Link archive: December, 2019

Running Code Over Time – Eric’s Archived Thoughts

We should think of our code, even our designs, as running for decades, and alter our work to match.

The People’s Web

Every day, millions of people rely on independent websites that are mostly created by regular people, weren’t designed as mobile apps, connect deeply to culture, and aren’t run by the giant tech companies. These are a vision of not just what the web once was, but what it can be again.

This really hits home for me. Anil could be describing The Session here:

They often start as a labor of love from one person, or one small, tightly-knit community. The knowledge or information set that they record is considered obscure or even worthless to outsiders, until it becomes so comprehensive that its collective worth is undeniable.

This is a very important message:

Taken together, these sites are as valuable as any of the giant platforms run by the tech titans.

How creating a Progressive Web App has made our website better for people and planet

Creating a PWA has saved a lot of kilobytes after the initial load by storing files on the device to reuse on subsequent requests – this in turn lowers the load time and carbon footprint on subsequent page views, making the website better for both people and planet. We’ve also enabled offline access, which significantly improves user experience for people in areas with patchy connections, such as mobile users on their commute.

Move Fast & Don’t Break Things | Filament Group, Inc.

This is the transcript of a brilliant presentation by Scott—read the whole thing! It starts with a much-needed history lesson that gets to where we are now with the dismal state of performance on the web, and then gives a whole truckload of handy tips and tricks for improving performance when it comes to styles, scripts, images, fonts, and just about everything on the front end.

Essential!

The Accidental Side Project ◆ 24 ways

This gets me right in the feels.

I can’t believe I was lucky enough to contribute to 24 Ways seven times over its fifteen year lifespan!

Building a More Honest Internet - Columbia Journalism Review

The dominant narrative for the growth of the World Wide Web, the graphical, user-friendly version of the internet created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, is that its success has been propelled by Silicon Valley venture capitalism at its most rapacious. The idea that currently prevails is that the internet is best built by venture-backed startups competing to offer services globally through category monopolies: Amazon for shopping, Google for search, Facebook for social media. These companies have generated enormous profits for their creators and early investors, but their “surveillance capitalism” business model has brought unanticipated harms.

It doesn’t have to be this way, says Ethan Zuckerman:

A public service Web invites us to imagine services that don’t exist now, because they are not commercially viable, but perhaps should exist for our benefit, for the benefit of citizens in a democracy. We’ve seen a wave of innovation around tools that entertain us and capture our attention for resale to advertisers, but much less innovation around tools that educate us and challenge us to broaden our sphere of exposure, or that amplify marginalized voices. Digital public service media would fill a black hole of misinformation with educational material and legitimate news.

The modern web is becoming an unusable, user-hostile wasteland

If you add another advertisement to your pages, you generate more revenue. If you track your users better, now you can deliver tailored ads and your conversion rates are higher. If you restrict users from leaving your walled garden ecosystem, now you get all the juice from whatever attention they have.

The question is: At which point do we reach the breaking point?

And I think the answer is: We are very close.

Facebook. Twitter. Medium. All desparate to withhold content they didn’t even create until you cough up your personal details.

This Page is Designed to Last: A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web

Geocities, LiveJournal, what.cd, now Yahoo Groups. One day, Medium, Twitter, and even hosting services like GitHub Pages will be plundered then discarded when they can no longer grow or cannot find a working business model.

Considering the needs of someone who wants to make and maintain a website, without the ridiculous complexity of “modern” web tooling:

How do we make web content that can last and be maintained for at least 10 years? As someone studying human-computer interaction, I naturally think of the stakeholders we aren’t supporting. Right now putting up web content is optimized for either the professional web developer (who use the latest frameworks and workflows) or the non-tech savvy user (who use a platform).

Artificial Intelligence: Threat or Menace? - Charlie’s Diary

I am not a believer in the AI singularity — the rapture of the nerds — that is, in the possibility of building a brain-in-a-box that will self-improve its own capabilities until it outstrips our ability to keep up. What CS professor and fellow SF author Vernor Vinge described as “the last invention humans will ever need to make”. But I do think we’re going to keep building more and more complicated, systems that are opaque rather than transparent, and that launder our unspoken prejudices and encode them in our social environment. As our widely-deployed neural processors get more powerful, the decisions they take will become harder and harder to question or oppose. And that’s the real threat of AI — not killer robots, but “computer says no” without recourse to appeal.

99 Good News Stories You Probably Didn’t Hear About in 2019

The goal in putting these stories together has never been to create a warm glow, or lull anyone into a false sense of complacency. The challenges facing the human family right now are big and scary and there’s no guarantee we will overcome them.

As millions of people have demonstrated in the past 12 months though, action is possible, better solutions are available and a better future can be built.

How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer – Marko Saric

• Don’t use Google search
• Don’t use the Chrome browser
• Don’t use AMP on your own sites
• Why are so many sites slow in the first place?
• Treat the cause: Third-party requests slow down the web
• How to make your sites faster than AMP without using AMP

The Origin Story of Container Queries—zachleat.com

Everyone wants it, but it sure seems like no one is actively working on it.

Zach traces the earliest inklings of container queries to an old blog post of Andy’s—back when he was at Clearleft—called Responsive Containers:

For fun, here’s some made-up syntax (which Jeremy has dubbed ‘selector queries’)…

Yap

yap is an ephemeral, real-time chat room with up to six participants. your messages appear and disappear as quickly as you type them, which means unless you pay attention to what everyone says (for once), you’ll miss it.

The Deep Sea

After showing us the size of space, here’s a fascinating intereactive visualisation of the ocean depths.

Why `details` is Not an Accordion - daverupert.com

At the risk of being a broken record; HTML really needs <accordion> , <tabs>, <dialog>, <dropdown>, and <tooltip> elements. Not more “low-level primitives” but good ol’ fashioned, difficult-to-get-consensus-on elements.

Hear, hear!

I wish browsers would prioritize accessibility improvements over things like main thread scheduling optimization to unblock tracking pixels and the Sisyphean task of competing with native.

If we really want to win, let’s make it easy for everyone to access the Web.

Self Treat

It’s been an absolute pleasure having Holly, Laçin, and Beyza at Clearleft while they’ve been working on this three-month internship project:

Self Treat is a vision piece designed to increase self-management of minor health conditions.

You can also read the blog posts they wrote during the process:

• Defining the problem
• Developing Concepts
• Becoming medical experts in the world of design
• Learnings from a design internship

How readable—Findings

The results are in for Daniel van Berzon’s most recent experiment into accurately measuring code readability. You can read the results and read about the methodology behind them.

The Server Souvenir: Taking Home Remnants of Virtual Worlds | Platypus

When the game developer Blizzard Entertainment decommissioned some of their server blades to be auctioned off, they turned them into commemorative commodities, adding an etching onto the metal frame with the server’s name (e.g., “Proudmoore” or “Darkspear”), its dates of operation, and an inscription: “within the circuits and hard drive, a world of magic, adventure, and friendship thrived… this server was home to thousands of immersive experiences.” While stripped of their ability to store virtual memory or connect people to an online game world, these servers were valuable and meaningful as worlds and homes. They became repositories of social and spatial memory, souvenirs from WoW.

Basil: Secret Santa as a Service | Trys Mudford

Trys writes up the process—and the tech (JAM)stack—he used to build basil.christmas.

“Link In Bio” is a slow knife

For a closed system, those kinds of open connections are deeply dangerous. If anyone on Instagram can just link to any old store on the web, how can Instagram — meaning Facebook, Instagram’s increasingly-overbearing owner — tightly control commerce on its platform? If Instagram users could post links willy-nilly, they might even be able to connect directly to their users, getting their email addresses or finding other ways to communicate with them. Links represent a threat to closed systems.

Anil Dash on the war on hyperlinks.

It may be presented as a cost-saving measure, or as a way of reducing the sharing of untrusted links. But it is a strategy, designed to keep people from the open web, the place where they can control how, and whether, someone makes money off of an audience. The web is where we can make sites that don’t abuse data in the ways that Facebook properties do.

Saron Yitbarek and Jeremy Keith - Command Line Heroes Live Podcast - View Source 2019 - YouTube

Here’s the live podcast recording I was on at the View Source conference in Amsterdam a while back, all about the history of JavaScript.

My contribution starts about ten minutes in. I really, really enjoyed our closing chat around the 25 minute mark.

It was such a pleasure and an honour to watch Saron at work—she did an amazing job!

AI Weirdness • Play AI Dungeon 2. Become a dragon. Eat the moon.

After reading this account of a wonderfully surreal text adventure game, you’ll probably want to play AI Dungeon 2:

A PhD student named Nathan trained the neural net on classic dungeon crawling games, and playing it is strangely surreal, repetitive, and mesmerizing, like dreaming about playing one of the games it was trained on.

It’s Time to Get Personal ◆ 24 ways

When people ask where to find you on the web, what do you tell them? Your personal website can be your home on the web. Or, if you don’t like to share your personal life in public, it can be more like your office. As with your home or your office, you can make it work for your own needs. Do you need a place that’s great for socialising, or somewhere to present your work? Without the constraints of somebody else’s platform, you get to choose what works for you.

A terrific piece from Laura enumerating the many ways that having your own website can empower you.

Have you already got your own website already? Fabulous! Is there anything you can do to make it easier for those who don’t have their own sites yet? Could you help a person move their site away from a big platform? Could you write a tutorial or script that provides guidance and reassurance?

Level of Effort | Brad Frost

Brad gets ranty …with good reason.

2019 Firefox Flashback

Here’s an end-of-year roundup of all the data that Mozilla have gathered through their Firefox browser—very impressive!

I <3 the cascade! | Go Make Things

Chris makes the valid observation that JavaScript programmers who bemoan the “global scope” of CSS are handily forgetting that JavaScript also has global scope by default.

JS is also global by default. We use IIFEs and wrapper functions to add scope.

And for all this talk about CSS being global, you can actually scope styles when you need to. It’s more-or-less the same way you do it in JavaScript.

Motion Paths - Past, Present and Future | Codrops

This is superbly in-depth and easy-to-follow article from Cassie—everything you need to know about motion paths in SVG and CSS! It’s worth reading just for the wonderful examples.

Music and Web Design | Brad Frost

I feel my trajectory as a musician maps to the trajectory of the web industry. The web is still young. We’re all still figuring stuff out and we’re all eager to get better. In our eagerness to get better, we’re reaching for more complexity. More complex abstractions, build processes, and tools. Because who wants to be bored playing in 4/4 when you can be playing in 7/16?

I hope we in the web field will arrive at the same realization that I did as a musician: complexity is not synonymous with quality.

Can I get an “Amen!”?

The New York City Subway Map as You’ve Never Seen It Before - The New York Times

The design history of the New York subway map.

Design Questions Library | d.school public library

This site is not meant to be exhaustive, but rather a useful guide—our FAQ for design understanding. We hope it will inspire discussion, some questioning, a little soul searching, and ideally, a bit of intellectual support for your everyday endeavors.

The Design Questions Library goes nicely with the Library of Ambiguity.

Just enough Internet | doteveryone

The carbon cost of collecting and storing data no one can use is already a moral issue.

So before you add another field, let alone make a new service, can you be sure it will make enough of a difference to legitimise its impact on the planet?

Episode 226 – Create Your Own Website Write about What You Discover and Be Dependable with Jeremy Keith – IT Career Energizer

This was a really fun podcast chat—nice and snappy at just 20 minutes.

Huffduff it.

HEAD - A free guide to `head` elements

A one-stop shop for all the metacrap you can put in the head of your HTML documents.

Oddly Amazing Animals from A to Z

This book is a beautiful tribute to Cindy.

Several talented illustrators have come together to create a unique book about unique animals. Each contributor has a special connection to the book’s original illustrator, Cindy Li. When she was unable to complete the illustrations before passing away in 2018, many of Cindy’s talented friends offered to help finish the project.

I think you should get a copy of this book for the little animal lover in your life this Christmas.

Proceeds from the sale of this book benefit Apollo Li Harris and Orion Li Harris, two out-of-this-world kids who had an amazing mom.

Six Web Performance Technologies to Watch in 2020 – Simon Hearne

The inexorable rise of frameworks such as Angular, React, Vue and their many cousins has been led by an assumption that managing state in the browser is quicker than a request to a server. This assumption, I can only assume, is made by developers who have flagship mobile devices or primarily work on desktop devices.