If someone’s been driven to Google something you’ve written, they’re stuck. Being stuck is, to one degree or another, upsetting and annoying. So try not to make them feel worse by telling them how straightforward they should be finding it. It gets in the way of them learning what you want them to learn.
There’s a time for linguistics, and there’s a time for grabbing the general public by the shoulders and shouting “It lies! The computer lies to you! Don’t trust anything it says!”
Imagine a collaboratively developed, universal content style guide, based on usability evidence.
A hall of shame for ludicrously convoluted password rules that actually reduce security.
A very astute framing by Ted Chiang—large language models as a form of lossy compression for text.
When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.
A lot of uses have been proposed for large language models. Thinking about them as blurry JPEGs offers a way to evaluate what they might or might not be well suited for.
I posted 1057 times on adactio in 2022.
That’s a bit more than in 2021.
November was the busiest month with 137 posts.
February was the quietest with 65 posts.
That included about 237 notes with photos and 214 replies.
I published one article, the transcript of my talk, In And Out Of Style.
I watched an awful lot of television but managed to read 25 books.
Elsewhere, I huffduffed 130 audio files and added 55 tune settings on The Session in 2022.
I spoke at ten events.
I travelled within Europe and the USA to a total of 18 destinations.
Here’s a highlight reel of some of my blog posts from 2022:
I also published the transcript of my conference talk, In And Out Of Style, a journey through the history of CSS.
This resonates with me.
This piece by Giles is a spot-on description of what I do in my role as content buddy at Clearleft. Especially this bit:
Your editor will explain why things need changing
As a writer, it’s really helpful to understand the why of each edit. It’s easier to re-write if you know precisely what the problem is. And often, it’s less bruising to the ego. It’s not that you’re a bad writer, but just that one particular thing could be expressed more simply, or more clearly, than your first effort.
When I wrote about democratising dev, I made brief mention of the growing “no code” movement:
Personally, I would love it if the process of making websites could be democratised more. I’ve often said that my nightmare scenario for the World Wide Web would be for its fate to lie in the hands of an elite priesthood of programmers with computer science degrees. So I’m all in favour of no-code tools …in theory.
But I didn’t describe what no-code is, as I understand it.
I’m taking the term at face value to mean a mechanism for creating a website—preferably on a domain you control—without having to write anything in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or any back-end programming language.
By that definition, something like WordPress.com (as opposed to WordPress itself) is a no-code tool:
Create any kind of website. No code, no manuals, no limits.
I’d also put Squarespace in the same category:
Start with a flexible template, then customize to fit your style and professional needs with our website builder.
And its competitor, Wix:
Discover the platform that gives you the freedom to create, design, manage and develop your web presence exactly the way you want.
Webflow provides the same kind of service, but with a heavy emphasis on marketing websites:
Your website should be a marketing asset, not an engineering challenge.
Bubble is trying to cover a broader base:
Bubble lets you create interactive, multi-user apps for desktop and mobile web browsers, including all the features you need to build a site like Facebook or Airbnb.
Wheras Carrd opts for a minimalist one-page approach:
Simple, free, fully responsive one-page sites for pretty much anything.
All of those tools emphasise that don’t need to need to know how to code in order to have a professional-looking website. But there’s a parallel universe of more niche no-code tools where the emphasis is on creativity and self-expression instead of slickness and professionalism.
Create your own free website. Unlimited creativity, zero ads.
Make a website in 5 minutes. Messy encouraged.
unique tool for web publishing & internet samizdat
I’m kind of fascinated by these two different approaches: professional vs. expressionist.
I’ve seen people grapple with this question when they decide to have their own website. Should it be a showcase of your achievements, almost like a portfolio? Or should it be a glorious mess of imagery and poetry to reflect your creativity? Could it be both? (Is that even doable? Or desirable?)
Robin Sloan recently published his ideas—and specs—for a new internet protocol called Spring ’83:
Spring ‘83 is a protocol for the transmission and display of something I am calling a “board”, which is an HTML fragment, limited to 2217 bytes, unable to execute JavaScript or load external resources, but otherwise unrestricted. Boards invite publishers to use all the richness of modern HTML and CSS. Plain text and blue links are also enthusiastically supported.
It’s not a no-code tool (you need to publish in HTML), although someone could easily provide a no-code tool to sit on top of the protocol. Conceptually though, it feels like it’s an a similar space to the chaotic good of neocities.org, mmm.page, and hotglue.me with maybe a bit of tilde.town thrown in.
It feels like something might be in the air. With Spring ’83, the Block protocol, and other experiments, people are creating some interesting small pieces that could potentially be loosely joined. No code required.
On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder is a very short book. Most of the time, this is a feature, not a bug.
There are plenty of non-fiction books I’ve read that definitely could’ve been much, much shorter. Books that have a good sensible idea, but one that could’ve been written on the back of a napkin instead of being expanded into an arbitrarily long form.
In the world of fiction, there’s the short story. I guess the equivelent in the non-fiction world is the essay. But On Tyranny isn’t an essay. It’s got chapters. They’re just really, really short.
Sometimes that brevity means that nuance goes out the window. What might’ve been a subtle argument that required paragraphs of pros and cons in another book gets reduced to a single sentence here. Mostly that’s okay.
The premise of the book is that Trump’s America is comparable to Europe in the 1930s:
We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.
But in making the comparison, Synder goes all in. There’s very little accounting for the differences between the world of the early 20th century and the world of the early 21st century.
This becomes really apparent when it comes to technology. One piece of advice offered is:
Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.
Wait. He’s not actually saying that words on screens are in some way inherently worse than words on paper, is he? Surely that’s just the nuance getting lost in the brevity, right?
Alas, no:
Staring at screens is perhaps unavoidable but the two-dimensional world makes little sense unless we can draw upon a mental armory that we have developed somewhere else. … So get screens out of your room and surround yourself with books.
I mean, I’m all for reading books. But books are about what’s in them, not what they’re made of. To value words on a page more than the same words on a screen is like judging a book by its cover; its judging a book by its atoms.
For a book that’s about defending liberty and progress, On Tyranny is puzzingly conservative at times.
Whatever the merit of the scientific aspirations originally encompassed by the term “artificial intelligence,” it’s a phrase that now functions in the vernacular primarily to obfuscate, alienate, and glamorize.
Do “cloud” next!
I posted to adactio.com 968 times in 2021.
That’s considerably less than 2020 or 2019. Not sure why.
March was the busiest month with 118 posts.
I published:
Those notes include 170 photos and 162 replies.
Elsewhere in 2021 I published two seasons of the Clearleft podcast (12 episodes), and I wrote the 15 modules that comprise a course on responsive design on web.dev.
Most of my speaking engagements in 2021 were online though I did manage a little bit of travel in between COVID waves.
My travel map for the year includes one transatlantic trip: Christmas in Arizona, where I’m writing this end-of-year wrap-up before getting back on a plane to England tomorrow, Omicron willing.
The French have a wonderful phrase, lesprit de l’escalier. It describes that feeling when you’ve stormed out of the room after an argument and you’re already halfway down the stairs when you think of the perfect quip that you wish you had said.
I had a similar feeling last week but instead of wishing I had said something, I was wishing I had kept my mouth shut.
I have an annoying tendency to want to get the last word in. I don’t have a problem coming up with a barbed quip. My problem is wishing I could take them back.
This happened while I was hosting the conference portion of UX Fest last week. On the hand, I don’t want the discussions to be dull so I try to come up with thought-provoking points to bring up. But take that too far and it gets ugly. There’s a fine line between asking probing questions and just being mean (I’m reminded of headline in The Onion, “Devil’s Advocate Turns Out To Be Just An Asshole”).
Towards the end of the conference, there was a really good robust discussion underway. But I couldn’t resist getting in the last word. In the attempt to make myself look clever I ended up saying something hurtful and clumsy.
Fucking idiot.
I apologised, and it all worked out well in the end, but damn if I haven’t spent the last week on the staircase wishing I could turn back time and say …nothing.
This is a great deep dive into a single component, a password toggle in this case. It shows how assumptions are challenged and different circumstances are considered in order to make it truly resilient.
A personal website ain’t got no wrong words.
This old article from Chris is evergreen. There’s been some recent discussion of calling these words “downplayers”, which I kind of like. Whatever they are, try not to use them in documentation.
I work with words. Sometimes they’re my words. Sometimes they’re words that my colleagues have written:
One of my roles at Clearleft is “content buddy.” If anyone is writing a talk, or a blog post, or a proposal and they want an extra pair of eyes on it, I’m there to help.
I also work with web technologies, usually front-of-the-front-end stuff. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The technologies that users experience directly in web browsers.
I think a lot about design principles for the web. The two principles I keep coming back to are the robustness principle and the principle of least power.
When it comes to words, the guide that I return to again and again is George Orwell, specifically his short essay, Politics and the English Language.
Towards the end, he offers some rules for writing.
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
These look a lot like design principles. Not only that, but some of them look like specific design principles. Take the robustness principle:
Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept.
That first part applies to Orwell’s third rule:
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Be conservative in what words you send.
Then there’s the principle of least power:
Choose the least powerful language suitable for a given purpose.
Compare that to Orwell’s second rule:
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
That could be rephrased as:
Choose the shortest word suitable for a given purpose.
Or, going in the other direction, the principle of least power could be rephrased in Orwell’s terms as:
Never use a powerful language where a simple language will do.
Oh, I like that! I like that a lot.
A good tutorial on making password fields accessible when you’ve got the option to show and hide the input.
A slot machine for speculation. Enter a topic and get a near-future scenario on that topic generated automatically.