This is great! The folks at Basecamp are releasing the front-end frameworks they use to build Hey. There’s Turbo—the successor to Turbolinks:
It offers a simpler alternative to the prevailing client-side frameworks which put all the logic in the front-end and confine the server side of your app to being little more than a JSON API.
With Turbo, you let the server deliver HTML directly, which means all the logic for checking permissions, interacting directly with your domain model, and everything else that goes into programming an application can happen more or less exclusively within your favorite programming language. You’re no longer mirroring logic on both sides of a JSON divide. All the logic lives on the server, and the browser deals just with the final HTML.
Yes, this is basically Hijax (which is itself simply a name for progressive enhancement applied to Ajax) and I’m totally fine with that. I don’t care what it’s called when the end result is faster, more resilient websites.
Compare and contrast the simplicity of the Hotwire/Turbo approach to the knots that React is tying itself up in to try to get the same performance benefits.
Hotwire is a neat evolution of the Turbolinks/Stimulus method, updated to use custom elements. The biggest boon of just dynamically composing HTML delivered over the wire is that state management is much much simpler. adactio.com/links/17712
Remy teaches non-techies how to use jQuery in a responsible way.
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.
There’s quite a crossover between resilience and longevity:
- Understand the requirements
- Keep scope small and fixed
- Reduce dependencies
- Produce static output
- Increase Quality Assurance
When I set about writing this article, I intended it to be a strong argument for progressive rendering. But after digging into it, my feelings are less certain.
Here’s a comprehensive round-up of new CSS that you can use right now—you can expect to see some of this in action at Web Day Out!
Reminding myself just how much you can do with CSS these days.
Here’s Clearleft’s approach to browser support. You can use it too (it’s CC-licensed).
Here’s how I interpret the top-level guidance in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
If a browser feature can be used as a progressive enhancement, you don’t have to wait for all browsers to support it.
A little fix for Safari.