Search
This Page is Designed to Last
23.1.2020
Jeff Huang, while going through his collection of bookmarks, sadly finds a lot of old pages gone from the internet. Bit rot. It's pretty bad. Most of what gets published on the web disappears. Thankfully, the Internet Archive gets a lot of it. Jeff has seven things that he thinks will help make...
Bad accessibility equals bad quality
22.1.2020
Here’s a smart post from Manuel Matuzovic where he digs into why accessibility is so important for building websites:
Web accessibility is not just about keyboard users, color contrast or screen readers. Accessibility is a perfect indicator for the quality of a website. Accessibility is strongly...
Hamburger ☰ Heaven
22.1.2020
A pleasant little romp through iconography and culture from Sophia Lucero. The "hamburger" menu icon we're familiar with now is really a sign from Taoist cosmology.
Besides ☰, which represents heaven 天, we have ☱ for lake/marsh 澤, ☲ for fire 火, ☳ for thunder 雷, ☴ for wind 風, ☵ for water 水,...
Edgium
22.1.2020
January 15th, 2020 was the day Microsoft Edge went Chromium. A drop in browser engine diversity. There is a strong argument to be made that's not good for an ecosystem. Looked at another way, perhaps not so bad:
Perhaps diversity has just moved scope. Rather than the browser engines themselves...
In Defence of “Serverless” —the term
14.1.2020
Ben Ellerby:
For now Serverless, to me at least, manages to do a hard job, defining the borders of a very fluid and complex space of possible solutions in which we can build next-generation architectures. It would help if there was not a framework of the same name, it would help if people didn’t...
Why do we have different programming languages?
13.1.2020
"But why do I have to learn Python?" She wailed, "I like Scratch!"
"I know," I said, "But there are different programming languages for different sorts of tasks."
"That's stupid" she said
I can empathize with the little girl in Terence Eden's story. In high school, I got super into Turbo Pascal....
“All these things are quite easy to do, they just need somebody to sit down and just go through the website”
8.1.2020
I saw a video posted on Twitter from Channel 5 News in the UK (I have no idea what the credibility of them is, it's an ocean away from me) with anchor Claudia Liza asking Glen Turner and Kristina Barrick questions about website accessibility.
Apparently, they often post videos with captions,...
Why every website wants you to accept its cookies
6.1.2020
I'm probably in the minority on this, but I've never ever built one of those "This site uses cookies, here's some kind of explanation of why, and please click this OK button to accept that" bars that feels like they are on half of the internet.
Emily Stewart:
Most of us just tediously click “yes”...
Systems, Mistakes, and the Sea
6.1.2020
Our own Robin Rendle:
[...] folks can’t talk about real design systems problems because it will show their company as being dysfunctional and broken in some way. This looks bad for their company and hence looks bad for them. But hiding those mistakes and shortcomings by glossing over everything...
Adding Dynamic And Async Functionality To JAMstack Sites
2.1.2020
Jason Lengstorf:
Here’s an incomplete list of things that I’ve repeatedly heard people claim the JAMstack can’t handle that it definitely can:
Load data asynchronously
Handle processing files, such as manipulating images
Read from and write to a database
Handle user authentication and protect...
A Recap of Frontend Development in 2019
1.1.2020
I noted Trey Huffine’s 2018 version of this article in The Great Divide.
To put a point on this divide a bit more, consider this article by Trey Huffine, "A Recap of Frontend Development in 2018." It's very well done! It points to big moments this year, shows interesting data, and makes...
A Recap of Frontend Development in 2019
1.1.2020
I noted Trey Huffine’s 2018 version of this article in The Great Divide.
To put a point on this divide a bit more, consider this article by Trey Huffine, "A Recap of Frontend Development in 2018." It's very well done! It points to big moments this year, shows interesting data, and makes...
Making Room for Variation
30.12.2019
Say you have a design system and you're having a moment where it doesn't have what you need. You need to diverge and create something new. Yesenia Perez-Cruz categorizes these moments from essentially ooops to niiice:
There are three kinds of deviations that come up in...
What it means to be a front-end developer in 2020 (and beyond)
29.12.2019
I wrote a piece for Layout, the blog of my hosting sponsor Flywheel.
Stick around in this field for a while, and you'll see these libraries, languages, build processes, and heck, even entire philosophies on how best to build websites come and go like a slow tide.
You might witness some...
How Many Websites Should We Build?
27.12.2019
Someone emailed me:
What approach to building a site should I take?
Build a single responsive website
Build a site on a single domain, but detect mobile, and render a separate mobile site
Build a separate mobile site on a subdomain
It's funny how quickly huge industry-defining conversations...
Why do we use .html instead of .htm?
26.12.2019
Interesting question from Andy:
Serious question. Why do we use .html instead of .htm? / @adactio @css
— Andy Clarke (@Malarkey) December 12, 2019
The most likely answer from the thread: DOS was a massive operating system for PCs for a long time and it had a three-character limit on file...
css.gg
18.12.2019
I'm not sure what to call these icons from Astrit Malsija. The title is "500+ CSS Icons, Customizable, Retina Ready & API" and the URL is "css.gg" but they aren't really named anything.
Anyway, their shtick is:
The 🌎's first icon library designed by code.
The idea is that they don't...
Design APIs: The Evolution of Design Systems
17.12.2019
A clever idea from Matthew Ström:
[...] design APIs don’t seem like a stretch of the imagination. An API-driven approach is the natural extension of the work currently being done on design systems, including tokens and standardization projects.
If you buy into the idea of design tokens, that...
“Link In Bio” is a slow knife
16.12.2019
Anil Dash:
If Instagram users could post links willy-nilly, they might even be able to connect directly to their users, getting their email addresses or finding other ways to communicate with them. Links represent a threat to closed systems.
On CodePen, we have a TextExpander snippet we use...
Blue Beanie Day 2019
13.12.2019
November 30th, the official "Blue Beanie Day," has come and gone. I'm not sure I ever grokked the exact spirit of it, but I've written about what it means to me. Last year:
Web standards, as an overall idea, has entirely taken hold and won the day. That's worth celebrating, as the web would...