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.
You cannot kill a federated thing by killing one node, the way you can kill a platform by changing one company.
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.
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.
Hallelujah! Support for sizes="auto" is finally landing in Firefox and Safari! Praise be!
This is such a brilliant idea! Why not allow an img element inside video element in order to provide a responsive, accessible poster image?
Here’s another nice progressive web component for your forms, this time for showing error messages.
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-saveris a small web component that wraps a form, keeps an eye on it, stores values inlocalStorage, 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.
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.
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
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.
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 a new meta tag on the block. This time it’s for allowing system-level text sizing to apply to your website.
Great minds think alike! I have a very similar HTML web component on the front page of The Session called input-autosuggest.
Progressive enhancement is about building something robust, that works everywhere, and then making it better where possible.
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.
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
Grrr… it turns out that browsers exhibit some very frustrating behaviour when it comes to the video element. Rob has the details…
I’ve personally struggled to implement a decentralized approach to quality in many of my teams. I believe in it from an academic standpoint, but in practice it works against the grain of every traditional management structure. Managers want ‘one neck to wring’ when things go wrong. Decentralized quality makes that impossible. So I’ve compromised, centralized, become the bottleneck I know slows things down. It’s easier to defend in meetings. But when I’ve managed to decentralize quality — most memorably when I was running a small agency and could write the org chart myself — I’ve been able to do some of the best work of my career.
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!