WDRL — Edition 258: Colorless Designs, Simple Forms, Native Web Videos, and Rendering The Web.

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Hey,

One of the hard problems in web technology is the right balance between technical complexity, smart solutions and a nice user experience that isn’t creating cognitive overload. With Brad Frost’s examples of this gone wrong in Login forms that show how smart technological choices have been made but without thinking about the user we can learn how to do better. And it’s starting by optimizing how to show video live streams that are working like a native integration and reduces additional clicks or taps by users, it’s by providing a file uploader that can fetch images also from other web services like Instagram, Dropbox or similar. And I really enjoyed reading why it can be useful to design without color first. Have fun reading my week’s article compilation now.

News

• IntersectionObserver is still quite new and yet, Chrome developers are now introducing Version 2 of it in order to tackle common problems and implement learnings from the first version. Here’s what’s going to change in Intersection Observer v2.

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• “In our modern world, it’s easy to junk things up. Simple is hard. We’re quick to add more questions to research surveys, more buttons to a digital interface, more burdens to people”. How to be an elegant simplifier.
• Jason Miller wrote a primary about Rendering on the Web, a great introduction to how that all works when a user accesses a website through a modern browser. From beginning to the end, and there’a a lot to learn in here.

UI/UX

• Anand Satyan explains why it’s important to start designing without color first. It helps you understand the structure of data and layout better, results often in cleaner designs, and creates consistency.
• Brad Frost on the importance of providing simple, not clever forms, especially if you want users to log in.

JavaScript

• Addy Osmani shares a full table that explains how different methods of loading JavaScript affect loading and rendering of websites in Chrome. And while other browsers might behave slightly differently this table is transferable.
• Faraz Kelhini shares the latest JavaScript features that ease our developers’ lives when we need to write regular expressions.
• We don’t hear a lot about integrating videos on websites efficiently. Now Oscar from Kitchen Stories shares how they use HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), optimize load times, and improved how they use the poster attribute.
• I’m a big fan of Filepond as JavaScript upload library, but Uppy seems to be worth mentioning as alternative as it can fetch files not only from local disk, but also from e.g. Google Drive, Dropbox, Instagram, remote URLs, cameras etc, and then uploads them to the final destination.
• React Hooks are the new hot topic in the React community but how do we write one? Leonardo Maldonado explains how to write your first React Hook.

CSS

• My mind is blown by this CSS-only experiment. I’m seriously impressed and wouldn’t have imagined we can do such renderings with CSS these days.

Work & Life

• I found this article by Sahil Lavingia, the founder of Gumroad, very insightful. In it, he shares the failures, the struggles, the bad decisions when getting Venture Capital, the issues of trying to become a billion dollar company and why having a “normal”, non-money-burning company is worth a thought, too, to prevent the whole thing from failing entirely.

Go beyond…

• Leo Babauta on the issue of thinking we have too less time in each day. Thoughts on spending our time intentionally and set the right expectations is very important for our hectic lives.

—Anselm