on giving Fractal a test drive, jump into this Slack channel. Mark and others will be able to help you out with any questions that aren’t covered in the docs.
Shamefully, I haven’t been doing one-to-ones with my front-end dev colleagues at Clearleft, but I’m planning to change that. This short list of starter questions from Lara will prove very useful indeed.
Una’s [Instagram filters in CSS}(https://github.com/una/CSSgram) are great, but the browser support for CSS filters isn’t as good as, say, the browser support for canvas. Here’s a clever bit of scripting to polyfill filters using canvas.
Here’s the video of the panel I participated in at Edge conference, expertly moderated by Lyza.
Thanks to the video editing, you can’t see the face I’m making when the guy from Facebook talks about user-agent sniffing as a totally cool and reliable way of working.
