Archive: June, 2016

Brighton Astro

The website for Brighton’s astronomy meet up:

Every month we will have one or two talks aimed at beginners with an interest in learning more about astronomy, but assuming no prior knowledge.

Also, we will take our telescopes out to observe in and around Brighton on clear evenings - on the seafront, Hove and Preston Park, Devil’s Dyke and beyond.

Jeremy Keith | < A > | HTML Special, CSS Day on Vimeo

The video of my talk on hypertext at the HTML Special before CSS Day. I’m pretty pleased with my delivery here. There’s a bit of Q&A afterwards as well.

Rivets.js — Lightweight and powerful data binding + templating solution for building modern web applications

Mark recommended this JavaScript library as lightweight alternative to Vue.js …itself a kind of lightweight alternative to React. Basically I’m interested in the data-binding stuff.

How To Break Open The Web | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

Dan Gillmor and Kevin Marks report on the Decentralized Web Summit:

Kahle framed the gathering with three key questions: How can we build a reliable decentralized web? How can we make it more private? And how do we keep it fun and evolving?

Audacious Fox: Mini Interview: Loren Brichter on the Sale of Letterpress to Solebon

Colin pointed out this interesting perspective from an iOS developer moving to the web:

My work for the last few years has been on the web, and honestly, it’s a breath of fresh air. Instant refreshing, surprisingly good debugging / perf tools, intrinsically multi-platform, and most importantly, open.

Web tech gets a lot of shit from native devs (some of it deserved). But the alternatives are worse. I find the entire concept of App Review morally questionable despite Apple’s good intentions. So I sleep better at night not being part of that anymore. Sure, the web is messy, and it’s delicate, but it’s important and good and getting better fast.

Astrum - A lightweight pattern library for any project

One more tool for making pattern libraries. This one looks fairly simple and straightforward.

Things to Know (and Potential Dangers) with Third-Party Scripts | CSS-Tricks

Third-party scripts can provide powerful functionality, but they also bring risks to privacy, security, performance, and page behavior.

Completely CSS: Progressively Collapsing Navigation | Kenan Yusuf

One way of implementing the growing/shrinking navigation pattern—an alternative to just shoving everything behind a hamburger icon.

MarkSheet: a free HTML and CSS tutorial - Free tutorial to learn HTML and CSS

This looks like a great resource for beginners looking to learn HTML and CSS.

The Foundation of Technical Leadership · An A List Apart Article

Story of my life:

I have to confess I had no idea what a technical leader really does. I figured it out, eventually.

Seriously, this resonates a lot with what I find myself doing at Clearleft these days.

Accessibility Matters: Meet Our New Book, “Inclusive Design Patterns” (Pre-Release) – Smashing Magazine

I think it’s a safe bet that this new book by Heydon will be absolutely brilliant.

It’s a handbook with valuable, time-saving techniques that will help you avoid hacky workarounds and solve common issues effectively.

I’ve just published a transcript of the talk I gave at the HTML Special that preceded CSS Day a couple of weeks back. I’ve also recorded an audio version for your huffduffing pleasure.

It’s not like the usual talks I give. The subject matter was assigned to me, Mission Impossible style. PPK wanted each speaker to give an entire talk on just one HTML element. He offered me the best element of them all: the A element.

There were a few different directions I could’ve taken it. I could’ve tried to make it practical, but I quickly dismissed that idea. Instead I went in the completely opposite direction, making it as pretentious as possible. I figured a talk about hypertext could afford to be winding and circuitous, building on some of the ideas I wrote about in my piece for The Manual a few years back. It’s quite self-indulgent of me, but I used it as an opportunity to geek out about some of my favourite things; from Borges, Babbage, and Bletchley to Leibniz, Lovelace, and Licklider.

I wouldn’t usually write out an entire talk word-for-word in advance, but somehow it felt right for this one. In fact, my talk preparation this time ‘round was very similar to the process Charlotte recently wrote about:

1. Get everything out of my head and onto a mind map.
2. Write chunks of content in short bursts—this was when I was buddying up with Paul.
3. Put together a slide deck of visuals to support the narrative.
4. Practice delivering the talk so I don’t look I’m just reading off a screen.

It takes me a long time to prepare talks. As the deadline for this one approached, I was getting quite panicked. It was touch and go there for a while, but I managed to get it done in time.

I’m pleased with how it turned out. On the day, I had fun delivering it. People seemed to like it too, which was gratifying.

Mind blowing talk by @adactio about the history of the www and the tag @cssdayconf ! Plus, tons of Jorge Luis Borges references! #cssday

— claudiahdz ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@koste4) June 16, 2016

So @adactio is an incredible public speaker. I’m so hooked to his historical run-through of the element. #CSSDay

— Ber Baquero Stand (@berbaquero) June 16, 2016

Although with this kind of talk, it was inevitable that I wouldn’t be able to please everyone.

Great speaker, but I’m hoping the next session will be more useful. Things we can apply to projects at work. #cssday

— Martijn van Turnhout (@MvanTurnhout) June 16, 2016

I guess this talk was a one-off affair. That said, if you’re putting on an event and you think this subject matter would be appropriate, let me know. I’d be more than happy to deliver it again.

The Languages Which Almost Were CSS - Eager Blog

A wonderful deep dive into the history of styling languages before CSS. I love spelunking down these internet history potholes—fascinating stuff!

Remarks at the SASE Panel On The Moral Economy of Tech

People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous confidence.

Great stuff as usual from Maciej, ending with a rallying cry for us to pay attention to history:

This is not the first time an enthusiastic group of nerds has decided to treat the rest of the world as a science experiment. Earlier attempts to create a rationalist Utopia failed for interesting reasons, and since we bought those lessons at a great price, it would be a shame not to learn them.

There is also prior art in attempts at achieving immortality, limitless wealth, and Galactic domination. We even know what happens if you try to keep dossiers on an entire country.

If we’re going to try all these things again, let’s at least learn from our past, so we can fail in interesting new ways, instead of failing in the same exasperating ways as last time.

Persistent Storage | Web Updates - Google Developers

Here’s an interesting proposal from Google for a user-initiated way of declaring a site’s offline assets should be prioritised (and not wiped out in a clean-up). Also interesting: the way that this idea is being tried out is through a token that you can request …sure beats prefixes!

My role at Clearleft is something along the lines of being a technical director. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but it seems to be a way of being involved in front-end development, without necessarily writing much actual code. That’s probably for the best. My colleagues Mark, Graham, and Charlotte are far more efficient at doing that. In return, I do my best to support them and make sure that they’ve got whatever they need (in terms of resources, time, and space) to get on with their work.

I’m continuously impressed not only by the quality of their output on client projects, but also by their output on the side.

Mark is working a project called Fractal. It’s a tool for creating component libraries, something he has written about before. The next steps involve getting the code to version 1.0 and completing the documentation. Then you’ll be hearing a lot more about this. The tricky thing right now is fitting it in around client work. It’s going to be very exciting though—everyone who has been beta-testing Fractal has had very kind words to say. It’s quite an impressive piece of work, especially considering that it’s the work of one person.

Graham is continuing on his crazily-ambitious project to recreate the classic NES game Legend Of Zelda using web technology. His documentation of his process is practically a book:

1. Introduction,
2. The Game Loop,
3. Drawing to the Screen,
4. Handling User Input,
5. Scaling the Canvas,
6. Animation — Part 1,
7. Levels & Collision — part 1, and most recently
8. Levels — part 2.

It’s simultaneously a project that involves the past—retro gaming—and the future—playing with the latest additions to JavaScript in modern browsers (something that feeds directly back into client work).

Charlotte has been speaking up a storm. She spoke at the Up Front conference in Manchester about component libraries:

The process of building a pattern library or any kind of modular design system requires a different approach to delivering a set of finished pages. Even when the final deliverable is a pattern library, we often still have to design pages for approval. When everyone is so used to working with pages, it can be difficult to adopt a new way of thinking—particularly for those who are not designers and developers.

This talk will look at how we can help everyone in the team adopt pattern thinking. This includes anyone with a decision to make—not just designers and developers. Everyone in the team can start building a shared vocabulary and attempt to make the challenge of naming things a little easier.

Then she spoke at Dot York about her learning process:

As a web developer, I’m learning all the time. I need to know how to make my code work, but more importantly, I want to understand why my code works. I’ve learnt most of what I know from people sharing what they know and I love that I can now do the same. In my talk I want to share my highlights and frustrations of continuous learning, my experiences of working with a mentor and fitting it into my first year at Clearleft.

She’ll also be speaking at Beyond Tellerrand in Berlin later this year. Oh, and she’s also now a co-organiser of the brilliant Codebar events that happen every Tuesday here in Brighton.

Altogether that’s an impressive amount of output from Clearleft’s developers. And all of that doesn’t include the client work that Mark, Graham, and Charlotte are doing. They inspire me!

At An Event Apart in Boston, I had the pleasure of meeting Hannah Birch from Pro Publica. It turns out that she was a copy editor in a previous life. I began gushing about the pleasure of working with a great editor.

I’ve been lucky enough to work with some of the best. Working with Mandy on HTML5 For Web Designers was wonderful. One of these days I hope to work with Owen Gregory.

When I think back on happy memories of working with world-class editors, I always a remember a Skype call about an article I was writing for The Manual. I talked with my editor for hours about the finer points of wordsmithery, completely losing track of time. It was a real joy. That editor was Carolyn Wood.

Carolyn is going through a bad time right now. A really bad time. A combination of awful medical problems combined with a Kafkaesque labyrinth of health insurance have combined to create a perfect shitstorm. I feel angry, sad, and helpless. At least I can do something about that last part. And you can too.

If you’d like to help, Karen has set up a page for contributing to help Carolyn. If you could throw a few bucks in there, I would appreciate it very much. Thank you.

Screw Mastery

The joy of starting from scratch:

I remembered a really nice thing: how to be goofily, absurdly proud of myself for figuring something out, a kind of pride I usually reserve for my children. This is the best part of dropping back to zero. The list of things you have to master is endless. And when you get one right — even a little, tiny one — everyone notices and gives you an adult version of an extra candy in your lunchbox.

Revisionist History Podcast

Malcolm Gladwell’s new podcast is very good: perfect for huffduffing. And I really, really like the website—lovely typography, illustrations, and subtle animations.

I made a little tweak to The Session today. The navigation bar across the top is “sticky” now—it doesn’t scroll with the rest of the content.

I made sure that the stickiness only kicks in if the screen is both wide and tall enough to warrant it. Vertical media queries are your friend!

But it’s not enough to just put some position: fixed CSS inside a media query. There are some knock-on effects that I needed to mitigate.

I use the space bar to paginate through long pages. It drives me nuts when sites with sticky headers don’t accommodate this. I made use of Tim Murtaugh’s sticky pagination fixer. It makes sure that page-jumping with the keyboard (using the space bar or page down) still works. I remember when I linked to this script two years ago, thinking “I bet this will come in handy one day.” Past me was right!

The other “gotcha!” with having a sticky header is making sure that in-page anchors still work. Nicolas Gallagher covers the options for this in a post called Jump links and viewport positioning. Here’s the CSS I ended up using:

:target:before {
    content: '';
    display: block;
    height: 3em;
    margin: -3em 0 0;
}

I also needed to check any of my existing JavaScript to see if I was using scrollTo anywhere, and adjust the calculations to account for the newly-sticky header.

Anyway, just a few things to consider if you’re going to make a navigational element “sticky”:

1. Use min-height in your media query,
2. Take care of keyboard-initiated page scrolling,
3. Adjust the positioning of in-page links.

» Service Workers at Scale, Part II: Handling Fallback Resources Cloud Four Blog

This ongoing series about the nuts’n’bolts of implementing Service Workers is really good. This one is great for getting to grips with the cache API.

Making bad ads sad. Rad! - O’Reilly Media

A great talk from Bruce on the digital self-defence that ad-blockers provide. I think it’s great that Opera are building ad-blocking straight into the browser.

Ev Williams is The Forrest Gump of the Internet - The Atlantic

There’s something so grim about the resigned acceptance of centralisation here.

It’s in general no longer about the creativity, it’s about the business.

ISP’s are updating your site without your permission

One more reason to make the switch to HTTPS.

Snapper: A CSS Snap Points Carousel | Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA

Scott introduces a polyfill for CSS snap points.

Progressive Web Apps Dev Summit | hiddedevries.nl

Hidde’s write-up of the Progressive Web App Dev Summit:

It was exciting to hear about the technologies, and to see that a lot of them already work on a great deal of platforms. Most of the major browser vendors expressed how much they liked the idea, so it is realistic to say support will increase in the short term. This, and the fact that all PWA techniques can be regarded as a ‘progressive enhancement’ (with some leniency as to what that term means), entails that we can build Progressive Web Apps today.

Hopefully, we will do so responsibly. Native apps really only work on their particular platforms. PWAs, in theory, can be built to work universally. For everyone with a web enabled device. This is awesome! Major browser vendors are behind the idea, and I think as developers we should be, too.

I was in Amsterdam again at the start of last week for the Progressive Web App Dev Summit, organised by Google. Most of the talks were given by Google employees, but not all—this wasn’t just a European version of Google I/O. Representatives from Opera, Mozilla, Samsung, and Microsoft were also there, and there were quite a few case studies from independent companies. That was very gratifying to see.

Almost all the talks were related to progressive web apps. I say, “almost all” because there were occasional outliers. There was a talk on web components, which don’t have anything directly to do with progressive web apps (and I hope there won’t be any attempts to suggest otherwise), and another on rendering performance that had good advice for anyone building any kind of website. Most of the talks were about the building blocks of progressive web apps: HTTPS, Service Workers, push notifications, and all that jazz.

I was very pleased to see that there was a move away from the suggesting that single-page apps with the app-shell architecture model were the only way of building progressive web apps.

Need to do more to change the perception that a progressive web app must be a single-page client-rendered app #pwadevsummit

— Jake Archibald (@jaffathecake) June 21, 2016

There were lots of great examples of progressively enhancing existing sites into progressive web apps. Jeff Posnick’s talk was a step-by-step walkthrough of doing exactly that. Reading through the agenda, I was really happy to see this message repeated again and again:

In this session we’ll take an online-only site and turn it into a fully network-resilient, offline-first installable progressive web app. We’ll also break out of the app shell and look at approaches that better-suit traditional server-driven sites.

Progressive Web Apps should work everywhere for every user. But what happens when the technology and API’s are not available for in your users browser? In this talk we will show you how you can think about and build sites that work everywhere.

Progressive Web Apps should load fast, work great offline, and progressively enhance to a better experience in modern browsers.

How do you put the “progressive” into your current web app?

You can (and should!) build for the latest and greatest browsers, but through a collection of fallbacks and progressive enhancements you can bring a lot tomorrow’s web to yesterday’s browsers.

I think this is a really smart move. It’s a lot easier to sell people on incremental changes than it is to convince them to rip everything out and start from scratch (another reason why I’m dubious about any association between web components and progressive web apps—but I’ll save that for another post).

The other angle that I really liked was the emphasis on emerging markets, not just wealthy westerners. Tal Oppenheimer’s talk Building for Billions was superb, and Alex kicked the whole thing off with some great facts and figures on mobile usage.

In my mind, these two threads are very much related. Progressive enhancement allows us to have our progressive web app cake and eat it too: we can make websites that can be accessed on devices with limited storage and slow networks, while at the same time ensuring those same sites take advantage of all the newest features in the latest and greatest browsers. I talked to a lot of Google devs about ways to measure the quality of a progressive web app, and I’m coming to the conclusion that a truly high-quality site is one that can still be accessed by a proxy browser like Opera Mini, while providing a turbo-charged experience in the latest version of Chrome. If you think that sounds naive or unrealistic, then I think you might want to dive deeper into all the technologies that make progressive web apps so powerful—responsive design, Service Workers, a manifest file, HTTPS, push notifications; all of those features can and should be used in a layered fashion.

Speaking of Opera, Andreas kind of stole the show, demoing the latest interface experiments in Opera Mobile.

That ambient badging that Alex was talking about? Opera is doing it. The importance of being able to access URLs that I’ve been ranting about? Opera is doing it.

Then we had the idea to somehow connect it to the “pull-to-refresh” spinner, as a secondary gesture to the left or right.

Nice! I’m looking forward to seeing what other browsers come up with it. It’s genuinely exciting to see all these different browser makers in complete agreement on which standards they want to support, while at the same time differentiating their products by competing on user experience. Microsoft recently announced that progressive web apps will be indexed in their app store just like native apps—a really interesting move.

The Progressive Web App Dev Summit wrapped up with a closing panel, that I had the honour of hosting. I thought it was very brave of Paul to ask me to host this, considering my strident criticism of Google’s missteps.

Initially there were going to be six people on the panel. Then it became eight. Then I blinked and it suddenly became twelve. Less of a panel, more of a jury. Half the panelists were from Google and the other half were from Opera, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Samsung. Some of those representatives were a bit too media-trained for my liking: Ali from Microsoft tried to just give a spiel, and Alex Komoroske from Google wouldn’t give me a straight answer about whether he wants Android Instant apps to succeed—Jake was a bit more honest. I should have channelled my inner Paxman a bit more.

Needless to say, nobody from Apple was at the event. No surprise there. They’ve already promised to come to the next event. There won’t be an Apple representative on stage, obviously—that would be asking too much, wouldn’t it? But at least it looks like they’re finally making an effort to engage with the wider developer community.

All in all, the Progressive Web App Dev Summit was good fun. I found the event quite inspiring, although the sausage festiness of the attendees was depressing. It would be good if the marketing for these events reached a wider audience—I met a lot of developers who only found out about it a week or two before the event.

I really hope that people will come away with the message that they can get started with progressive web apps right now without having to re-architect their whole site. Right now the barrier to entry is having your site running on HTTPS. Once you’ve got that up and running, it’s pretty much a no-brainer to add a manifest file and a basic Service Worker—to boost performance if nothing else. From there, you’re in a great position to incrementally add more and more features—an offline-first approach with your Service Worker, perhaps? Or maybe start dabbling in push notifications. The great thing about all of these technologies (with the glaring exception of web components in their current state) is that you don’t need to bet the farm on any of them. Try them out. Use them as enhancements. You’ve literally got nothing to lose …and your users have everything to gain.

My talk writing process (so far) | Charlotte Jackson, Front-end developer

Charlotte outlines the process she used in creating her talk at Dot York. It was a real joy to see it come together.

Typography for User Interfaces | Viljami Salminen

The history and physiology of text on screen. You can also see the slides from the talk that prompted this article.

Designing Modular UI Systems Via Style Guide-Driven Development – Smashing Magazine

Striking that balance between the reusability of modular components and maintaining a big-picture vision of the overall design:

We should always strive to use patterns in an application. For example, consistent use of colors and font sizes can quickly indicate to the user elements in the UI that can be interacted with. However, avoid using a pattern just because it has been implemented before; rather, use it because it really solves the problem at hand.

Apps are dying by Cameron Moll

Cameron looks back on his 2007 Mobile Web Design book:

I don’t anticipate native apps will die off anytime soon. But I’m warming to the idea that they may be less relevant to the future of the web, and I reaffirm that “a browser will be — or should be — sufficient for interacting with web content.”

Progressive web apps are poised to be remarkably relevant to the future of the web. Let’s not screw it up.

Democratize the Internet Now! | New Republic

It is a sad and beautiful world wide web:

The technology that let people make web sites never went away. You can still set up a site as if it were 1995. But culture changes, as do expectations. It takes a certain set of skills to create your own web site, populate it with cool stuff, set up a web server, and publish your own cool-stuff web pages. I would argue that those skills should be a basic part of living in a transparent and open culture where individuals are able to communicate on an equal field of play. Some fellow nerds would argue the same. But most everyone else, statistically, just uses Facebook and plays along.

Paul Ford shines a light on the solution:

Standing against this tide of centralization is the indie web movement. Perhaps “movement” is too strong—it’s more an aesthetic of independence and decentralization. The IndieWebCamp web page states: “When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation.” You should own your information and profit from it. You should have your own servers. Your destiny, which you signed over to Facebook in order to avoid learning a few lines of code, would once again be your own.

Beautiful, beautiful writing:

We could still live in that decentralized world, if we wanted to. Despite the rise of the all-seeing database, the core of the internet remains profoundly open. I can host it from my apartment, on a machine that costs $35. You can link to me from your site. Just the two of us. This is an age of great enterprise, no time to think small. Yet whatever enormous explosion tears through our digital world next will come from exactly that: an individual recognizing the potential of the small, where others see only scale.

Standardizing the Social Web

The slides from Aaron’s talk at OS Bridge in Portland, looking at the formats and protocols powering the indie web.

Blade Runner | Typeset In The Future

I’ve seen letterforms you people wouldn’t believe…

City Objects

A catalogue of objects and observations from cities around the world.

The internet does forget | hiddedevries.nl

Hidde’s write-up of the talk I gave to Vasilis’s students in Amsterdam last week, all about digital preservation and long-term thinking.

Dev.Opera — Making progressive web apps even better: ambient badging and “pop into browser”

Andreas demoed these ideas yesterday. Proper ambient badging and a way of getting at URLs even if a progressive web app is running in fullscreen or standalone mode. Great stuff!

PWAs: The Panel (Progressive Web App Summit 2016) - YouTube

Here’s the video of the panel I moderated yesterday at the Progressive Web App Dev Summit. I had to get a bit Paxman at times with some of the more media-trained panelists.

ManifeStation - Automagically create your Web App Manifest

If you’re going to make a manifest file for an existing site, start with this very handy tool. You give it the URL of your site and it then parses the content for existing metadata to create a best first stab at a manifest JSON file.

Resilience Poster Talk from Jeremy Keith by jessman5Stuff on Etsy

This beautiful poster could be the ideal decoration for your home or office.

You can download the original size (DIN A3) and print it to hang it on the walls in your office or wherever you want.

I’m about to have a crazy few days that will see me bouncing between Brighton and Amsterdam.

It starts tomorrow. I’m flying to Amsterdam in the morning and speaking at this Icons event in the afternoon about digital preservation and long-term thinking.

Then, the next morning, I’ll be opening up the inaugural HTML Special which is a new addition the CSS Day conference. Each talk on Thursday will cover one HTML element. I am honoured to speaking about the A element. Here’s the talk description:

The world exploded into a whirling network of kinships, where everything pointed to everything else, everything explained everything else…

Enquire within upon everything.

I’ve been working all out to get this talk done and I finally wrapped it up today. Right now, I feel pretty happy with it, but I bet I’ll change that opinion in the next 48 hours. I’m pretty sure that this will be one of those talks that people will either love or hate, kind of like my 2008 dConstruct talk, The System Of The World.

After CSS Day, I’ll be heading back to Brighton on Saturday, June 18th to play a Salter Cane gig in The Greys pub. If you’re around, you should definitely come along—not only is it free, but there will be some excellent support courtesy of Jon London, and Lucas and King.

Then, the next morning, I’ll be speaking at DrupalCamp Brighton, opening up day two of the event. I won’t be able to stick around long afterwards though, because I need to skidaddle to the airport to go back to Amsterdam!

Google are having their Progressive Web App Dev Summit there on Monday on Tuesday. I’ll be moderating a panel on the second day, so I’ll need to pay close attention to all the talks. I’ll be grilling representatives from Google, Samsung, Opera, Microsoft, and Mozilla. Considering my recent rants about some very bad decisions on the part of Google’s Chrome team, it’s very brave of them to ask me to be there, much less moderate a panel in public.

You can still register for the event, by the way. Like the Salter Cane gig, it’s free. But if you can’t make it along, I’d still like to know what you think I should be asking the panelists about.

Got a burning question for browser/device makers? Write it down, post it somewhere on the web with a link back to this post, and then send me a web mention (there’s a form for you to paste in the URL at the bottom of this post).

My talk at Dot York: Learn and Teach | Charlotte Jackson, Front-end developer

Here’s the full text of Charlotte’s fantastic short talk at the Dot York event last week. I’m so, so proud of her.

studio.zeldman — designing our future

Jeffrey has started up a studio and launched its lovely one-page website. You can read more about it on his site. Lovely!

Enhancing Optimistically | Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA

I love the thinking that Scott puts into all aspects of building on the web. Here, he outlines a really robust approach to cutting the mustard for progressive enhancement.

Brief History of the Internet - Internet Timeline | Internet Society

From twenty years ago, a look back at the origins of the internet, written by its creators.

Human scale technology — Medium

A wonderful rallying cry for the indie web:

Do it yourself. Strip it down. Keep control. Make it for your community. Don’t do it for the money.

And this is where I start to understand what my friend Rebecca Gates means when she says that technologists and designers have a lot to learn from punk and indie rock. Leave the expensive, large scale, commercial arena rock to Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

We can be The Ramones.

And Bad Brains.

We can press our own records, and run our own labels.

We can make our own spaces based on our own values.

Such a shame that it’s only on Medium—the MOR of online publishing.

ARPAWOCKY

RFC 527

Building better accessibility primitives

On the need for a way to mark parts of a document as “inert” while the user is interacting with modal content.

Man-Computer Symbiosis

J. C. R. Licklider’s seminal 1960 paper. I’ve added it to this list of reading material.

The title should, of course, read “Person-Computer Symbiosis.”

Surveying the Landscape – Peter Gasston

An in-depth, thoroughly-researched look at the threatened health of the web. It’s grim reading, for the most part, but there’s a glimmer of hope towards the end.

I turned Huffduffer into a progressive web app recently. It was already running on HTTPS so I didn’t have much to do. One manifest file and one basic Service Worker did the trick.

I also did a bit of spring cleaning, refactoring some CSS. The site dates to 2008 so there’s plenty in there that I would do very differently today. Still, considering the age of the code, I wasn’t cursing my past self too much.

After that, I decided to refactor the JavaScript too. There, I had a clear goal: could I remove the dependency on jQuery?

It turned out to be pretty straightforward. I was able to bring my total JavaScript file size down to 3K (gzipped). Pretty much everything I was doing in jQuery could be just as easily accomplished with DOM methods like addEventListener and querySelectorAll, and objects like XMLHttpRequest and classList.

Of course, the reason why half of those handy helpers exist is because of jQuery. Certainly in the case of querySelector and querySelectorAll, jQuery blazed a trail for browsers and standards bodies to pave. In some cases, like animation, the jQuery-led solutions ended up in CSS instead of JavaScript, but the story was the same: developers used the heck of jQuery and browser makers paid attention to that. This is something that Jack spoke about at Render Conf a little while back.

Brian once said of PhoneGap that its ultimate purpose is to cease to exist. I think of jQuery in a similar way.

jQuery turned ten years old this year, and jQuery version 3.0 was just released. Congratulations, jQuery! You have served the web well.

Declarative Design Tools | Jon Gold

Jon introduces a new tool with a very interesting observation: up until now, all our graphic design tools have been imperative rather than declarative…

With our current tools we’re telling the computer how to design the vision we have in our head (by tapping on our input devices for every element on the screen); in our future tools we will tell our computers what we want to see, and let them figure out how to move elements around to get there.

Research with blind users on mobile devices | Accessibility

Some interesting outcomes from testing gov.uk with blind users of touchscreen devices:

Rather than reading out the hierarchy of the page, some of the users navigated by moving their finger around to ‘discover’ content.

This was really interesting - traditionally good structure for screen readers is about order and hierarchy. But for these users, the physical placement on the screen was also really important (just as it is for sighted users).

» Introducing Drizzle Cloud Four Blog

A new pattern library tool, this time from the smart people at Cloud Four. It’s called Drizzle and it started life as a fork of Fabricator.

Remember when Chrome developers decided to remove the “add to home screen” prompt for progressive web apps that used display: browser in their manifest files? I wasn’t happy.

Alex wrote about their plans to offer URL access for all installed progressive web apps, regardless of what’s in the manifest file. I look forward to that. In the meantime, it makes no sense to punish the developers who want to give users access to URLs.

Alex has acknowledged the cart-before-horse-putting, and written a follow-up post called PWA Discovery: You Ain’t Seen Nothin Yet:

The browser’s goal is clear: create a hurdle tall enough that only sites that meet user expectations of “appyness” will be prompted for. Maybe Chrome’s version of this isn’t great! Feedback like Ada’s, Andrew’s, and Jeremy’s is helpful is letting us know how to improve. Thankfully, in most of the cases flagged so far, we’ve anticipated the concerns but maybe haven’t communicated our thinking as well as we should have. This is entirely my fault. This post is my penance.

It turns out that the home-screen prompt was just the first stab. There’s a really interesting idea Alex talks about called “ambient badging”:

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a button in the URL bar that appeared whenever you landed on a PWA that you could always tap to save it to your homescreen? A button that showed up in the top-level UI only when on a PWA? Something that didn’t require digging through menus and guessing about “is this thing going to work well when launched from the homescreen?”

I really, really like this idea. It kind of reminds me of when browsers would flag up whether or not a website had an RSS feed, and allow you to subscribe right then and there.

Hold that thought. Because if you remember the history of RSS, it ended up thriving and withering based on the fortunes of one single RSS reader.

Whenever the discoverability of progressive web apps comes up, the notion of an app store for the web is inevitably floated. Someone raised it as a question at one of the Google I/O panels: shouldn’t Google provide some kind of app store for progressive web apps? …to which Jake cheekily answered that yes, Google should create some kind of engine that would allow people to search for these web apps.

He’s got a point. Progressive web apps live on the web, so any existing discovery method on the web will work just fine. Remy came to a similar conclusion:

Progressive web apps allow users to truly “visit our URL to install our app”.

Also, I find it kind of odd that people think that it needs to be a company the size of Google that would need to build any kind of progressive web app store. It’s the web! Anybody can build whatever they want, without asking anyone else for permission.

So if you’re the entrepreneurial type, and you’re looking for the next Big Idea to make a startup out of, I’ve got one for you:

Build a directory of progressive web apps.

Call it a store if you want. Or a marketplace. Heck, you could even call it a portal, because, let’s face it, that’s kind of what app stores are.

Opera have already built you a prototype. It’s basic but it already has a bit of categorisation. As progressive web apps get more common though, what we’re really going to need is curation. Again, there’s no reason to wait for somebody else—Google, Opera, whoever—to build this.

Oh, I guess I should provide a business model too. Hmmm …let me think. Advertising masquerading as “featured apps”? I dunno—I haven’t really thought this through.

Anyway, you might be thinking, what will happen if someone beats you to it? Well, so what? People will come to your progressive web app directory because of your curation. It’s actually a good thing if they have alternatives. We don’t want a repeat of the Google Reader situation.

It’s hard to recall now, but there was a time when there wasn’t one dominant search engine. There’s nothing inevitable about Google “owning” search or Facebook “owning” social networking. In fact, they both came out of an environment of healthy competition, and crucially neither of them were first to market. If that mattered, we’d all still be using Yahoo and Friendster.

So go ahead and build that progressive web app store. I’m serious. It will, of course, need to be a progressive web app itself so that people can install it to their home screens and perhaps even peruse your curated collection when they’re offline. I could imagine that people might even end up with multiple progressive web app stores added to their home screens. It might even get out of control after a while. There’d need to be some kind of curation to help people figure out the best directory for them. Which brings me to my next business idea:

Build a directory of directories of progressive web apps…

The web is catching up on mobile

A good impartial overview of progressive web apps, as described at the most recent Google I/O. This is very telling:

At the start I found the term a bit confusing as some PWA examples are single page applications (SPA) controlled by JavaScript. These apps are not strictly using progressive enhancement where JavaScript is added on top to enhance the experience.

The term also begs the question; what is the difference between websites and apps? It seems many of the new capabilities fit well for any dynamic website, not just apps.

Anyhow. It’s good to have an umbrella term to talk about these things.

Apprenticeship: A better path to mastering our craft | Louder Than Ten

I’ve been thinking a lot about learning, teaching, mentoring, coaching …this article by Ivana McConnell from last year is packed with gold nuggets of wisdom concerning apprenticeships.

As lifelong learners, we may be reluctant to call ourselves “masters.” But that’s missing the point, and it discounts the fact that teaching is learning. We’re not there to guarantee mastery—we’re there to give our apprentices fundamentals, to foster their respect, and make journeymen (or women) out of them. Mastery will come; we just offer the tools.

eBay MIND Patterns - GitBook

A very handy collection:

This book contains frontend coding patterns (and anti-patterns) that will assist developers in building accessible e-commerce web pages, widgets and workflows.

I like that it contains a list of anti-patterns too.

There’s also a corresponding collection of working demos.

Making your JavaScript Pure · An A List Apart Article

I really like this piece by Jack. All the things he’s talking about—pure functions and referential transparency—are terms I was previously unfamiliar with …but the concepts smell familiar. It’s good to have terminology (and reasoning) to apply to the way I structure my JavaScript.

BitCam : The World’s Most Advanced Camera For Your Mini Pocket Computer

A lovely little native app:

The world’s most advanced camera for your mini pocket computer.

View source for added nostalgia/flashbacks.

Oh, and RTFM.

The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It - The New York Times

“The web is already decentralized,” Mr. Berners-Lee said. “The problem is the dominance of one search engine, one big social network, one Twitter for microblogging. We don’t have a technology problem, we have a social problem.”

Progressive Web App Dev Summit 2016 | Home

Google have asked me to moderate a panel on the second day of this event in Amsterdam dedicated to progressive web apps. Very brave of them, considering some of my recent posts.

Dave Goes Build - daverupert.com

I think I’ve gotten tired of Google telling me “This is how you have to build websites now.” Or Apple coming down from the mountain once a year saying “Here are the two new products you will buy this year.”

Jason has written a great post about progressive web apps. It’s also a post about whether fears of the death of the web are justified.

Lately, I vacillate on whether the web is endangered or poised for a massive growth due to the web’s new capabilities. Frankly, I think there are indicators both ways.

So he applies Pascal’s wager. The hypothesis is that the web is under threat and progressive web apps are a solution to fighting that threat.

• If the hypothesis is incorrect and we don’t build progressive web apps, things continue as they are on the web (which is not great for users—they have to continue to put up with fragile, frustratingly slow sites).
• If the hypothesis is incorrect and we do build progressive web apps, users get better websites.
• If the hypothesis is correct and we do build progressive web apps, users get better websites and we save the web.
• If the hypothesis is correct and we don’t build progressive web apps, the web ends up pining for the fjords.

Whether you see the web as threatened or see Chicken Little in people’s fears and whether you like progressive web apps or feel it is a stupid Google marketing thing, we can all agree that putting energy into improving the experience for the people using our sites is always a good thing.

Jason is absolutely correct. There are literally no downsides to us creating progressive web apps. Everybody wins.

But that isn’t the question that people have been tackling lately. None of these (excellent) blog posts disagree with the conclusion that building progressive web apps as originally defined would be a great move forward for the web:

• Yet another blog about the state and future of Progressive Web App by Ada Rose Edwards
• Progressively less progressive by Andrew Betts
• Progressive web apps – let’s not repeat the errors from the beginning of responsive web design by Michael Scharnagl

The real question that comes out of those posts is whether it’s good or bad for the future of progressive web apps—and by extension, the web—to build stop-gap solutions that use some progressive web app technologies (Service Workers, for example) while failing to be progressive in other ways (only working on mobile devices, for example).

In this case, there are two competing hypotheses:

1. In the short term, it’s okay to build so-called progressive web apps that have a fragile technology stack or only work on specific devices, because over time they’ll get improved and we’ll end up with proper progressive web apps in the long term.
2. In the short term, we should build proper progressive web apps, and it’s a really bad idea to build so-called progressive web apps that have a fragile technology stack or only work on specific devices, because that encourages more people to build sub-par websites and progressive web apps become synonymous with door-slamming single-page apps in the long term.

The second hypothesis sounds pessimistic, and the first sounds optimistic. But the people arguing for the first hypothesis aren’t coming from a position of optimism. Take Christian’s post, for example, which I fundamentally disagree with:

End users deserve to have an amazing, form-factor specific experience. Let’s build those.

I think end users deserve to have an amazing experience regardless of the form-factor of their devices. Christian’s viewpoint—like Alex’s tweetstorm—is rooted in the hypothesis that the web is under threat and in danger. The conclusion that comes out of that—building mobile-only JavaScript-reliant progressive web apps is okay—is a conclusion reached through fear.

Never make any decision based on fear.

Smart Responsive Design Patterns, Or When Off-Canvas Isn’t Good Enough – Smashing Magazine

Vitaly takes a look at some of the more unusual patterns used in responsive designed.

“Apprenticeships,” an article by Dan Mall

I really love what Dan is doing with his apprenticeship programme—I hope we can do something like this at Clearleft.

Miscellany № 74: zombies always make a hash of things – Shady Characters

A thoroughly lovely look at the octothorpe that skewers a myth or two along the way.

PURL: A Portable Content Store - Not Enough Neon

I need to wrap my head around the details of this approach, but it sounds like it might be something I could do here on my site (where I feel nervous about my current dependency on a database).

Progressive web apps – let’s not repeat the errors from the beginning of responsive web design | justmarkup

Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it:

When people learned about responsive design, there were many wrong assumptions. The iPhone and early Android phones all had the same screen size (320x480px) and people thought it is a good idea to change the design based on these device-specific sizes.

We wouldn’t do that now, right? We wouldn’t attempt to create something that’s supposed to be a progressive web app, only to make it device-specific, right?

We are still at the beginning of learning about the best ways to build Progressive Web Apps. I hope it will make many more people aware of progressive enhancement. I hope that nobody makes the error again and concentrates on the device part.

as days pass by — Programmatic Progressiveness

Stuart’s ideas for Lighthouse sound a lot like the resilience validator tool that Scott mentioned recently.

This is our chance to help stamp out sites that don’t do things right, and help define that a progressive web app should actually be progressive.

If you have ideas on this, please file an issue.

Instagram to third-party developers: drop dead - Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design

Jeffrey’s right. Instagram’s new deal with developers is openly hostile. It probably means the end of OwnYourGram in its current form …a service whose existence is frankly the only reason I’m able to use Instagram at all.

PWA Discovery: You Ain’t Seen Nothin Yet | Infrequently Noted

Smart thinking from Alex on how browsers could better indicate that a website is a progressive web app (and would therefore benefit from being added to the home screen). Ambient badging, he calls it.

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a button in the URL bar that appeared whenever you landed on a PWA that you could always tap to save it to your homescreen? A button that showed up in the top-level UI only when on a PWA? Something that didn’t require digging through menus and guessing about “is this thing going to work well when launched from the homescreen?”

Intro to Flexbox

The slides from Arelia’s flexbox talk.

Good intentions are not enough | silversuit.net

Online discourse:

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had an x-ray that could peer into the true intention behind words on a screen? Sadly we don’t have that x-ray yet (for most of humanity’s existence, we had body language to enrich our words and enhance understanding, but we live in interesting times where so much, perhaps even the majority, of our communication lacks body language) and so we have to be mindful of how our words might be perceived, and what the ramifications of publishing them might be. That’s not to say we should hold off completely, but it does mean we should be mindful if we’re to be most effective.

Network Effect

The latest piece from Jonathan Harris explores online life in all its mundanity, presenting it in an engaging way, all the while trying to make you feel bad for doing exactly what the site is encouraging you to do.

Shane Becker - Regarding the Indie Web : Why

Why Get on the Indie Web?

In a word, autonomy.

See also:

• What is the Indie Web?
• How Can You Get on the Indie Web?,
• Where is the Indie Web? and
• Who is the Indie Web?

The Indie Web is made of people. It’s made by me. It can be made by you too. There’s no gatekeeper. You can join anytime without anyone’s permission. The Indie Web is made by everyone.

Progressively less progressive | Andrew Betts

I agree with everything Andrew says here. Progressive web apps are great, but as long as Google heap praise on mobile-only solutions (like the Washington Post doorslam) and also encourage separate AMP sites, they’re doing a great disservice to the web.

More features arrive regularly to make this “one web” even better and easier to maintain. Service worker, streams, app manifests, payment request, to name a few. But adding these features one at a time to large, mature applications like WaPo or FT or Nikkei is a slow and painstaking process. That’s why it’s taking us a long time for us to tick off all these new features, and why it seems like madness to try and build the entire app several times over.

However, by creating the concept of PWAs and marketing them as they do, Google is encouraging publishers to ‘start again’. And they’re doing exactly the same thing with AMP.

You Don’t Need JavaScript for That!

A few common patterns—tooltips, fly-out menus, and toggles—that you can achieve with CSS.

Going Offline With Progressive Web Apps

Dave turned Day Trip into a progressive web app.

Starting this week, Android users (~13% of our active user base) who use DayTrip more than once will eventually be asked if they want to install our web app to their Home Screen. That’s important real estate for a small startup like ourselves.

It’s ok to say what’s ok | Government Digital Service

I really like this list. I might make a similar one for the Clearleft office so what’s implicit is made explicit.

It’s ok to:

• say “I don’t know”
• ask for more clarity
• stay at home when you feel ill
• say you don’t understand
• ask what acronyms stand for
• ask why, and why not
• forget things

matthiasott/webmention: Webmention Plugin for Craft CMS

A plug-in for Craft CMS for receiving webmentions. I’ll have to tell Charlotte about this (she’s using Craft for her site).

Application Cache is—as Jake so infamously described—not a good API. It was specced and shipped before developers had a chance to figure out what they really needed, and so AppCache turned out to be frustrating at best and downright dangerous in some situations. Its over-zealous caching combined with its byzantine cache invalidation ensured it was never going to become a mainstream technology.

There are very few use-cases for AppCache, but I think I hit upon one of them. Six years ago, A Book Apart published HTML5 For Web Designers. A year and a half later, I put the book online. The contents are never going to change. There’s a second edition of the book out now but if you want to read all the extra bits that Rachel added, you’re going to have to buy the book. The website for the original book is static and unchanging. That’s what made it such a good candidate for using AppCache. I could just set it and forget.

Except that’s no longer true. AppCache is being deprecated and browsers are starting to withdraw support. Chrome is already making sure that AppCache—like geolocation—no longer works on sites that aren’t served over HTTPS. That’s for the best. In retrospect, those APIs should never have been allowed over unsecured HTTP.

I mentioned that I spent the weekend switching all my book websites over to HTTPS, so AppCache should continue to work …for now. It’s only a matter of time before AppCache is removed completely from many of the browsers that currently support it.

Seeing as I’ve got the HTML5 For Web Designers site running on HTTPS now, I might as well go all out and make it a progressive web app. By far the biggest barrier to making a progressive web app is that first step of setting up HTTPS. It’s gotten cheaper—thanks to Let’s Encrypt Certbot—but it still involves mucking around in the command line with root access; I never wanted to become a sysadmin. But once that’s finally all set up, the other technological building blocks—a Service Worker and a manifest file—are relatively easy.

In this case, the Service Worker is using a straightforward bit of logic:

• On installation, cache absolutely everything: HTML, CSS, images.
• When anything is requested, grab it from the cache.
• If it isn’t in the cache, try the network.
• If the network doesn’t work, show an offline page (or image).

Basically I’m reproducing AppCache’s overzealous approach. It works for this site because the content is never going to change. I hope that this time, I really can just set it and forget it. I want the site to be an historical artefact, available at the same URL for at least my lifetime. I don’t want to have to maintain it or revisit it every few years to swap out one API for another.

Which brings me back to the way AppCache is being deprecated…

The Firefox team are very eager to ditch AppCache as soon as possible. On the one hand, that’s commendable. They’re rightly proud of shipping Service Workers and they want to encourage people to use the better technology instead. But it sure stings for the suckers (like me) who actually went and built stuff using AppCache.

In a weird way, I think this rush to deprecate AppCache might actually hurt the adoption of Service Workers. Let me explain…

At last year’s Edge Conference, Nolan Lawson gave a great presentation on storing data in the browser. He enumerated the many ways—past and present—that we could store data locally: WebSQL, Local Storage, IndexedDB …the list goes on. He also posed the question: why aren’t more people using insert-name-of-latest-API-here? To me it seemed obvious why more people weren’t diving into using the latest and greatest option for local data storage. It was because they had been burned before. The developers who rushed into trying previous solutions end up being mocked for their choice. “Still using that ol’ thing? Pffftt!”

You can see that same attitude on display from Mozilla as they push towards removing AppCache. Like in a comment that refers to developers using AppCache in production as “the angry hordes”. Reminds me of something Tom said:

Developer relations is like 20% telling people about what’s new and 80% building trust and making people feel heard.

— Tom Dale (@tomdale) April 3, 2016

In that same Mozilla thread, Soledad echoes Tom’s point:

As a member of the devrel team: I think that this should be better addressed in a blog post that someone from the team responsible for switching AppCache off should write, so everyone can understand the reasons and ask questions to those people.

I’d rather warn people beforehand, pointing them to that post and help them with migration paths than apply emergency mitigation strategies when a lot of people find their stuff stopped working in the newer Firefox…

Bravo! That same approach should have also been taken by the Chrome team when it came to their thread about punishing display:browser in manifest files. There was absolutely no communication with developers about this major decision. I only found out about it because Paul happened to mention it to me.

I was genuinely shocked by this:

Withholding the “add to home screen” prompt like that has a whiff of blackmail about it.

I can confirm that smell. When I was making the manifest file for HTML5 For Web Designers, I really wanted to put display: browser because I want people to be able to copy and paste URLs (for the book, for individual chapters, and for sections within chapters). But knowing that if I did that, Android users would never see the “add to home screen” prompt made me question that decision. I felt strong-armed into declaring display: standalone. And no, I’m not mollified by hand-waving reassurances that the Chrome team will figure out some solution for this. Figure out the solution first, then punish the saps like me who want to use display: browser to allow people to share URLs.

Anyway, the website for HTML5 For Web Designers is now using AppCache and Service Workers. The AppCache part will probably be needed for quite a while yet to provide offline support on iOS. Apple are really dragging their heels on Service Worker support, with at least one WebKit engineer actively looking for reasons not to implement it.

There’s a lot of talk about making apps work offline, but I think it’s just as important that we consider making information work offline. Books are a great example of this. To use the tired transport tropes, the website for a book is something you might genuinely want to access when you’re on a plane, or in the underground, or out at sea.

I really, really like progressive web apps. But I also think it’s important that we don’t fall into the trap of just trying to imitate native apps on the web. I love the idea of taking the best of the web—like information being permanently available at a URL—and marrying that up with the best of native—like offline access. I also like the idea of taking the best of books—a tome of thought—and marrying it up with the best of the web—hypertext.

I’d love to see more experimentation around online/offline hypertext/books. For now, you can visit HTML5 For Web Designers, add it to your home screen, and revisit it whenever and wherever you like.

Progressive Enhancement and Modern JavaScript ― Caolan

I think JavaScript frameworks have been blinkered to the needs of many developers (most websites are not SPAs or run by Node, nor should they be) for too long. We need to find a way to apply the lessons of modern frameworks to the rest of the web - it would be sad if everyone had to run JavaScript on their server and good-old resilient HTML was considered only as a fallback.

Yet another blog about the state and future of Progressive Web App - The blog of Ada Rose Edwards

Bravo!

In the web developer community’s collective drive to be more App Like and compete with native apps we may lose or weaken some of the web’s strongest features and we need to consider carefully before we throw away urls or the entire browser chrome in an effort to look like and behave like the cool kids of native.

You can hear more of Ada’s thoughts on progressive web apps on a recent episode of JavaScript Air.

Richard Dawkins, Mount Improbable: Play With Evolution

A lovely interactive demonstration of evolution, based on the original code Richard Dawkins used for Climbing Mount Improbable.

Podcasts I listen to | Marc Thiele

Marc shares some of his podcast favourites for your huffduffing pleasure.

Introducing Multirange: A tiny polyfill for HTML5.1 two-handle sliders | Lea Verou

You’re supposed to be able to create two-handled sliders with input type="range" but the browser support isn’t there yet. In the meantime, Lea has created a nice lightweight polyfill.

adactio - Upcoming.org Archive

My old Upcoming.org profile is back online, along with everyone else’s:

This is a static historical archive more than 7 million events saved from Upcoming’s first ten years.

I’m enjoying this trip down memory lane, recalling fun times from the last decade.