Justified Text: Better Than Expected? – Cloud Four
Some interesting experiments in web typography here.
State of the gap
Remy looks at the closing gap between native and web. Things are looking pretty damn good for the web, with certain caveats:
The web is the long game. It will always make progress. Free access to both consumers and producers is a core principle. Security is also a core principle, and sometimes at the costs of ease to the developer (but if it were easy it wouldn’t be fun, right?).
That’s why there’ll always be some other technology that’s ahead of the web in terms of features, but those features give the web something to aim for:
Flash was the plugin that was ahead of the web for a long time, it was the only way to play video for heavens sake!
Whereas before we needed polyfills like PhoneGap (whose very reason for existing is to make itself obsolete), now with progressive web apps, we’re proving the philosophy behind PhoneGap:
If the web doesn’t do something today it’s not because it can’t, or won’t, but rather it is because we haven’t gotten around to implementing that capability yet.
Related links
Untapped – Using Simple Tools as a Radical Act of Independence
It would be much harder for a 15-year-old today to View Source and understand the code structure that built the website they’re on. Every site is layered with analytics, code snippets, javascript plugins, CMS data, and more.
This is why the simplicity of HTML and CSS now feels like a radical act. To build a website with just these tools is a small protest against platform capitalism: a way to assert sustainability, independence, longevity.
Churn
This is a good description of the appeal of HTML web components:
WC lifecycles are crazy simple: you register the component with
customElements.defineand it’s off to the races. Just write a class and the browser will take care of elements appearing and disappearing for you, regardless of whether they came from a full reload, a fetch request, or—god forbid—adocument.write. The syntax looks great in markup, too: no more having to decorate withjs-somethingclasses or data attributes, you just wrap your shit in a custom element calledsomething-controllerand everyone can see what you’re up to. Since I’m firmly in camp “progressively enhance or go home” this fits me like a glove, and I also have great hopes for Web Components improving the poor state of pulling in epic dependencies like date pickers or text editors.
Bugs I’ve filed on browsers | Read the Tea Leaves
I think filing bugs on browsers is one of the most useful things a web developer can do.
Agreed!
Apple backs off killing web apps, but the fight continues - Open Web Advocacy
Hallelujah! Apple have backed down on their petulant plan to sabatoge homescreen apps.
I’m very grateful to the Open Web Advocacy group for standing up to this bullying.
Related posts
content-visibility in Safari
Safari 18 supports `content-visibility: auto` …but there’s a very niche little bug in the implementation.
The datalist element on iOS
Some buggy behaviour has been fixed in iOS 18 but now there’s a new bit of weirdness.
Rotten Apple
Apple are planning to kill mobile web apps. This is not an exaggeration. We must stop them.
HTML web components
Don’t replace. Augment.
Web Audio API update on iOS
The behaviour is more consistent now.