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Scott shares the code that Filament Group are using to determine which style declarations are critical (and can be inlined) and which are non-critical (and can be loaded asynchronously). It makes quite a difference in perceived performance.
By the way, I really, really like the terminology of “critical” and “non-critical” CSS, rather than “above the fold” and “below the fold” CSS.
Dave wanted to figure out if having a responsive site necessarily meant taking a performance hit, so he ran the numbers on his own site. It turns out all of performance-related issues are not related to responsive design.
Ten facets of web development that you can choose to focus on. One of them is from me …but other nine are worth paying attention to.
Zoe uses one little case study to contrast two different CSS techniques: display-table and flexbox. Flexbox definitely comes out on top when it comes to true source-order independence.
A nice profile of BERG’s Little Printer. That Matt Webb is a smart cookie. He is also a very thoughtful cookie.
I met Cesar at An Event Apart in San Diego earlier this year. We had a nice lunchtime chat and he suggested that I come on his show, Pencil vs Pixel. I was, of course, honoured and I accepted his invitation immediately.
If you were in any doubt that Warren Ellis is going to blow the roof off the Brighton Dome at dConstruct, this is what happens when he decides to write a little something every day.
A set of slides from Destiny Montague and Lara Swanson at Etsy with their advice on setting up a device lab. Lara also wrote about the device lab on the Etsy code blog.
I can relate to every single word that Bastian has written here.
The longer I look at boilerplates, build tools, frameworks and ways to make my life as a developer easier, the more I long for the basics.
Turns out that the :checked pseudo-class selector allows you to do some clever interaction without JavaScript.
Some very handy techniques for working with right-to-left text.
There’s a memorial picnic in Central Park on Saturday for Chloe. I wish I could be there.
Over 700 screenshots of ZX Spectrum games, captured by Jason Scott. Some of these bring back memories.
The challenges of maintaining a living breathing front-end style guide for an always-evolving product (the Lonely Planet website in this case).
Mark Otto talks through the state of Github’s CSS and the processes behind updating it. There’s a nice mix of pragmatism and best practices, together with a recognition that there’s always room for improvement.
This year’s collection of twelve sci-fi stories from Technology Review features three dConstruct speakers: Lauren Beukes, Cory Doctorow, and Warren Ellis.
An alternative history from a parallel timeline.
He started coding his own just weeks after Tim Berners-Lee, a tunnel engineer helping to build the STERN protein collider, discovered ancient scrolls buried in the Swiss soil that revealed the secrets of HTML.
The image-stitching algorithm is trying its best.
Kubrickian pictures taken by the Google robot wherein it captures its own reflection.
The first Lunar Orbiter, Andy Warhol’s Amiga, and George R.R. Martin’s WordStar …the opening address to the Digital Preservation 2014 conference July 22 in Washington, DC.
Just as early filmmakers couldn’t have predicted the level of ongoing interest in their work over a hundred years later, who can say what future generations will find important to know and preserve about the early history of software?
(Mind you, I can’t help but feel that the chances of this particular text have a long life at a Medium URL are pretty slim.)
This was a lot of fun for us. It might even be fun to listen to.
If you haven’t seen Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, then listen ye not—this is a spoilerific podcast episode.
Literally a library of patterns: y’know, for tiling background images. Old school!
If you’re going to check out the New Yorker’s nice new responsive site, might I suggest you start here?
An early look at the just-in-time interactions that Scott has been working on:
Nearby works like this. An enabled object broadcasts a short description of itself and a URL to devices nearby listening. Those URLs are grabbed and listed by the app, and tapping on one brings you to the object’s webpage, where you can interact with it—say, tell it to perform a task.
This fetching red future friendly T-shirt would look quite good on you. Just down beam down to any planetary surfaces as part of an away team.
Profits go to the Internet Archive.
Well, thanks to the ass-hattery of AddThis, the use case of your site’s visitors switching off JavaScript for (legitimate) security reasons just became a lot more plausible.
But you’re using JavaScript as an enhancement, right? You’re not relying on it for core tasks, right?
The Internet forgets every single day.
I’m with Jason.
I encourage you all to take a moment and consider the importance of preserving your online creations for yourself, your family, and for future generations.
James talks about his latest project, The Right To Flight.
We are missing someone special this CSS Summit.
Lighthouse are putting on their Improving Reality conference again this year. It’s the day before dConstruct. Come to both!
For your consideration.
If enough people want a print run of this lovely Future Friendly T-shirt, then they’ll make a new batch.
The profits go to the Internet Archive.
A look behind the scenes of gov.uk. I like their attitude to Photoshop comps:
We don’t want a culture of designs being “thrown over a wall” to a dev team. We don’t make “high fidelity mock ups” or “high fidelity wireframes”. We’re making a Thing, not pictures of a Thing.
And UX:
We don’t have a UX Team. If the problem with your service is that the servers are slow and the UX Team can’t change that, then they aren’t in control of the user experience and they shouldn’t be called the user experience team.
A new browser on the block (though not a new rendering engine), this one is written is written entirely in JavaScript. It’s worth taking it for a spin to see some of the interesting interface ideas around tabs and loading indicators.
Personally, I’m all for more browsers. The more, the merrier.
Almost six minutes of me squinting in the sun and sharing my reckons while seagulls squawk in the background.
The first in a series of posts looking at the process behind builfing this “quantified self” site:
As with most decisions in my life, I asked myself: What would Tony Stark do?
45 years ago today.
I keep thinking that the world needs more Chloe, not less
Here’s an intriguing approach to offering a navigation control that adapts as the user scrolls.
I’m not too keen on the way it duplicates the navigation in the markup though. I might have a play to see if I can find a way to progressively enhance up from a link-to-footer pattern to achieve this.
John peers behind the surface veneer of the web’s current screen-based setting:
The challenge for us as developers and designers for the web becomes less about screens and pixels and buttons and much more about how the web augments our lives, both actively and passively; how it makes us know ourselves and our homes and workplaces and environments better.
Watch the skies: James Bridle’s balloon will be hovering above London distributing wifi.
A look at the architectural history of the network hubs of New York: 32 Avenue of the Americas and 60 Hudson Street. Directed by Davina Pardo and written by her husband Andrew Blum, author of Tubes: A Journey to the Centre of the Internet.
These buildings were always used as network hubs. It’s just that the old networks were used to house the infrastructure of telephone networks (these were the long line buildings).
In a way, the big server hotel of New York—111 Eight Avenue—was also always used to route packets …it’s just that the packets used to be physical.
The Aaron Swartz film is available on the Internet Archive under a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial share-alike license.
A peek behind the scenes of an interesting new navigation pattern on the Guardian’s still-in-beta responsive site.
You can try it out here
Here’s a dystopian vision of the web in ten years time, where professional developers are the only people able to publish on the web.
This is why it worries me when I come across very smart people who don’t seem to see a problem with the creation of web pages being taken out of the reach of any human being with an internet connection and a smattering of declarative languages—HTML, CSS—and into the hands of an elite minority of JavaScript programmers.
A handy reference for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript features. Each feature has a bare-bones demo at a nice guessable URL e.g. http://simpl.info/datalist/
A concise case study from gov.uk:
Designing for the constraints of mobile is useful – if we get the fundamentals of the service working on small screens and slow network speeds, it can work on more capable devices.
My interest in rich client-side apps has almost entirely reversed, and now I’m more interested in doing good ol’ server rendering with the occasional side of progressive enhancement, just like we did it in 2004.
This post resonates with me 100%.
Where will I be in 10 years? I don’t know. I hope I still will have some in-demand skills to pay the bills. But it feels like all I see are DevOps and JavaScript, and I know less and less every day about those things.
Heydon Pickering put together a great collection of accessible self-contained interface patterns that demonstrate smart use of ARIA.
Photos from the first Science Hack Day in China which just wrapped up.
A profile of Norbert Wiener, and how his star was eclipsed by Claude Shannon.
I just feel very sad that she isn’t around anymore, and I can’t reach out to her and say, “Hey, me too.”
It feels like I have lost one of my own.
RIP, Chloe.
Even though we didn’t spend loads of time together, I will miss you Chloe; your quirky tweets, your fantastic photos of FACE, and the wonderful things you made both online and in real life.
Chloe often told me about Jill, her friend at work, and how they bonded straight away.
That was Chloe. She was exceptional. I hate that “was” is not “is.”
What struck me most - and has always stayed with me - is how Chloe appeared to be the kindest, most sweet person I could have wished to meet. She was the actual definition of “lovely” and “kind”, through and through.
Chloe was generous with her emotions, but not in a needy or narcissistic way. I think she just found honesty more efficient than posturing. She didn’t hide her depression, but she didn’t let it define her, either. The clouds that followed her around wouldn’t hesitate to part for a good joke or an enthusiastic conversation about shared passions. Her wit was incisive and unassuming, her smile was enormous, and it was tremendously satisfying to make her laugh.
Geri remembers Chloe.
Someone else who was inspired by Chloe, without ever having met her.
Chloe was an inspiration, even to people she never met.
I always wondered how Chloe was able to create so much so well from such a young age. I could never grasp web dev, knitting intimidated the crap out of me, and I still think she’s one of the best writers I’ve ever read.
I still can’t make peace with the fact, and honestly not sure if I ever will, that Chloe Weil is no longer with us.
I want you to know that she vibrated at a different frequency. I don’t really know how to put it any other way. Her raw talent just seemed so effortless. Her dark discomfort wouldn’t allow her to see how loved she was, or how incredible, or how talented. But you can see it, and you don’t need my help. Read for yourself. She will stop you in your tracks.
On the fifth anniversary of Pinboard, Maciej reflects on working on long-term projects:
Avoiding burnout is difficult to write about, because the basic premise is obnoxious. Burnout is a rich man’s game. Rice farmers don’t get burned out and spend long afternoons thinking about whether to switch to sorghum.
…
The good news is, as you get older, you gain perspective. Perspective helps alleviate burnout.
The bad news is, you gain perspective by having incredibly shitty things happen to you and the people you love. Nature has made it so that perspective is only delivered in bulk quantities. A railcar of perspective arrives and dumps itself on your lawn when all you needed was a microgram.
Chloe, I wish I’d told you in life how much I admire you, how incredibly talented I think you are.
The transcript of Anab Jain’s talk from the FutureEverything Festival.
Words of wisdom from Scott on the clash of brand guidelines and the flexible nature of the web:
One thing I am pretty sure of though, is that having a fast, accessible, user-friendly site can reflect incredibly well on a company, and I’d love to see more guidelines and expectations that prioritize these aspects of a service as branding requirements in addition to the usual visual details.
This (literally) charts the evolution of HTML, tracking which elements have been added and which have been removed.
Neil Berry writes down his thoughts prompted by Responsive Day Out 2.
A new essay from Maciej on Idle Words is always a treat, and this latest dispatch from Yemen is as brilliantly-written as you’d expect.
A brilliant idea (and implementation) from Kartik. By combing webmentions and fragmentions, it’s possible to allow a kind of distributed marginalia: you post a comment on your site about a specific passage in a post on my site and a smattering of CSS and JavaScript can display it in the right context.
A great blow-by-blow account of Responsive Day Out 2 from Simon R Jones.
I can very much relate to what Dan is talking about here. I have no idea what I do any more.
No doubt we’ll always feel we’re behind the curve as there always seems like more to learn. That’s OK. No-one knows it all, but it is hard knowing what people expect of you.
Phil Baker writes up his thoughts on all the day’s talks.
What follows here is not a full account of each talk, you can listen to the audio recordings for that. This is more a collection of my main take-aways for the day, and what I found most interesting.
Marc Jenkins shares his thoughts on Responsive Day Out 2.
Another lovely write-up of Responsive Day Out 2.
Now this is what I call a conference write-up. Paul synthesises the talks from Responsive Day Out 2 into five principles for responsive design:
With the usual caveat that I wish this were published on Craig’s own site, I particularly like this passage:
Apps, too, are ephemeral. Some of the most ephemeral software we’ve ever produced. Ephemeral if for no other reason than because of their gated homes. Our apps cower below the fickle whim of App Store Gods, struck down for no reasonable reasons or for very reasonable reasons. It doesn’t matter which, the end result is always the same: gone, forever.
Sally and I will be speaking at this free evening in London on August 7th.
The brilliant George Oates has started a new design company with an emphasis on cultural heritage: “explicit notes to the future, local archives of global content.” Watch this space
A clever way of doing progressive disclosure with CSS.
This looks like it could be a great book for anyone looking to get starting with JavaScript.
