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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
One more tool for making pattern libraries. This one looks fairly simple and straightforward.
Third-party scripts can provide powerful functionality, but they also bring risks to privacy, security, performance, and page behavior.
One way of implementing the growing/shrinking navigation pattern—an alternative to just shoving everything behind a hamburger icon.
This looks like a great resource for beginners looking to learn HTML and CSS.
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.
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.
A wonderful deep dive into the history of styling languages before CSS. I love spelunking down these internet history potholes—fascinating stuff!
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.
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!
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.
Malcolm Gladwell’s new podcast is very good: perfect for huffduffing. And I really, really like the website—lovely typography, illustrations, and subtle animations.
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.
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.
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.
One more reason to make the switch to HTTPS.
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.
Charlotte outlines the process she used in creating her talk at Dot York. It was a real joy to see it come together.
The history and physiology of text on screen. You can also see the slides from the talk that prompted this article.
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.
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.
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.
The slides from Aaron’s talk at OS Bridge in Portland, looking at the formats and protocols powering the indie web.
I’ve seen letterforms you people wouldn’t believe…
A catalogue of objects and observations from cities around the world.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jeffrey has started up a studio and launched its lovely one-page website. You can read more about it on his site. Lovely!
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.
From twenty years ago, a look back at the origins of the internet, written by its creators.
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.
RFC 527
On the need for a way to mark parts of a document as “inert” while the user is interacting with modal content.
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.”
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.”
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.
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.”
Vitaly takes a look at some of the more unusual patterns used in responsive designed.
I really love what Dan is doing with his apprenticeship programme—I hope we can do something like this at Clearleft.
A thoroughly lovely look at the octothorpe that skewers a myth or two along the way.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?”
The slides from Arelia’s flexbox talk.
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.
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.
Why Get on the Indie Web?
In a word, autonomy.
See also:
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.
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.
A few common patterns—tooltips, fly-out menus, and toggles—that you can achieve with CSS.
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.
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
A plug-in for Craft CMS for receiving webmentions. I’ll have to tell Charlotte about this (she’s using Craft for her site).
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.
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.
A lovely interactive demonstration of evolution, based on the original code Richard Dawkins used for Climbing Mount Improbable.
Marc shares some of his podcast favourites for your huffduffing pleasure.
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.
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.