Journal tags: art

Yesterday when I mentioned my paranoia of third-party dependencies on The Session, I said:

I’ve built in the option to switch between multiple geocoding providers. When one of them inevitably starts enshittifying their service, I can quickly move on to another. It’s like having a “go bag” for geocoding.

(Geocoding, by the way, is when you provide a human-readable address and get back latitude and longitude coordinates.)

My paranoia is well-founded. I’ve been using Google’s geocoding API, which is changing its pricing model from next March.

You wouldn’t know it from the breathlessly excited emails they’ve been sending about it, but this is not a good change for me. I don’t do that much geocoding on The Session—around 13,000 or 14,000 requests a month. With the new pricing model that’ll be around $15 to $20 a month. Currently I slip by under the radar with the free tier.

So it might be time for me to flip that switch in my code. But which geocoding provider should I use?

There are plenty of slop-like listicles out there enumerating the various providers, but they’re mostly just regurgitating the marketing blurbs from the provider websites. What I need is more like a test kitchen.

Here’s what I did…

I took a representative sample of six recent additions to the sessions section of thesession.org. These examples represent places in the USA, Ireland, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Spain, so a reasonable spread.

For each one of those sessions, I’m taking:

• the venue name,
• the town name,
• the area name, and
• the country.

I’m deliberately not including the street address. Quite often people don’t bother including this information so I want to see how well the geocoding APIs cope without it.

I’ve scored the results on a simple scale of good, so-so, and just plain wrong.

• A good result gets a score of one. This is when the result gives back an accurate street-level result.
• A so-so result gets a score of zero. This when it’s got the right coordinates for the town, but no more than that.
• A wrong result gets a score of minus one. This is when the result is like something from a large language model: very confident but untethered from reality, like claiming the address is in a completely different country. Being wrong is worse than being vague, hence the difference in scoring.

Then I tot up those results for an overall score for each provider.

When I tried my six examples with twelve different geocoding providers, these were the results:

Geocoding providers

Provider	USA	England	Ireland	Spain	Scotland	Northern Ireland	Total
Google	1	1	1	1	1	1	7
Mapquest	1	1	1	1	1	1	7
Geoapify	0	1	1	0	1	0	3
Here	1	1	0	1	0	0	3
Mapbox	1	1	0	1	1	-1	3
Bing	1	0	0	0	0	0	1
Nominatim	0	0	0	0	-1	1	0
OpenCage	-1	1	0	0	0	-1	-1
Tom Tom	-1	-1	0	0	-1	1	-2
Positionstack	0	-1	0	-1	1	-1	-2
Locationiq	-1	0	-1	0	0	-1	-3
Map Maker	-1	0	-1	-1	-1	-1	-5

Some interesting results there. I was surprised by how crap Bing is. I was also expecting better results from Mapbox.

Most interesting for me, Mapquest is right up there with Google.

So now that I’ve got a good scoring system, my next question is around pricing. If Google and Mapquest are roughly comparable in terms of accuracy, how would the pricing work out for each of them?

Let’s say I make 15,000 API requests a month. Under Google’s new pricing plan, that works out at $25. Not bad.

But if I’ve understood Mapquest’s pricing correctly, I reckon I’ll just squeek in under the free tier.

Looks like I’m flipping the switch to Mapquest.

If you’re shopping around for geocoding providers, I hope this is useful to you. But I don’t think you should just look at my results; they’re very specific to my needs. Come up with your own representative sample of tests and try putting the providers through their paces with your data.

If, for some reason, you want to see the terrible PHP code I’m using for geocoding on The Session, here it is.

The Session has been online for over 20 years. When you maintain a site for that long, you don’t want to be relying on third parties—it’s only a matter of time until they’re no longer around.

Some third party APIs are unavoidable. The Session has maps for sessions and other events. When people add a new entry, they provide the address but then I need to get the latitude and longitude. So I have to use a third-party geocoding API.

My code is like a lesson in paranoia: I’ve built in the option to switch between multiple geocoding providers. When one of them inevitably starts enshittifying their service, I can quickly move on to another. It’s like having a “go bag” for geocoding.

Things are better on the client side. I’m using other people’s JavaScript libraries—like the brilliant abcjs—but at least I can self-host them.

I’m using Leaflet for embedding maps. It’s a great little library built on top of Open Street Map data.

A little while back I linked to a new project called OpenFreeMap. It’s a mapping provider where you even have the option of hosting the tiles yourself!

For now, I’m not self-hosting my map tiles (yet!), but I did want to switch to OpenFreeMap’s tiles. They’re vector-based rather than bitmap, so they’re lovely and crisp.

But there’s an issue.

I can use OpenFreeMap with Leaflet, but to do that I also have to use the MapLibre GL library. But whereas Leaflet is 148K of JavaScript, MapLibre GL is 800K! Yowzers!

That’s mahoosive by the standards of The Session’s performance budget. I’m not sure the loveliness of the vector maps is worth increasing the JavaScript payload by so much.

But this doesn’t have to be an either/or decision. I can use progressive enhancement to get the best of both worlds.

If you land straight on a map page on The Session for the first time, you’ll get the old-fashioned bitmap map tiles. There’s no MapLibre code.

But if you browse around The Session and then arrive on a map page, you’ll get the lovely vector maps.

Here’s what’s happening…

The maps are embedded using an HTML web component called embed-map. The fallback is a static image between the opening and closing tags. The web component then loads up Leaflet.

Here’s where the enhancement comes in. When the web component is initiated (in its connectedCallback method), it uses the Cache API to see if MapLibre has been stored in a cache. If it has, it loads that library:

caches.match('/path/to/maplibre-gl.js')
.then( responseFromCache => {
    if (responseFromCache) {
        // load maplibre-gl.js
    }
});

Then when it comes to drawing the map, I can check for the existence of the maplibreGL object. If it exists, I can use OpenFreeMap tiles. Otherwise I use the old Leaflet tiles.

But how does the MapLibre library end up in a cache? That’s thanks to the service worker script.

During the service worker’s install event, I give it a list of static files to cache: CSS, JavaScript, and so on. That includes third-party libraries like abcjs, Leaflet, and now MapLibre GL.

Crucially this caching happens off the main thread. It happens in the background and it won’t slow down the loading of whatever page is currently being displayed.

That’s it. If the service worker installation works as planned, you’ll get the nice new vector maps. If anything goes wrong, you’ll get the older version.

By the way, it’s always a good idea to use a service worker and the Cache API to store your JavaScript files. As you know, JavaScript is unduly expensive to performance; not only does the JavaScript file have to be downloaded, it then has to be parsed and compiled. But JavaScript stored in a cache during a service worker’s install event is already parsed and compiled.

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!

I was having a discussion with some of my peers a little while back. We were collectively commenting on the state of education and documentation for front-end development.

A lot of the old stalwarts have fallen by the wayside of late. CSS Tricks hasn’t been the same since it got bought out by Digital Ocean. A List Apart goes through fallow periods. Even the Mozilla Developer Network is looking to squander its trust by adding inaccurate “content” generated by a large language model.

The most obvious solution is to start up a brand new resource for front-end developers. But there are two probems with that:

1. It’s really, really, really hard work, and
2. It feels a bit 927.

I actually think there are plenty of good articles and resources on front-end development being published. But they’re not being published in any one specific place. People are publishing them on their own websites.

Ahmed, Josh, Stephanie, Andy, Lea, Rachel, Robin, Michelle …I could go on, but you get the picture.

All this wonderful stuff is distributed across the web. If you have a well-stocked RSS reader, you’re all set. But if you’re new to front-end development, how do you know where to find this stuff? I don’t think you can rely on search, unless you have a taste for slop.

I think the solution lies not with some hand-wavey “AI” algorithm that burns a forest for every query. I think the solution lies with human curation.

I take inspiration from Phil’s fantastic project, ooh.directory. Imagine taking that idea of categorisation and applying it to front-end dev resources.

Whether it’s a post on web.dev, Smashing Magazine, or someone’s personal site, it could be included and categorised appropriately.

Now, there would still be a lot of work involved, especially in listing and categorising the articles that are already out there, but it wouldn’t be nearly as much work as trying to create those articles from scratch.

I don’t know what the categories should be. Does it make sense to have top-level categories for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with sub-directories within them? Or does it make more sense to categorise by topics like accessibility, animation, and so on?

And this being the web, there’s no reason why one article couldn’t be tagged to simultaneously live in multiple categories.

There’s plenty of meaty information architecture work to be done. And there’d be no shortage of ongoing work to handle new submissions.

A stretch goal could be the creation of “playlists” of hand-picked articles. “Want to get started with CSS grid layout? Read that article over there, watch this YouTube video, and study this page on MDN.”

What do you think? Does this one-stop shop of hyperlinks sound like it would be useful? Does it sound feasible?

I’m just throwing this out there. I’d love it if someone were to run with it.

My colleague Chris has written a terrific post over on the Clearleft blog: Is the planet the missing member of your project team?

Rather than hand-wringing and finger-wagging, it gets down to some practical steps that you—we—can take on every project.

Chris finishes by asking:

Let me know how you design with the environment in mind. What practical advice would you suggest?

Well, here’s something that I keep coming up against…

Chris shows that the environment can be part of project management, specifically the RACI methodology:

We list who is responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed within the project. It’s a simple exercise but the clarity is useful for identifying what expertise and input we should seek from the named individuals.

Having the planet be a proactive partner in your project ensures its needs are considered.

Whenever responsibilities are being assigned there are some things that inevitably fall through the cracks. One I’ve seen over and over again is responsibility for third-party scripts.

On the face of it this seems like another responsibility for developers. We’re talking about code here, right?

But in my experience it is never the developers adding “beacons” and other third-party embedded scripts.

Chris rightly points out:

Development decisions, visual design choices, content approach, and product strategy all contribute to the environmental impact of your website.

But what about sales and marketing? Often they’re the ones who’ll drop in a third-party script to track user journeys. That’s understandable. That’s kind of their job.

Dropping in one line of JavaScript seems like a victimless crime. It’s just one small script, right? But JavaScript can import more JavaScript. Tools like Request Map Generator can show just how much destruction third-party JavaScript can wreak:

You pop in a URL, it fetches the page and maps out all the subsequent requests in a nifty interactive diagram of circles, showing how many requests third-party scripts are themselves generating. I’ve found it to be a very effective way of showing the impact of third-party scripts to people who aren’t interested in looking at waterfall diagrams.

Just to be clear, the people adding third-party scripts to websites usually aren’t doing so maliciously. They often don’t realise the negative effect the scripts will have on performance and the environment.

As is so often the case, this isn’t a technical problem. At root it’s about understanding people’s needs (like “I need a way to see what pages are converting!”) and finding a way to meet those needs without negatively impacting the planet. A good open-minded discussion can go a long way.

So I echo Chris’s call to think about environmental impacts from the very start of a project. Establish early on who will have the ability to add third-party scripts to the site. Do all of those people understand the responsibility that gives them?

I saw this lack of foresight in action on a project recently. The front-end development was going really well and the site was going to be exceptionally performant: green Lighthouse scores across the board. But when the site went live it had tracking scripts. That meant that users needed to consent to being tracked. That meant adding another third-party script to generate a consent banner. It completely tanked the Lighthouse scores.

I’m sure the people who added the tracking scripts and consent banners thought they had no choice. But there are alternatives. There are ways to get the data you need without the intrusive surveillance and performance-wrecking JavaScript.

The problem is that it’s not the norm. “Everyone else is doing it” was the justification for Flash intros two decades ago and it’s the justification for enshittification via third-party scripts now.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

2010 was a good year for me. I moved into a new home. Salter Cane released an album. We had a really good dConstruct. And I wrote a book.

It was HTML5 For Web Designers, the very first title from a new indie publisher called A Book Apart.

Back then, I wrote about the writing process, Jason wrote about the design, Mandy wrote about editing, and Jeffrey wrote a lovely foreword. What a dream team!

From there, A Book Apart went from strength to strength. Under Katel’s stewardship, they released the must-have books for web design and development.

One of the perks of being an author for A Book Apart is that I get a copy of every book published. I have a shelf of slim but colourful book spines.

Now, after 14 years and 60 titles, the collection is complete. A Book Apart won’t be publishing any more new books. Don’t worry—you can still buy the existing titles at all good bookshops, like bookshop.org. They made sure to prepare the way for this decision.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to express how grateful I am to everyone at A Book Apart. They treated me very, very well. Heck, they even let me publish a second book.

Thank you, team—it was a pleasure and honour to collaborate with you.

I was doing some housekeeping on my website recently, tidying up some broken links, that kind of thing. I happened on the transcript and video for the talk I gave two years ago called “Sci-fi and Me.”

I really enjoyed preparing and giving that talk. It’s the kind of topic I’d love to speak/podcast about more.

Part of the structure of the talk involved me describing ten topics that might be encountered in the literature of science fiction. I describe the topic, mention some examples, and then choose one book as my pick for that topic.

For the topic of post-apocalypse stories, I chose Emily St. John Mandell’s Station Eleven. I love that book, and the equally excellent—though different—television series.

I’ve written in the past about why I love it:

Station Eleven describes a group of people in a post-pandemic world travelling around performing Shakespeare plays. At first I thought this was a ridiculous conceit. Then I realised that this was the whole point. We don’t have to watch Shakespeare to survive. But there’s a difference between surviving and living.

You’ve got a post-apocalyptic scenario where the pursuit of art helps giving meaning to life. That’s Station Eleven, but it also describes a film currently streaming on Netflix called Apocalypse Clown. Shakespeare’s been swapped for clowning, the apocalypse is set in Ireland, and the film is a comedy, but in a strange way, it tackles the same issue at the heart of Station Eleven: survival is insufficent.

I really enjoyed Apocalypse Clown, mostly down to Natalie Palamides’s scene-stealing performance. It very much slipped by under the radar, unlike the recent Netflix production Leave The World Behind

If you haven’t watched Leave The World Behind yet, stop reading please. Because I want to talk about the ending of the film.

SPOILERS

I never read the Rumaan Alam novel, but I thoroughly enjoyed this film. The mounting dread, the slow trickle of information, all good vibey stuff.

What I really liked was the way you can read the ending in two different ways.

On the large scale, we hear how everything that has unfolded is leading to the country tearing itself apart—something we see beginning to happen in the distance.

But on the smaller scale, we see people come together. When the final act was introduced as “The Last One” I thought we might be in for the typical trope of people turning on one another until there’s a final survivor. But instead we see people who have been mistrustful of one another come to help each other. It felt very true to the reality described in Rebecca Solnit’s excellent A Paradise Built In Hell.

The dichotomy between the large-scale pessimism and the smale-scale optimism rang true. It reminded me of The Situation. The COVID-19 pandemic was like a Rorscharch test that changed as you zoomed in and out:

I’ve noticed concentric circles of feelings tied to geography—positive in the centre, and very negative at the edges. What I mean is, if you look at what’s happening in your building and your street, it’s quite amazing how people are pulling together.

But once you look further than that, things turn increasingly sour. At the country level, incompetence and mismanagement seem to be the order of the day. And once you expand out to the whole world, who can blame you for feeling overwhelmed with despair?

But the world is made up of countries, and countries are made up of communities, and these communities are made up of people who are pulling together and helping one another.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a fan of initialisms and acronyms. They can be exclusionary.

It bothers me doubly when everyone is talking about AI.

First of all, the term is so vague as to be meaningless. Sometimes—though rarely—AI refers to general artificial intelligence. Sometimes AI refers to machine learning. Sometimes AI refers to large language models. Sometimes AI refers to a series of if/else statements. That’s quite a spectrum of meaning.

Secondly, there’s the assumption that everyone understands the abbreviation. I guess that’s generally a safe assumption, but sometimes AI could refer to something other than artificial intelligence.

In countries with plenty of pastoral agriculture, if someone works in AI, it usually means they’re going from farm to farm either extracting or injecting animal semen. AI stands for artificial insemination.

I think that abbreviation might work better for the kind of things currently described as using AI.

We were discussing this hot topic at work recently. Is AI coming for our jobs? The consensus was maybe, but only the parts of our jobs that we’re more than happy to have automated. Like summarising some some findings. Or perhaps as a kind of lorem ipsum generator. Or for just getting the ball rolling with a design direction. As Terence puts it:

Midjourney is great for a first draft. If, like me, you struggle to give shape to your ideas then it is nothing short of magic. It gets you through the first 90% of the hard work. It’s then up to you to refine things.

That’s pretty much the conclusion we came to in our discussion at Clearleft. There’s no way that we’d use this technology to generate outputs for clients, but we certainly might use it to generate inputs. It’s like how we’d do a quick round of sketching to get a bunch of different ideas out into the open. Terence is spot on when he says:

Midjourney lets me quickly be wrong in an interesting direction.

To put it another way, using a large language model could be a way of artificially injecting some seeds of ideas. Artificial insemination.

So now when I hear people talk about using AI to create images or articles, I don’t get frustrated. Instead I think, “Using artificial insemination to create images or articles? Yes, that sounds about right.”

My trip to California went well. It was bookended with a few days in San Diego on either end. I relished the opportunity to hang with family and soak up the sunshine.

In the middle was my outing to San Francisco for An Event Apart. There were some great talks: Krystal talking about onboarding, Miriam blowing my mind with cascade layers, Eric diving deep into the :has() selector, and David closing out the show with a superb call to arms.

I gave my talk on declarative design at the very start of the event, just the way I like it. I was able to relax and enjoy all the other talks without having mine on my mind.

The talk went down well. I thought maybe I might have the chance to repeat it at another An Event Apart sometime in 2023.

But that won’t happen. An Event Apart has closed its doors:

Seventeen years ago, in December 2005, we held our first conference in Philadelphia. The event we just held in San Francisco was our last.

Whenever I was invited to speak at An Event Apart, I always responded in the affirmative and always said it was an honour to be asked. I meant it every time.

It wasn’t just me. Ask anyone who’s spoken at An Event Apart. They’ll all tell you the same thing. It was an honour. It was also a bit intimidating. There was a definite feeling that you had to bring your A game. And so, everyone did. Of course that just contributed to the event’s reputation which only reinforced the pressure to deliver a top-notch presentation.

I’m really going to miss An Event Apart. I mean, I get why all good things must come to an end (see also: dConstruct), but it feels like the end of an era.

My first time speaking at An Event Apart was in 2007. My last time was in San Francisco this month.

Thank you, Eric, Jeffrey, Toby, Marci, and the entire An Event Apart crew. It has been my privilege to play a small part in your story.

2007

Chicago

Be Pure. Be Vigilant. Behave

2008

San Francisco

Pattern In The Process

2009

Boston

Future Shock Treatment

2010

Seattle, Boston, Minneapolis, Washington DC, San Diego

Paranormal Interactivity

2011

Seattle, Boston, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Washington DC, San Francisco

Design Principles

2012

Austin

The Spirit Of The Web

2013

Atlanta, Washington DC, Chicago, Austin, San Francisco

The Long Web

2014

Seattle, San Diego, Chicago, Orlando, San Francisco

Enhance!

2015

Seattle, Austin, San Francisco

Resilience

2016

Seattle, Boston, Orlando, San Francisco

Resilience, Evaluating Technology

2017

Seattle, Denver

Evaluating Technology

2018

Seattle, Boston

The Way Of The Web

2019

Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco

Going Offline

2020

Online

Design Principles For The Web

2021

Online

The State Of The Web

2022

Online, San Francisco

In And Out Of Style

Declarative Design

Two weeks ago I was on stage for two days hosting Leading Design in London.

Last week I was on stage for two days hosting Clarity in New Orleans.

It was an honour and a pleasure to MC at both events. Hard work, but very, very rewarding. And people seemed to like the cut of my jib, so that’s good.

With my obligations fulfilled, I’m now taking some time off before diving back into some exciting events-related work (he said, teasingly).

Jessica and I left New Orleans for Florida on the weekend. We’re spending a week at the beach house in Saint Augustine, doing all the usual Floridian activities: getting in the ocean, eating shrimp, sitting around doing nothing, that kind of thing.

But last night we got to experience something very unusual indeed.

We stayed up late, fighting off tiredness until strolling down to the beach sometime after 1am.

It was a mild night. I was in shorts and short sleeves, standing on the sand with the waves crashing, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness.

We were looking to the south. That’s where Cape Canaveral is, about a hundred miles away.

A hundred miles is quite a distance, and it was a cloudy night, so I wasn’t sure whether we’d be able to see anything. But when the time came, shortly before 2am, there was no mistaking it.

An orange glow appeared on the ocean, just over the horizon. Then an intense bright orange-red flame burst upwards. Even at this considerable distance, it was remarkably piercing.

It quickly travelled upwards, in an almost shaky trajectory, until entering the clouds.

And that was it. Brief, but unforgettable. We had seen the launch of Artemis 1 on the Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket ever launched.

Speaking of in-person gatherings, I’ve got some exciting—if not downright nervewracking—events coming up soon.

Next week I’ll be in London for Leading Design. Looking at the line-up that Rebecca is assembled, I’m kind of blown away—it looks fantastic!

You’ll notice that I’m in that line-up, but don’t worry—I’m not giving a talk. I’ll be there as host. That means I get to introduce the speakers before they speak, and ask them a question or two afterwards.

Then, one week later, I do it all again at Clarity in New Orleans. I’m really honoured that Jina has invited me to MC. Again, it’s a ridiculously fantastic line-up (once you ignore my presence).

I really, really enjoy hosting events. And yet I always get quite anxious in the run-up. I think it’s because there isn’t much I can do to prepare.

During The Situation, I had something of an advantage when I was hosting UX Fest. The talks were pre-recorded, which meant that I could study them ahead of time. At a live event, I won’t have that luxury. Instead, I need to make sure that I pay close attention to each talk and try to come up with good questions.

Based on past experience, my anxiety is unwarranted. Once I’m actually talking to these super-smart people, the problem isn’t a lack of things to discuss, but the opposite—so much to talk about in so little time!

I keep trying to remind myself of that.

See, it’s different if I’m speaking at an event. Sure, I’ll get nervous, but I can do something about it. I can prepare and practice to alleviate any anxiety. I feel like I have more control over the outcome when I’m giving a talk compared with hosting.

In fact, I do have a speaking gig on the horizon. I’ll be giving a brand new talk at An Event Apart in San Francisco in December.

It was just a month ago when Jeffrey invited me to speak. Of course I jumped at the chance—it’s always an honour to be asked—but I had some trepidation about preparing a whole new talk in time.

I’ve mentioned this before but it takes me aaaaaaaages to put a talk together. Don’t get me wrong; I think it’s worth it. I may not be good at much, but I know I can deliver a really good conference talk …once I’ve spent ridiculously long preparing it.

But more recently I’ve noticed that I’ve managed to shorten this time period. Partly that’s because I recklessly agree to prepare the talk in a shorter amount of time—nothing like a deadline to light a fire under my ass. But it’s also because a lot of the work is already done.

When I have a thought or an opinion about something, I write it down here on my own website. They’re brain farts, but their my brain farts. I consider them half-baked, semi-formed ideas.

For a conference talk, I need something fully-baked and well-formed. But I can take a whole bunch of those scrappy blog posts and use them as raw material.

There’s still a lot of work involved. As well as refining the message I want to get across, I have to structure these thoughts into a narrative thread that makes sense. That’s probably the hardest part of preparing a conference talk …and the most rewarding.

So while I’ve been feeling somewhat under the gun as I’ve been preparing this new talk for An Event Apart, I’ve also been feeling that the talk is just the culmination; a way of tying together some stuff I’ve been writing about it here for the past year or two.

It’s still entirely possible that the talk could turn out to be crap, but I think the odds are in my favour. I’ve been able to see how the ideas I’ve been writing about have resonated with people, so I can feel pretty confident that they’ll go down well in a talk.

As for the topic of the talk? All will be revealed.

I’ve published a transcription of the talk I gave at CSS Day:

In And Out Of Style.

The title is intended to have double meaning. The obvious reference is that CSS is about styling web pages. But the talk also covers some long-term trends looking at ideas that have appear, disappear, and reappear over time. Hence, style as in trends and fashion.

There are some hyperlinks in the transcript but I also published a list of links if you’re interested in diving deeper into some of the topics mentioned in the talk.

I also published the slides but, as usual, they don’t make much sense out of context. They’re on Noti.st too.

I made an audio recording for your huffduffing pleasure.

There are two videos of this talk. On Vimeo, there’s the version I pre-recorded for An Event Apart online. On YouTube, there’s the recording from CSS Day.

It’s kind of interesting to compare the two (well, interesting to me, anyway). The pre-recorded version feels like a documentary. The live version has more a different vibe and it obviously has more audience interaction. I think my style of delivery suits a live audience best.

I invite you to read, watch, or listen to In And Out Of Style, whichever you prefer.

Someone was asking recently about advice for public speaking. This was specifically for in-person events now that we’re returning to actual live conferences.

Everyone’s speaking style is different so there’s no universal advice. That said, just about everyone recommends practicing. Practice your talk. Then practice it again and again.

That’s good advice but it’s also quite time-consuming. Something I’ve recommended in the past is to really concentrate on the start and the end of the talk.

You should be able to deliver the first five minutes of your talk in your sleep. If something is going to throw you, it’s likely to happen at the beginning of your talk. Whether it’s a technical hitch or just the weirdness and nerves of standing on stage, you want to be able to cruise through that part of the talk on auto-pilot. After five minutes or so, your nerves will have calmed and any audio or visual oddities should be sorted.

Likewise you want to really nail the last few minutes of your talk. Have a good strong ending that you can deliver convincingly.

Make it very clear when you’re done—usually through a decisive “thank you!”—to let the audience know that they may now burst into rapturous applause. Beware the false ending. “Thank you …and this is my Twitter handle. I always like hearing from people. So. Yeah.” Remember, the audience is on your side and they want to show their appreciation for your talk but you have to let them know without any doubt when the talk is done.

At band practice we sometimes joke “Hey, as long as we all start together and finish together, that’s what matters.” It’s funny because there’s a kernel of truth to it. If you start a song with a great intro and you finish the song with a tight rock’n’roll ending, nobody’s going to remember if somebody flubbed a note halfway through.

So, yes, practice your talk. But really practice the start and the end of your talk.

Back in April I gave a talk at An Event Apart Spring Summit. The talk was called The State Of The Web, and I’ve published the transcript. I’ve also published the video.

I put a lot of work into this talk and I think it paid off. I wrote about preparing the talk. I also wrote about recording it. I also published links related to the talk. It was an intense process, but a rewarding one.

I almost called the talk The Overview Effect. My main goal with the talk was to instil a sense of perspective. Hence the references to the famous Earthrise photograph.

On the one hand, I wanted the audience to grasp just how far the web has come. So the first half of the talk is a bit of a trip down memory lane, with a constant return to just how much we can accomplish in browsers today. It’s all very positive and upbeat.

Then I twist the knife. Having shown just how far we’ve progressed technically, I switch gears the moment I say:

The biggest challenges facing the World Wide Web today are not technical challenges.

Then I dive into those challenges, as I see them. It turns out that technical challenges would be preferable to the seemingly intractable problems of today’s web.

I almost wish I could’ve flipped the order: talk about the negative stuff first but then finish with the positive. I worry that the talk could be a bit of a downer. Still, I tried to finish on an optimistic note.

I won’t spoil it any more for you. Watch the video or have a read of The State Of The Web.

An Event Apart Spring Summit is happening right now. I opened the show yesterday with a talk called The State Of The Web:

The World Wide Web has come a long way in its three decades of existence. There’s so much we can do now with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: animation, layout, powerful APIs… we can even make websites that work offline! And yet the web isn’t exactly looking rosy right now. The problems we face aren’t technical in nature. We’re facing a crisis of expectations: we’ve convinced people that the web is slow, buggy, and inaccessible. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is no fate but what we make. In this perspective-setting talk, we’ll go on a journey to the past, present, and future of web design and development. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and by the end, you’ll be ready to make the web better.

I wrote about preparing this talk and you can see the outline on Kinopio. I thought it turned out well, but I never actually know until people see it. So I’m very gratified and relieved that it went down very well indeed. Phew!

Eric and the gang at An Event Apart asked for a round-up of links related to this talk and I was more than happy to oblige. I’ve separated them into some of the same categories that the talk covers.

I know that these look like a completely disconnected grab-bag of concepts—you’d have to see the talk to get the connections. But even without context, these are some rabbit holes you can dive down…

Apollo 8

• Earthrise by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee on Vimeo, 2018.
• Earthrise by Amanda Gorman on YouTube, 2018.
• They Saw Earth From Space. Here’s How It Changed Them by Nadia Drake in National Geographic, 2018.
• Seeing the Whole Earth from Space Changed Everything by Ahmed Kabil for The Long Now Foundation, 2018.

Hypertext

• As We May Think by Vannevar Bush in The Atlantic Monthly, 1945.
• The Demo by Douglas Engelbart, 1968.
• Information Management: A Proposal by Tim Berners-Lee, 1989.

The World Wide Web

• proposed new tag: IMG by Marc Andreessen to www-talk, 1993.
• What is a Polyfill? by Remy Sharp, 2010.
• Stop solving problems you don’t yet have by Rachel Andrew, 2012.
• Re: More granularity for font-weight? by Håkon Wium Lie to www-style, 2015.
• Clean advertising on adactio.com, 2020.
• 2021 Predictions for UX and Front-End Experts (PDF) by Ire Aderinokun et al. for An Event Apart, 2021.

NASA

• Poppy Northcutt: The Woman Who Took Us to the Stars by Apriya Rai, 2020.
• Katherine Johnson Biography by Margot Lee Shetterly, 2020.
• Margaret Hamilton interview by Zoë Corbyn in The Guardian, 2019.

Remember how I said I was preparing an online conference talk? Well, I’m happy to say that not only is the talk prepared, but I’ve managed to successfully record it too.

If you want to see the finished results, come along to An Event Apart Spring Summit on April 19th. To sweeten the deal, I’ve got a discount code you can use when you buy any multi-day pass: AEAJEREMY.

Recording the talk took longer than I thought it would. I think it was because I said this:

It feels a bit different to prepare a talk for pre-recording rather than live delivery on stage. In fact, it feels less like preparing a conference talk and more like making a documentary.

Once I got that idea in my head, I think I became a lot fussier about the quality of the recording. “Would David Attenborough allow his documentaries to have the sound of a keyboard audibly being pressed? No! Start again!”

I’m pleased with the final results. And I’m really looking forward to the post-presentation discussion with questions from the audience. The talk gets provocative—and maye a bit ranty—towards the end so it’ll be interesting to see how people react to that.

It feels good to have the presentation finished, but it also feels …weird. It’s like the feeling that conference organisers get once the conference is over. You spend all this time working towards something and then, one day, it’s in the past instead of looming in the future. It can make you feel kind of empty and listless. Maybe it’s the same for big product launches.

The two big projects I’ve been working on for the past few months were this talk and season two of the Clearleft podcast. The talk is in the can and so is the final episode of the podcast season, which drops tomorrow.

On the one hand, it’s nice to have my decks cleared. Nothing work-related to keep me up at night. But I also recognise the growing feeling of doubt and moodiness, just like the post-conference blues.

The obvious solution is to start another big project, something on the scale of making a brand new talk, or organising a conference, or recording another podcast season, or even writing a book.

The other option is to take a break for a while. Seeing as the UK government has extended its furlough scheme, maybe I should take full advantage of it. I went on furlough for a while last year and found it to be a nice change of pace.

I’m terrible at taking my own advice.

Hana wrote a terrific article called You’re on mute: the art of presenting in a Zoom era. In it, she has very kind things to say about my process for preparing conference talks.

As it happens, I’m preparing a conference talk right now for delivery online. Am I taking my advice about how to put a talk together? I am on me arse.

Perhaps the most important part of the process I shared with Hana is that you don’t get too polished too soon. Instead you get everything out of your head as quickly as possible (probably onto disposable bits of paper) and only start refining once you’re happy with the rough structure you’ve figured out by shuffling those bits around.

But the way I’ve been preparing this talk has been more like watching a progress bar. I started at the start and even went straight into slides as the medium for putting the talk together.

It was all going relatively well until I hit a wall somewhere between the 50% and 75% mark. I was blocked and I didn’t have any rough sketches to fall back on. Everything was a jumbled mess in my brain.

It all came to a head at the start of last week when that jumbled mess in my brain resulted in a very restless night spent tossing and turning while I imagined how I might complete the talk.

This is a terrible way of working and I don’t recommend it to anyone.

The problem was I couldn’t even return to the proverbial drawing board because I hadn’t given myself a drawing board to return to (other than this crazy wall of connections on Kinopio).

My sleepless night was a wake-up call (huh?). The next day I forced myself to knuckle down and pump out anything even if it was shit—I could refine it later. Well, it turns out that just pumping out any old shit was exactly what I needed to do. The act of moving those fingers up and down on the keyboard resulted in something that wasn’t completely terrible. In fact, it turned out pretty darn good.

Past me said:

The idea here is to get everything out of my head.

I should’ve listened to that guy.

At this point, I think I’ve got the talk done. The progress bar has reached 100%. I even think that it’s pretty good. A giveaway for whether a talk is any good is when I find myself thinking “Yes, this has good points well made!” and then five minutes later I’m thinking “Wait, is this complete rubbish that’s totally obvious and doesn’t make much sense?” (see, for example, every talk I’ve ever prepared ever).

Now I just to have to record it. The way that An Event Apart are running their online editions is that the talks are pre-recorded but followed with live Q&A. That’s how the Clearleft events team have been running the conference part of the Leading Design Festival too. Last week there were three days of this format and it worked out really, really well. This week there’ll be masterclasses which are delivered in a more synchronous way.

It feels a bit different to prepare a talk for pre-recording rather than live delivery on stage. In fact, it feels less like preparing a conference talk and more like making a documentary. I guess this is what life is like for YouTubers.

I think the last time I was in a cinema before The Situation was at the wonderful Duke of York’s cinema here in Brighton for an afternoon showing of The Proposition followed by a nice informal chat with the screenwriter, one Nick Cave, local to this parish. It was really enjoyable, and that’s kind of what Leading Design Festival felt like last week.

I wonder if maybe we’ve been thinking about online events with the wrong metaphor. Perhaps they’re not like conferences that have moved online. Maybe they’re more like film festivals where everyone has the shared experience of watching a new film for the first time together, followed by questions to the makers about what they’ve just seen.

Arthur C. Clarke once said:

Trying to predict the future is a discouraging and hazardous occupation becaue the profit invariably falls into two stools. If his predictions sounded at all reasonable, you can be quite sure that in 20 or most 50 years, the progress of science and technology has made him seem ridiculously conservative. On the other hand, if by some miracle a prophet could describe the future exactly as it was going to take place, his predictions would sound so absurd, so far-fetched, that everybody would laugh him to scorn.

But I couldn’t resist responding to a recent request for augery. Eric asked An Event Apart speakers for their predictions for the coming year. The responses have been gathered together and published, although it’s in the form of a PDF for some reason.

Here’s what I wrote:

This is probably more of a hope than a prediction, but 2021 could be the year that the ponzi scheme of online tracking and surveillance begins to crumble. People are beginning to realize that it’s far too intrusive, that it just doesn’t work most of the time, and that good ol’-fashioned contextual advertising would be better. Right now, it feels similar to the moment before the sub-prime mortgage bubble collapsed (a comparison made in Tim Hwang’s recent book, Subprime Attention Crisis). Back then people thought “Well, these big banks must know what they’re doing,” just as people have thought, “Well, Facebook and Google must know what they’re doing”…but that confidence is crumbling, exposing the shaky stack of cards that props up behavioral advertising. This doesn’t mean that online advertising is coming to an end—far from it. I think we might see a golden age of relevant, content-driven advertising. Laws like Europe’s GDPR will play a part. Apple’s recent changes to highlight privacy-violating apps will play a part. Most of all, I think that people will play a part. They will be increasingly aware that there’s nothing inevitable about tracking and surveillance and that the web works better when it respects people’s right to privacy. The sea change might not happen in 2021 but it feels like the water is beginning to swell.

Still, predicting the future is a mug’s game with as much scientific rigour as astrology, reading tea leaves, or haruspicy.

Much like behavioural advertising.

I went to art college in my younger days. It didn’t take. I wasn’t very good and I didn’t work hard. So I dropped out before they could kick me out.

But I remember one instance where I actually ended up putting in more work than my fellow students—an exceptional situation.

In the first year of art college, we did a foundation course. That’s when you try a bit of everything to help you figure out what you want to concentrate on: painting, sculpture, ceramics, printing, photography, and so on. It was a bit of a whirlwind, which was generally a good thing. If you realised you really didn’t like a subject, you didn’t have to stick it out for long.

One of those subjects was animation—a relatively recent addition to the roster. On the first day, the tutor gave everyone a pack of typing paper: 500 sheets of A4. We were told to use them to make a piece of animation. Put something on the first piece of paper. Take a picture. Now put something slightly different on the second piece of paper. Take a picture of that. Repeat another 498 times. At 24 frames a second, the result would be just over 20 seconds of animation. No computers, no mobile phones. Everything by hand. It was so tedious.

And I loved it. I ended up asking for more paper.

(Actually, this was another reason why I ended up dropping out. I really, really enjoyed animation but I wasn’t able to major in it—I could only take it as a minor.)

I remember getting totally absorbed in the production. It was the perfect mix of tedium and creativity. My mind was simultaneously occupied and wandering free.

Recently I’ve been re-experiencing that same feeling. This time, it’s not in the world of visuals, but of audio. I’m working on season two of the Clearleft podcast.

For both seasons and episodes, this is what the process looks like:

1. Decide on topics. This will come from a mix of talking to Alex, discussing work with my colleagues, and gut feelings about what might be interesting.
2. Gather material. This involves arranging interviews with people; sometimes co-workers, sometimes peers in the wider industry. I also trawl through the archives of talks from Clearleft conferences for relevent presentations.
3. Assemble the material. This is where I’m chipping away at the marble of audio interviews to get at the nuggets within. I play around with the flow of themes, trying different juxtapositions and narrative structures.
4. Tie everything together. I add my own voice to introduce the topic and segue from point to point.
5. Release. I upload the audio, update the RSS feed, and publish the transcript.

Lots of podcasts (that I really enjoy) stop at step two: record a conversation and then release it verbatim. Job done.

Being a glutton for punishment, I wanted to do more of an amalgamation for each episode, weaving multiple conversations together.

Right now I’m in step three. That’s where I’ve found the same sweet spot that I had back in my art college days. It’s somewhat mindless work, snipping audio waveforms and adjusting volume levels. At the same time, there’s the creativity of putting those audio snippets into a logical order. I find myself getting into the zone, losing track of time. It’s the same kind of flow state you get from just the right level of coding or design work. Normally this kind of work lends itself to having some background music, but that’s not an option with podcast editing. I’ve got my headphones on, but my ears are busy.

I imagine that is what life is like for an audio engineer or producer.

When I first started the Clearleft podcast, I thought I would need to use GarageBand for this work, arranging multiple tracks on a timeline. Then I discovered Descript. It’s been an enormous time-saver. It’s like having GarageBand and a text editor merged into one. I can see the narrative flow as a text document, as well as looking at the accompanying waveforms.

Descript isn’t perfect. The transcription accuracy is good enough to allow me to search through my corpus of material, but it’s not accurate enough to publish as is. Still, it gives me some nice shortcuts. I can elimate ums and ahs in one stroke, or shorten any gaps that are too long.

But even with all those conveniences, this is still time-consuming work. If I spend three or four hours with my head down sculpting some audio and I get anything close to five minutes worth of usable content, I consider it time well spent.

Sometimes when I’m knee-deep in a piece of audio, trimming and arranging it just so to make a sentence flow just right, there’s a voice in the back of my head that says, “You know that no one is ever going to notice any of this, don’t you?” I try to ignore that voice. I mean, I know the voice is right, but I still think it’s worth doing all this fine tuning. Even if nobody else knows, I’ll have the satisfaction of transforming the raw audio into something a bit more polished.

If you aren’t already subscribed to the RSS feed of the Clearleft podcast, I recommend adding it now. New episodes will start showing up …sometime soon.

Yes, I’m being a little vague on the exact dates. That’s because I’m still in the process of putting the episodes together.

So if you’ll excuse me, I need to put my headphones on and enter the zone.

I really, really missed speaking at conferences in 2020. I managed to squeeze in just one meatspace presentation before everything shut down. That was in Nottingham, where myself and Remy reprised our double-bill talk, How We Built The World Wide Web In Five Days.

That was pretty much all the travelling I did in 2020, apart from a joyous jaunt to Galway to celebrate my birthday shortly before the Nottingham trip. It’s kind of hilarious to look at a map of the entirety of my travel in 2020 compared to previous years.

Mind you, one of my goals for 2020 was to reduce my carbon footprint. Mission well and truly accomplished there.

But even when travel was out of the question, conference speaking wasn’t entirely off the table. I gave a brand new talk at An Event Apart Online Together: Front-End Focus in August. It was called Design Principles For The Web and I’ve just published a transcript of the presentation. I’m really pleased with how it turned out and I think it works okay as an article as well as a talk. Have a read and see what you think (or you can listen to the audio if you prefer).

Giving a talk online is …weird. It’s very different from public speaking. The public is theoretically there but you feel like you’re just talking at your computer screen. If anything, it’s more like recording a podcast than giving a talk.

Luckily for me, I like recording podcasts. So I’m going to be doing a new online talk this year. It will be at An Event Apart’s Spring Summit which runs from April 19th to 21st. Tickets are available now.

I have a pretty good idea what I’m going to talk about. Web stuff, obviously, but maybe a big picture overview this time: the past, present, and future of the web.

Time to prepare a conference talk.