Jeremy Keith

You can use Web Components without the shadow DOM

So what are the advantages of the Custom Elements API if you’re not going to use the Shadow DOM alongside it?

1. Obvious Markup
2. Instantiation is More Consistent
3. They’re Progressive Enhancement Friendly

I wrote a book about service workers. It’s called Going Offline. It was first published by A Book Apart in 2018. Now it’s available to read for free online.

If you want you can read the book as a PDF, an ePub, or .mobi, but I recommend reading it in your browser.

Needless to say the web book works offline. Once you go to goingoffline.adactio.com you can add it to the homescreen of your mobile device or add it to the dock on your Mac. After that, you won’t need a network connection.

The book is free to read. Properly free. Not the kind of “free” where you have to supply an email address first. Why would I make you go to the trouble of generating a burner email account?

The site has no analytics. No tracking. No third-party scripts of any kind whatsover. By complete coincidence, the site is fast. Funny that.

For the styling of this web book, I tweaked the stylesheet I used for HTML5 For Web Designers. I updated it a little bit to use logical properties, some fluid typography and view transitions.

In the process of converting the book to HTML, I got reaquainted with what I had written almost seven years ago. It was kind of fun to approach it afresh. I think it stands up pretty darn well.

Ethan wrote about his feelings when he put two of his books online, illustrated by that amazing photo that always gives me the feels:

I’ll miss those days, but I’m just glad these books are still here. They’re just different than they used to be. I suppose I am too.

Anyway, if you’re interested in making your website work offline, have a read of Going Offline. Enjoy!

For Love of God, Make Your Own Website - Aftermath

Unfortunately, this is what all of the internet is right now: social media, owned by large corporations that make changes to them to limit or suppress your speech, in order to make themselves more attractive to advertisers or just pursue their owners’ ends. Even the best Twitter alternatives, like Bluesky, aren’t immune to any of this—the more you centralize onto one single website, the more power that website has over you and what you post there. More than just moving to another website, we need more websites.

The Free Web - The History of the Web

I am going to continue to write this newsletter. I am going to spend hours and hours pouring over old books and mailing lists and archived sites. And lifeless AI machines will come along and slurp up that information for their own profit. And I will underperform on algorithms. My posts will be too long, or too dense, or not long enough.

And I don’t care. I’m contributing to the free web.

Last year I described how I syndicate my posts to different social networks.

Back then my approach to syndicating to Bluesky was to piggy-back off my micro.blog account (which is really just the RSS feed of my notes):

Micro.blog can also cross-post to other services. One of those services is Bluesky. I gave permission to micro.blog to syndicate to Bluesky so now my notes show up there too.

It worked well enough, but it wasn’t real-time and I didn’t have much control over the formatting. As Bluesky is having quite a moment right now, I decided to upgrade my syndication strategy and use the Bluesky API.

Here’s how it works…

First you need to generate an app password. You’ll need this so that you can generate a token. You need the token so you can generate …just kidding; the chain of generated gobbledegook stops there.

Here’s the PHP I’m using to generate a token. You’ll need your Bluesky handle and the app password you generated.

Now that I’ve got a token, I can send a post. Here’s the PHP I’m using.

There’s something extra code in there to spot URLs and turn them into links. Bluesky has a very weird way of doing this.

It didn’t take too long to get posting working. After some more tinkering I got images working too. Now I can post straight from my website to my Bluesky profile. The Bluesky API returns an ID for the post that I’ve created there so I can link to it from the canonical post here on my website.

I’ve updated my posting interface to add a toggle for Bluesky right alongside the toggle for Mastodon. There used to be a toggle for Twitter. That’s long gone.

Now when I post a note to my website, I can choose if I want to send a copy to Mastodon or Bluesky or both.

One day Bluesky will go away. It won’t matter much to me. My website will still be here.

CCC | Ban tracking and personalised advertising

YES! THIS!!!

A ban on tracking-based personalised advertising will provide an incentive to reinforce sustainable alternative models and, in fact, will be a condition for making them viable. The advertising industry already has sustainable, proven concepts for effective online advertising that do not require targeted tracking and personalisation (e.g. contextual advertising).

MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

Technology doesn’t have to be terrible. Here’s an absolutely wonderful use of an e-ink display:

I made as much use of vanilla HTML and CSS as possible. I used a small amount of JavaScript but no framework or other libraries.

I don’t have time to learn React - Keith Cirkel

React is a non-transferable skill.

React proponents might claim that React will teach you modern UI, but from what I’ve seen it barely copes with modern UI. autofocus is broken, custom elements don’t work in all but the experimental version, using any “modern” features like dialog or popovers requires useEffect, and the synthetic event system teaches you so little about how DOM actually works. This isn’t modern UI, it’s UI from 2013 at its inception. I don’t have the time left in my career to pick up UI paradigms that haven’t evolved much beyond from when Barack Obama was in office.

When I mentor early career developers and they ask me what they should learn, I can’t say React, they don’t have time. I mean sure, pick up enough React to land you the inevitable job doing it, but it’s not going to level up your career.