Tags: eme

The Boring Internet | Terry Godier

You cannot kill a federated thing by killing one node, the way you can kill a platform by changing one company.

Anti-work | Go Make Things

But this obsession with hard work as a virtue, as a good and righteous thing to do, the glorification of toil and sweat and labor… that’s a tool the wealthy who don’t work for a living use to oppress those who do.

I concur.

Let’s Use the Nonexistent ::nth-letter Selector Now | CSS-Tricks

Eight years ago, I asked some questions. Here are some answers.

Two Paradigms for Enhancing HTML Tags | That HTML Blog

This really gets to the heart of one of the biggest benefits of HTML web components: composability. You can nest your regular markup inside multiple custom elements; something that is can’t do.

The other exciting approach doesn’t exist yet: custom attributes. Again, they’d be a great way of using composability to turbo-charge your existing HTML in all sorts of ways.

The end of responsive images - Piccalilli

Hallelujah! Support for sizes="auto" is finally landing in Firefox and Safari! Praise be!

HTML Video Poster Image: Enable Responsive Images and ALT Text for Poster by allowing a child IMG Element (with an optional Picture Element wrapper) to Control the Video Poster Image · Issue #10378 · whatwg/html

This is such a brilliant idea! Why not allow an img element inside video element in order to provide a responsive, accessible poster image?

Alistair Davidson / validation-enhancer · GitLab

Here’s another nice progressive web component for your forms, this time for showing error messages.

Never Lose Form Progress Again :: Aaron Gustafson

Here’s an excellent progressive web component from Aaron—wrap a custom element around your exising form and your good to go:

At its core, form-saver is a small web component that wraps a form, keeps an eye on it, stores values in localStorage, and restores them when the page loads again. Better yet, it clears out saved data after a successful submission so you’re not accidentally resurrecting stale information the next time someone stops by.

Progressive Web Components | Ariel Salminen

I’m slapping my forehead—progressive web components is a perfect name for what I’ve been calling HTML web components. Why didn’t I think of that?

A Progressive Web Component is a native Custom Element designed in two layers: a base layer of HTML and CSS that renders immediately, without JavaScript, and an enhancement layer of JavaScript that adds reactivity, event handling, and more advanced templating.

The End : Focal Curve

I can’t remember the last time a blog post resonated with me this much.

Craig’s criteria on his job search:

• One: fuck offices
• Two: fuck AI
• Three: fuck React

And his conclusion:

Fuck work

The Session has been online in some form since the late 1990s. That’s long before web fonts existed.

To begin with, Times New Roman was the only game in town if you wanted serif type on a website. When Microsoft introduced Georgia it was a godsend. A beautiful typeface designed by Matthew Carter for the screen. I put it right at the start of my font stack for The Session.

Later, web fonts came along. Boy, does that short sentence belie the drama! There were very heated discussions about whether web browsers should provide this ability at all, and what it would mean for type foundries.

Microsoft led the way with their prorietary EOT format. Then everyone agreed on WOFF. Finally we got WOFF2, Electric Boogaloo.

Perhaps more important than that, we got intermediaries. Typekit, Fontdeck, and then the big daddy, Google Fonts.

That’s pretty much the state of play today. Oh yeah, and we’ve got variable fonts now.

I remember Nick Sherman presenting the idea of variable fonts at an Ampersand event years ago. I remember thinking “great idea, but it’ll never happen.” Pure science fiction. I thought the same thing when I first saw a conference presentation about a miraculous image format called Scalable Vector Graphics.

Sometimes I like to stop and take stock of what we take for granted in web browsers now. Web fonts. Variable web fonts. SVG. Flexbox. Grid. Media queries. Container queries. Fluid typography. And I haven’t even mentioned how we were once limited to just 216 colours on the web.

Georgia

Given all the advances in web typography, you might be wondering how my font strategy for The Session changed over the years.

It didn’t.

I mean, sure, I added fluid typography. That was a natural extension of my love for liquid layouts and, later, responsive design. But the font stack itself? That was still Georgia all the way.

Y’see, performance has always been a top priority for The Session. If I was going to replace a system font with a web font that the user had to download, it really needed to be worth it.

Over the years I dabbled with different typefaces but none of them felt quite right to me. And I still think Georgia is a beautiful typeface.

“But your website will look like lots of other websites!” some may cry. That used to be true when all we had was system fonts. But now that web fonts have become the norm, it’s actually pretty unusual to see Georgia in the wild.

Lora

Recently I found a font I liked. Part of why I like it is that it shares a lot of qualities with Georgia. It’s Lora by Olga Karpushina and Alexei Vanyashin.

I started to dabble with it and began seriously contemplating using it on The Session.

It’s a variable font, which is great. But actually, I’m not using that many weights on The Session. I could potentially just use a non-variable variety. It comes in fixed weights of regular, medium, semibold, and bold.

Alas, the regular weight (400) is a bit too light and the medium weight (500) is a bit too heavy. My goldilocks font weight is more like 450.

Okay, so the variable font it is. That also allows me to play around with some subtle variations in weights. As the font size gets bigger for headings, the font weight can reduce ever so slightly. And I can adjust the overall font weight down in dark mode (there’s no grading feature in this font, alas).

Subsetting

Lora supports a lot of alphabets, which is great—quite a few alphabets turn up on The Session occasionally. But this means that the font file size is quite large. 84K.

Subsetting to the rescue!

I created a subset of Lora that has everything except Cyrillic, Greek, and Latin Extended-B. I created another subset that only has Cyrillic, Greek, and Latin Extended-B. Now I’ve got two separate font files that are 48K and 41K in size.

I wrote two @font-face declarations for the two files. They’ve got the same font-family (Lora), the same font-weight (400 700), and the same font-style (normal) but they’ve got different values for unicode-range. That way, browsers know to only use appropriate file when characters on the page actually match the unicode range.

The first file is definitely going to be used. The second one might not even be needed on most pages.

I want to prioritise the loading of that first subsetted font file so it gets referenced in a link element with rel="preload".

The switcheroo

As well as file size, my other concern was how the swapping from Georgia to Lora would be perceived, especially on a slow connection. I wanted to avoid any visible rejiggering of the content.

This is where size-adjust comes in, along with its compadres ascent-override and descent-override.

Rather than adjusting the default size of Lora to match that of Georgia, I want to do it the other way around; adjust the fallback font to match the web font.

Here’s how I’m doing it:

@font-face {
    font-family: 'Fallback for Lora';
    src: local('Georgia');
    size-adjust: 105.77%;
    ascent-override: 95.11%;
    descent-override: 25.9%;
}

And then my font stack is:

font-family: Lora, 'Fallback for Lora', Georgia, serif;

It’s highly unlikely that any device out there has a system font called “Fallback for Lora” so I can be pretty confident that the @font-face adjustment rules will only get applied to browsers that have the right local font, Georgia.

But where did those magic numbers come from for size-adjust, ascent-override, and descent-override?

They came from Katie Hempenius. As well as maintaing a repo of font metrics, she provides the formula needed to calculate all three values. Or you could use this handy tool to eyeball it.

With that, Georgia gets swapped out for Lora with a minimum of layout shift.

First-timers and repeat visitors

Even with the layout shift taken care of, do I want to serve up web fonts to someone on a slow connection?

It depends. Specifically, it depends on whether it’s their first time visiting.

The Session already treats first time visitors differently to repeat visitors. The first time you visit the site, critical CSS is embedded in the head of the HTML page instead of being referenced in an external style sheet. Only once the page has loaded does the full style sheet also get downloaded and cached.

I decided that my @font-face rules pointing to the web fonts are not critical CSS. If it’s your first time visiting, those CSS rules only get downloaded after the page is done loading.

And unless you’re on a fast connection, you won’t see Georgia get swapped out for Lora. That’s because I’ve gone with a font-display value of “optional”.

Most people use “swap”. Some people use “fallback”. You’ve got to be pretty hardcore to use “optional”.

But the next page you go to, or the next time you come to the site, you more than likely will see Lora straight away. That’s because of the service worker I’ve got quietly putting static assets into the Cache API: CSS, JavaScript, and now web fonts.

So even though I’m prioritising snappy performance over visual consistency, it’s a trade-off that only really comes into play for first visits.

Next

I’m pretty happy with the overall strategy. Still, I’m not going to just set it and forget it. I’ll be monitoring the CRUX data for The Session keeping a particular eye on cumulative layout shift.

Before adding web fonts, the cumulative layout shift on The Session was zero. I think I’ve taken all the necessary steps to keep it nice and low, but if I’m wrong I’ll need to revisit my strategy.

Update: Big thanks to Roel Nieskens—of Wakamai Fondue fame—who managed to get the file size of my main subsetted font down even further; bedankt!

In my previous post, I mentioned that I’ve used the web install API in production. Specifically, I’ve used it on The Session. In order to do that, I had to register for the origin trial.

I’ve just signed up for another origin trial. This time it’s for the proposed focusgroup attribute:

The focusgroup HTML attribute is a proposed declarative way to add keyboard arrow-key navigation to composite widgets such as toolbars, tablists, menus, listboxes, etc. without writing any roving-tabindex JavaScript. One attribute replaces hundreds of lines of boilerplate.

I’ve got an HTML web component on The Session called tab-controls. And yes, there’s a bunch of code in there to listen for keyboard events and respond appropriately. I would very much like to rip that code out.

So now that I’ve opted into the origin trial, I’ve added this to my HTML:

<tab-controls role="tablist" focusgroup="tablist">

If this focusgroup attribute takes off, I’ll be able to remove the role attribute but for now, it’s very much needed.

In the JavaScript for my tab-controls custom element, I need to be able to detect support for focusgroup. Here’s how I’m doing it:

if (!this.focusgroup) {
// do all my key handling stuff here
}

Here’s the important thing: don’t use getAttribute('focusgroup') to test for browser support. That will return true if the attribute is in the HTML. But the attribute will only get converted into a property if the browser understands it.

Jake has a lot more detail on the differences between attributes and properties.

Anyway, I figured I’d share that little snippet in case you too were interested in trying out the focusgroup proposal using progressive enhancement.

Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity – Terrible Software

You can’t write a compelling narrative about the thing you didn’t build. Nobody gets promoted for the complexity they avoided.

Complexity looks smart. Not because it is, but because our systems are set up to reward it.

Anyone can add complexity. It takes experience and confidence to leave it out.

It’s the 25th of February and it’s a beautiful day here in Brighton. I had lunch sitting outside—that’s how unseasonably warm it is. Like a little whiff of Summer to remind us of what’s yet to come.

It’s also my birthday. The beautiful weather is an auspicious augery.

Mozilla also released a new version of Firefox. I was hoping for cross-document view transitions and scroll-driven animations for my birthday, but alas I may have to wait another year.

Later, Jessica is going to take me out for some excellent Japanese food before we head on to a session in a cosy pub. I can think of no better way to celebrate my birthday than playing a rake of jigs and reels.

I’m 55 now. It feels like a meaningful number. I think I’ve moved down an option in the select menus that ask for your age range.

I got letters in the post from my pension provider reminding me that 55 is the age when you can technically start taking money out of your pension. Something that retired people do.

I have to admit, this birthday has me entertaining retirement options. I’m already down to just three days a week. It wouldn’t take much to wind that down over the next few years. There’d be even more opportunities to savour the sunshine on a sunny day.

Anyway. Just pondering. You know, the kind of thoughts a 55-year old has.

Don’t judge a book by its cover

Some neat CSS from Tess that’s a great example of progressive enhancement; these book covers look good in all browsers, but they look even better in some.

Try text scaling support in Chrome Canary - Josh Tumath

There’s a new meta tag on the block. This time it’s for allowing system-level text sizing to apply to your website.

Dynamic Datalist: Autocomplete from an API :: Aaron Gustafson

Great minds think alike! I have a very similar HTML web component on the front page of The Session called input-autosuggest.

Why we teach our students progressive enhancement | Blog Cyd Stumpel

Progressive enhancement is about building something robust, that works everywhere, and then making it better where possible.

Safari, Chrome, and Edge all allow you to install websites as though they’re apps.

On mobile Safari, this is done with the “Add to home screen” option that’s buried deep in the “share” menu, making it all but useless.

On the desktop, this is “Add to dock” in Safari, or “Install” in Chrome or Edge.

Firefox doesn’t offer this functionality, which as a shame. Firefox is my browser of choice but they decided a while back to completely abandon progressive web apps (though they might reverse that decision soon).

Anyway, being able to install websites as apps is fantastic! I’ve got a number of these “apps” in my dock: Mastodon, Bluesky, Instagram, The Session, Google Calendar, Google Meet. They all behave just like native apps. I can’t even tell which browser I used to initially install them.

If you’d like to prompt users to install your website as an app, there’s not much you can do other than show them how to do it. But that might be about to change…

I’ve been eagerly watching the proposal for a Web Install API. This would allow authors to put a button on a page that, when clicked, would trigger the installation process (the user would still need to confirm this, of course).

Right now it’s a JavaScript API called navigator.install, but there’s talk of having a declarative version too. Personally, I think this would be an ideal job for an invoker command. Making a whole new install element seems ludicrously over-engineered to me when button invoketarget="share" is right there.

Microsoft recently announced that they’d be testing the JavaScript API in an origin trial. I immediately signed up The Session for the trial. Then I updated the site to output the appropriate HTTP header.

You still need to mess around in the browser configs to test this locally. Go to edge://flags or chrome://flags/ and search for ‘Web App Installation API’, enable it and restart.

I’m now using this API on the homepage of The Session. Unsurprisingly, I’ve wrapped up the functionality into an HTML web component that I call button-install.

Here’s the code. You use it like this:

<button-install>
  <button>Install the app</button>
</button-install>

Use whatever text you like inside the button.

I wasn’t sure whether to keep the button element in the regular DOM or generate it in the Shadow DOM of the custom element. Seeing as the button requires JavaScript to do anything, the Shadow DOM option would make sense. As Tess put it, Shadow DOM is for hiding your shame—the bits of your interface that depend on JavaScript.

In the end I decided to stick with a regular button element within the custom element, but I take steps to remove it when it’s not necessary.

There’s a potential issue in having an element that could self-destruct if the browser doesn’t cut the mustard. There might be a flash of seeing the button before it gets removed. That could even cause a nasty layout shift.

So far I haven’t seen this problem myself but I should probably use something like Scott’s CSS in reverse: fade in the button with a little delay (during which time the button might end up getting removed anyway).

My connectedCallback method starts by finding the button nested in the custom element:

class ButtonInstall extends HTMLElement {
  connectedCallback () {
    this.button = this.querySelector('button');
    …
  }
customElements.define('button-install', ButtonInstall);

If the navigator.install method doesn’t exist, remove the button.

if (!navigator.install) {
  this.button.remove();
  return;
}

If the current display-mode is standalone, then the site has already been installed, so remove the button.

if (window.matchMedia('(display-mode: standalone)').matches) {
  this.button.remove();
  return;
}

As an extra measure, I could also use the display-mode media query in CSS to hide the button:

@media (display-mode: standalone) {
  button-install button {
    display: none;
  }
}

If the button has survived these tests, I can wire it up to the navigator.install method:

this.button.addEventListener('click', async (ev) => {
  await navigator.install();
});

That’s all I’m doing for now. I’m not doing any try/catch stuff to handle all the permutations of what might happen next. I just hand it over to the browser from there.

Feel free to use this code if you want. Adjust the code as needed. If your manifest file says display: fullscreen you’ll need to change the test in the JavaScript accordingly.

Oh, and make sure your site already has a manifest file that has an id field in it. That’s required for navigator.install to work.

Custom Asidenotes – Eric’s Archived Thoughts

An excellent example of an HTML web component from Eric:

Extend HTML to do things automatically!

He layers on the functionality and styling, considering potential gotchas at every stage. This is resilient web design in action.