Backseat Software – Mike Swanson’s Blog
People use “enshittification” to describe platform decay. What I’m describing here is one of the mechanisms that makes that decay feel personal. It’s the constant conversion of your attention into a KPI.
Link tags: back
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Hixie’s Natural Log: When complaints are a good sign
This is a very smart way to handle feedback about a product.
Blogs and longevity | James’ Coffee Blog
When I write a blog post, I want it to live on my blog, rather than a platform. I can thus invest my time thinking about how to make my blog better and backing it up, rather than having to worry about where my writing is, finding ways to export data from a platform, setting up persistent backups, etc.
Prototypes, production & fidelity layers | Trys Mudford
I’ve always maintained that prototyping and production require different mindsets. Trys suggests it’s not as simple as that.
I agree with much of what he says about back-end decisions (make it manual ‘till it hurts—avoid premature optimisation), but as soon as you’re delivering HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to real people, I think you need to meet certain standards when it comes to accessibility, performance, etc.
Nuberodesign > Blog > In Praise of Buttons – Part One
I concur:
Just because a user interface uses 3D-buttons and some shading doesn’t mean that it has to look tacky. In fact, if you have to make the choice between tacky-but-usable and minimalistic-but-hard-to-use, tacky is the way to go. You don’t have to make that choice though: It’s perfectly possible to create something that is both good-looking and easy to use.
scottjehl/PE: declarative data binding for HTML
This is an interesting idea from Scott—a templating language that doesn’t just replace variables with values, but keeps the original variable names in there too.
Not sure how I feel about using data- attributes for this though; as far as I know, they’re intended to be site-specific, not for cross-site solutions like this.
Revealing ‘back to top’ button
Such a clever minimalist use of CSS!
An editor’s guide to giving feedback – Start here
I was content-buddying with one of my colleagues yesterday so Bobbie’s experience resonates.
Bruce Lawson’s personal site : HTML popover, videos and display:blackhole
Bruce raises an interesting question with media playing in popovers—shouldn’t the media pause when the popover is closed? I agree with Bruce that this is a common use case that should be covered declaratively.
XML is the future - by Nobody has time for Python
I learned that geeks think they are rational beings, while they are completely influenced by buzz, marketing, and their emotions. Even more so than the average person, because they believe they are less susceptible to it than normies, so they have a blind spot.
Two JavaScripts
There are two JavaScripts.
One for the server - where you can go wild.
One for the client - that should be thoughtful and careful.
Yes! This! I’m always astounded to see devs apply the same mindset to backend and frontend development, just because it happens to be in the same language. I don’t care what you use on your own machine or your own web server, but once you’re sending something down the wire to end users, you need to prioritise their needs over your own.
It’s the JavaScript on the client side that’s the problem. What’s given to the visitor.
I’d ask you, if you’re still reading, that you consider a separation of JavaScript between client and server. If you’re a dev, consider the payload, your bundle and work to reduce the cost to your visitor. Heck, think progressive enhancement.
The Grug Brained Developer
If only all thinkpieces on complexity in software development were written in such an entertaining style! (Although, admittedly, that would get very old very fast.)
A layman’s guide to thinking like the self-aware smol brained
The Demo → Demo Loop - daverupert.com
I’m 100% convinced that working demo-to-demo is the secret formula to making successful creative products.
The Demise of the Mildly Dynamic Website
It me:
Broadly, these are websites which are still web pages, not web applications; they’re pages of essentially static information, personal websites, blogs, and so on, but they are slightly dynamic. They might have a style selector at the top of each page, causing a cookie to be set, and the server to serve a different stylesheet on every subsequent page load.
This rings sadly true to me:
Suppose a company makes a webpage for looking up products by their model number. If this page were made in 2005, it would probably be a single PHP page. It doesn’t need a framework — it’s one SELECT query, that’s it. If this page were made in 2022, a conundrum will be faced: the company probably chose to use a statically generated website. The total number of products isn’t too large, so instead their developers stuff a gigantic JSON file of model numbers for every product made by the company on the website and add some client-side JavaScript to download and query it. This increases download sizes and makes things slower, but at least you didn’t have to spin up and maintain a new application server. This example is fictitious but I believe it to be representative.
Also, I never thought about “serverless” like this:
Recently we’ve seen the rise in popularity of AWS Lambda, a “functions as a service” provider. From my perspective this is literally a reinvention of CGI, except a) much more complicated for essentially the same functionality, b) with vendor lock-in, c) with a much more complex and bespoke deployment process which requires the use of special tools.
Plus Equals #3, September 2021
Want to take a deep dive into tiling images? Like, a really deep dive. Rob has you covered.
Basic Pattern Repository
A nice little collection of very simple—and very lightweight—SVGs to use as background patterns.
canistilluse.com - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
…you would be forgiven if you saw an API where a feature went from green (supported) to red (unsupported) and you thought: is the browser being deprecated?
That’s the idea behind my new shiny domain: canistilluse.com. I made the site as satire after reading Jeremy Keith’s insightful piece where he notes:
the onus is not on web developers to keep track of older features in danger of being deprecated. That’s on the browser makers. I sincerely hope we’re not expected to consult a site called canistilluse.com.
It’s weirdly gratifying to see a hastily-written sarcastic quip tuned into something real.
Stay alert - DEV Community 👩💻👨💻
It’s not just a story about unloved APIs, it’s a story about power, standards design, and who owns the platform — and it makes me afraid for the future of the web.
A thoughtful, considered post by Rich Harris on the whole ballyhoo with alert and its ilk:
For all its flaws, the web is generally agreed to be a stable platform, where investments made today will stand the test of time. A world in which websites are treated as inherently transient objects, where APIs we commonly rely on today could be cast aside as unwanted baggage by tomorrow’s spec wranglers, is a world in which the web has already lost.
Choice Words about the Upcoming Deprecation of JavaScript Dialogs | CSS-Tricks
Believe it or not, I generally am a fan of Google and think they do a good job of pushing the web forward. I also think it’s appropriate to waggle fingers when I see problems and request they do better. “Better” here means way more developer and user outreach to spell out the situation, way more conversation about the potential implications and transition ideas, and way more openness to bending the course ahead.
Google vs. the web | Go Make Things
With any changes to the platform, but especially breaking ones, communication and feedback on how this will impact people who actually build things with the web is super important, and that was not done here.
Chris has written a thoughtful reflection on last week’s brouhaha around confirm, prompt, and alert being deprecated in Chrome. The way that the “developer relations” folks at Google handled feedback was less than ideal.
I reached out to one of the Google Chrome developer advocates I know to see if I could learn more. It did not go well.