How often do we, as frontend engineers, overlook the URL as a state management tool? We reach for all sorts of abstractions to manage state such as global stores, contexts, and caches while ignoring one of the web’s most elegant and oldest features: the humble URL.
This is such a great write-up of the workshop I did in Hong Kong!
Jeremy, it was a pleasure to work with you and you are always welcome here in Hong Kong!
If you fancy having this one-day workshop at your company, get in touch.
So many folks spend time on their CSS and their UX/UI but still come up with URLs that are at best, comically long, and at worst, user hostile.
Vasilis gives the gist of his excellent talk at the border:none event that just wrapped up in Nuremberg. The rant at the end chimed very much with my feelings on this topic:
I showed a little interaction experiment that one of my students made, with incredible attention to detail. Absolutely brilliant in so many ways. You would expect that all design agencies would be fighting to get someone like that into their design team. But to my amazement she now works as a react native developer.
I have more of these very talented, very creative designers who know how to code, who really understand how the web works, who can actually design things for the web, with the web as a medium, who understand the invisible details, who know about the UX of HTML, who know what’s possible with modern HTML and CSS. Yet when they start working they have to choose: you either join our design team and are forced to use a tool that doesn’t get it, or you join the development team and are forced to use a ridiculous framework and make crap.
When you think of heraldry what comes to mind is probably knights in shining armor, damsels in distress, jousting, that sort of thing. Medieval stuff. But I prefer to think of it as one of the earliest design systems.
This totally checks out.
This is a really excellent four-part series on web performance that really dives into the technical details and asks all the right questions:
How to make the distance of link underlines proportional to the line height of the text.
Make your links beautiful and accessible.
Turning accessibility awareness into action with HTML.
Technically, websites can do just about anything that native apps can do. And yet the actual experience of using the web on mobile is worse than ever.
How Clearleft worked with the Chrome team to create a fifteen-part course on modern responsive design.