Building a robust frontend using progressive enhancement - Service Manual - GOV.UK
Oh, how I wish that every team building for the web would use this sensible approach!
I really like Alex’s framing of best-of-breed progressively enhanced websites as “progressive apps” (although Bruce has some other ideas about the naming).
It’s a shame that the add-to-homescreen part isn’t standardised yet though.
Oh, how I wish that every team building for the web would use this sensible approach!
I’m very glad to see that work has moved away from a separate selectmenu
element to instead enhancing the existing select
element—I could never see an upgrade path for selectmenu
, but now there are plenty of opportunities for progressive enhancement.
Perhaps the tide is finally turning against complex web frameworks.
I want to be a part of a frontend culture that accepts and promotes our responsibilities to others, rather than wallowing in self-centred “DX” puffery. In the hierarchy of priorities, users must come first.
Alex doesn’t pull his punches in this four-part truth-telling:
The React anti-pattern of hugely bloated single-page apps has to stop. And we can stop it.
Success or failure is in your hands, literally. Others in the equation may have authority, but you have power.
Begin to use that power to make noise. Refuse to go along with plans to build YAJSD (Yet Another JavaScript Disaster). Engineering leaders look to their senior engineers for trusted guidance about what technologies to adopt. When someone inevitably proposes the React rewrite, do not be silent. Do not let the bullshit arguments and nonsense justifications pass unchallenged. Make it clear to engineering leadership that this stuff is expensive and is absolutely not “standard”.
This is an interesting thought from Scott: using Shadow DOM in HTML web components but only as a way of providing sort-of user-agent styles:
providing some default, low-specificity styles for our slotted light-dom HTML elements while allowing them to be easily overridden.
Here’s how I interpret the top-level guidance in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Naming custom elements, naming attributes, the single responsibility principle, and communicating across components.
HTML web components for augmenting date inputs.
A little fix for Safari.
If you’re going to toggle the display of content with CSS, make sure the more complex selector does the hiding, not the showing.