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Some solid research here. Turns out that using input type=”text” inputmode=”numeric” pattern="[0-9]*" is probably a better bet than using input type="number".
Why do people respect JavaScript or other languages enough to learn them inside-out, and yet constantly dunk on CSS?
The headline begs the question, but Robin makes this very insightful observation in the article itself:
I reckon the biggest issue that engineers face — and the reason why they find it all so dang frustrating — is that CSS forces you to face the webishness of the web. Things require fallbacks. You need to take different devices into consideration, and all the different ways of seeing a website: mobile, desktop, no mouse, no keyboard, etc. Sure, you have to deal with that when writing JavaScript, too, but it’s easier to ignore. You can’t ignore your the layout of your site being completely broken on a phone.
A non-profit that offers digital preservation services for individuals.
Permanence means no subscriptions; a one-time payment for dedicated storage that preserves your most precious memories and an institution that will be there to protect the digital legacy of all people for all time.
How and when did I get to the point where I would consider a page weight of 4 MB on a large page and 500 KB on a small page normal?
This isn’t just a well-earned rant from Manuel. I mean, it *is that, but it’s also packed with practical performance advice.
I don’t understand what currying is, but Trys points out a really interesting thing about custom properties in CSS:
The value after the : in the CSS custom property does not have to be valid CSS.
That means you can use custom properties to store arbitrary strings of text, which can then be combined within a calc() function, at which point they get evaluated.
I didn’t know about scroll-margin-top! I wonder if you could apply a universal rule …like, say you’ve got a fixed header that’s 2em in height, couldn’t you declare:
:target {
scroll-margin-top: 2em;
}
This looks like an interesting hypertexty tool.
A new online publication from Julia Angwin:
Big Tech Is Watching You. We’re Watching Big Tech.
Lessons for web development from a home renovation project:
- Greenfield Projects Are Everyone’s Favorite
- The Last Person’s Work Is Always Bewildering
- It’s All About the Trade-Offs
- It ALWAYS Takes Longer Than You Think
- Communication, Communication, Communication!
And there’s this:
You know those old homes people love because they’re unique, have lasted for decades, and have all that character? In contrast, you have these modern subdivision homes that, while shiny and new, are often bland and identical (and sometimes shoddily built).
node_modulesis like the suburbia/subdivision of modern web development: it seems nice and fancy today, and most everyone is doing it, but in 30 years everyone will hate the idea. They’ll all need to be renovated or torn down. Meanwhile, the classical stuff that’s still standing from 100 years ago lives on but nobody seems to be building houses that way anymore for some reason. Similarly, the first website ever is still viewable in all modern web browsers. But many websites built last year on last year’s bleeding edge tech already won’t work in a browser.
I’ve really come to appreciate that performance isn’t just some property of a tool independent from its functionality or its feature set. Performance — in particular, being notably fast — is a feature in and of its own right, which fundamentally alters how a tool is used and perceived.
This is a fascinating look into how performance has knock-on effects beyond the obvious:
It’s probably fairly intuitive that users prefer faster software, and will have a better experience performing a given task if the tools are faster rather than slower.
What is perhaps less apparent is that having faster tools changes how users use a tool or perform a task.
This observation is particularly salient for web developers:
We have become accustomed to casually giving up factors of two or ten or more with our choices of tools and libraries, without asking if the benefits are worth it.
I love, love, love this encounter that Stephanie had with high school students when she showed them her own website (“Your website? You have a website?”).
I opened the DevTools on my site and there was an audible gasp from the class and excited murmuring.
“That’s your code?” A student asked. “Yes, that’s all my code!” “You wrote all of that?!” “Yes, it’s my website.”
And the class kind of exploded and starting talking amongst themselves. I was floored and my perspective readjusted.
When I code, it’s usually in HTML and CSS, and I suppose there’s a part of me that feels like that isn’t special because some tech bros decide to be vocal and loud about HTML and CSS not being special nearly everyday (it is special and tech bros can shut up.)
And the response from that class of high school students delighted me and grounded me in a way I haven’t experienced before. What I view as a simple code was absolute magic to them. And for all of us who code, I think we forget it is magic. Computational magic but still magic. HTML and CSS are magic.
Yes! Yes! Yes!
It may be the end of the world as we know it, but other worlds are possible.
Pages are often designed so that they’re hard or impossible to read if some dependency fails to load. On a slow connection, it’s quite common for at least one depedency to fail.
Fire up Reader Mode and read this excellent article informed by data from using a typically slow connection in rural USA today. Two findings are:
- A large fraction of the web is unusable on a bad connection. Even on a good (0% packetloss, no ping spike) dialup connection, some sites won’t load.
- Some sites will use a lot of data!
Jen kicked off a fascinating thread here:
It’s come up quite a few times recently that the world of people who make websites would greatly benefit from the CSS Working Group officially defining ”CSS 4”, and later “CSS 5“, etc.
The level is discourse is impressively smart and civil.
Personally, I don’t (yet) have an opinion on this either way, but I’ll be watching it unfold with keen interest.
Through planning and architectural design, Le Corbusier hoped to create a scientifically rational and comprehensive solution to urban problems in a way that would both promote democracy and quality of life. For him, the factory production process applied to high-rise buildings with prefabricated and standardized components is the most modern and egalitarian of urban forms.
Something something top-down design systems.
Guidebooks to countries that no longer exist.
The first book will be on the Republic of Venice. There’ll be maps, infographics, and I suspect there’ll be an appearance by Aldus Manutius.
Our first guidebook tells the story of the Republic of Venice, la Serenissima, a 1000-year old state that disappeared in 1797.
- Is this really a problem?
- Does the problem need to be solved?
- Does the problem need to be solved now?
- Does the problem need to be solved by me?
- Is there a simpler problem I can solve instead?
The characteristica universalis and the calculus racionator of Leibniz.
The beautiful 19th century data visualisations of Emma Willard unfold in this immersive piece by Susan Schulten.
Monica shares the little snippet of handy CSS she uses at the start of any project.
Have fun with this little machine, tweaking the parameters for generating a Joy Division/Jocelyn Bell-Burnell data visualisation.
The interface is quite delightful!
I am the programming equivalent of a home cook.
The exhortation “learn to code!” has its foundations in market value. “Learn to code” is suggested as a way up, a way out. “Learn to code” offers economic leverage, a squirt of power. “Learn to code” goes on your resume.
But let’s substitute a different phrase: “learn to cook.” People don’t only learn to cook so they can become chefs. Some do! But far more people learn to cook so they can eat better, or more affordably, or in a specific way.
Like a little mini CSS Zen Garden, here’s one compenent styled five very different ways.
Crucially, the order of the markup doesn’t consider the appearance—it’s concerned purely with what makes sense semantically. And now with CSS grid, elements can be rearranged regardless of source order.
CSS is powerful and capable of doing amazingly beautiful things. Let’s embrace that and keep the HTML semantical instead of adapting it to the need of the next design change.
This is so useful! Get instant results from Google’s Chrome User Experience Report without having to wait (or pay) for BigQuery.
Here’s an example of my site’s metrics over the last few months, complete with nice charts.
Here are the many, many reasons why you should not open links in a new window (or tab).
Regardless of what accessibility conformance level you target, do not arbitrarily open links in a new window or tab. If you are required to do so anyway, inform users in text.
- Write Chronologically, Not Spatially
- Write Left to Right, Top to Bottom
- Don’t Use Colors and Icons Alone
- Describe the Action, Not the Behavior
- Wrong: web workers will take over the world
- Wrong: Safari is the new IE
- Right: developer experience is trumping user experience
- Right: I’m better off without a Twitter account
- Right: the cost of small modules
- Mixed: progressive enhancement isn’t dead, but it smells funny
Maybe I should do one of these.
An absolutely gorgeous piece of hypermedia!
Data visualisations and interactive widgets enliven this maze of mathematics. Dig deep—you may just uncover the secret passages that join these concepts together.
Chris takes two side-by-side deep dives; one into the a element, the other into the button element.
Even if you think you already know those elements well, I bet there’ll be something new here for you. Like, did you know that the button element can have form over-riding attributes like formaction, formenctype, formmethod, formnovalidate, and formtarget?
This is going to be so useful for client work at Clearleft—instant snapshots of performance metrics across industries and regions!
For example, we’ve been working a lot with the travel sector, and now we can call up these benchmarks without having to generate a whole bunch of Web Page Test results ourselves.
See Tammy’s blog post for me details.
A great explanation of aria-label and aria-labelledby!
In this interview, Biance Berning says:
Cassie Evans from Clearleft is an interesting person to follow as she combines web animation with variable font technology, essentially exploring the technology’s practicality and expression.
Hells yeah!
We’re only just scratching the surface of what variable fonts can do within more interactive and immersive spaces. I think we’ll see a lot more progress and experimentation with that as time goes on.
Andy takes Utopia for a spin—it very much matches his approach.
This is the project that Trys and James have been working on at Clearleft. It’s a way of approaching modular scales in web typography that uses CSS locks and custom properties to fantastic effect.
Utopia is not a product, a plugin, or a framework. It’s a memorable/pretentious word we use to refer to a way of thinking about fluid responsive design.
Emergence and complex systems, explained with interactive diagrams.
The transcript of David Heinemeier Hansson keynote from last year’s RailsConf is well worth reading. It’s ostensibily about open source software but it delves into much larger questions.
It’s now easier than ever to style form controls without sacrificing semantics and accessibility:
The reason is that we can finally style the ::before and ::after pseudo-elements on the
<input>tag itself. This means we can keep and style an<input>and won’t need any extra elements. Before, we had to rely on the likes of an extra<div>or<span>, to pull off a custom design.
The demo is really nice. And best of all, you can wrap all of these CSS enhancements in a feaure query:
Hopefully, you’re seeing how nice it is to create custom form styles these days. It requires less markup, thanks to pseudo-elements that are directly on form inputs. It requires less fancy style switching, thanks to custom properties. And it has pretty darn good browser support, thanks to
@supports.
I’ve come to accept that our current approach to remedy poor performance largely consists of engineering techniques that stem from the ill effects of our business, product management, and engineering practices. We’re good at applying tourniquets, but not so good at sewing up deep wounds.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that web performance isn’t solely an engineering problem, but a problem of people.
Tantek documents the features he wants his posting interface to have.
Design systems can often ‘read’ as very top down, but need to be bottom up to reflect the needs of different users of different services in different contexts.
I’ve yet to be involved in a design system that hasn’t struggled to some extent for participation and contribution from the whole of its design community.
Like Brad, I switched to Firefox for web browsing and Duck Duck Go for searching quite a while back. I highly recommend it.
This is something we’ve learned at Clearleft—you can’t create a design system for an organisation, hand it over to them, and expect it to be maintained.
You can’t just hire an agency to create a design system and expect that the system alone will solve something. It won’t do much before the people in the organization align on this idea as well, believe in it, invest in it, and create a culture of collaboration around it.
The people who will be living with the design system must be (co-)creators of it. That’s very much the area we work in now.
Aaaaaand the circle is now complete.
Frank—whose post on architects and gardeners inspired my post on design systems and automation—has now written his follow-on post about all of this. His position?
It is a crisis of care.
As with anything, it’s not about the technology itself:
A well-made design system created for the right reasons is reparative. One created for the wrong reasons becomes a weapon for displacement. Tools are always beholden to values. This is well-trodden territory.
Another follow-on to my post about design systems and automation. Here, Matthew invokes the spirit of the much-misunderstood Luddite martyrs. It’s good stuff.
Design systems are used by greedy software companies to fatten their bottom line. UI kits replace skilled designers with cheap commoditized labor.
Agile practices pressure teams to deliver more and faster. Scrum underscores soulless feature factories that suck the joy from the craft of software development.
But progress requires more than breaking looms.
Brad weighs in on what I wrote about design systems and automation. He rightly points out that the issue isn’t with any particular tool—and a design system is, after all, a tool—but rather with the culture and processes of the organisation.
Sure, design systems have the ability to dehumanize and that’s something to actively watch out for. But I’d also say to pay close attention to the processes and organizational culture we take part in and contribute to.
There’s a full-on rant here about the dehumanising effects of what’s called “agile” at scale:
I’ve come to the conclusion that “enterprise web development” is just regular web development, only stripped of any joy or creativity or autonomy. It’s plugging a bunch of smart people into the matrix and forcing them to crank out widgets and move the little cards to the right.
But a design system that optimizes for consistency relies on compliance: specifically, the people using the system have to comply with the system’s rules, in order to deliver on that promised consistency. And this is why that, as a way of doing something, a design system can be pretty dehumanizing.
Ethan shares his thoughts on what I wrote about design systems and automation. He offers this test on whether a design system is empowering or disempowering:
Does the system you work with allow you to control the process of your work, to make situational decisions? Or is it simply a set of rules you have to follow?
Piece together your own regular expression or choose from a pre-made selection.
(Like the creator if this site, I’m not a fan of regular expressions …or they’re not a fan of me. The logic just doesn’t stick in my brain.)
Some really interesting ideas here from Hidde on how browsers could provide optional settings for users to override developers when it comes to accessibility issues like colour contrast, focus styles, and autoplaying videos.
We’ve industrialized design and are relegated to squeezing efficiencies out of it through our design systems. All CSS changes must now have a business value and user story ticket attached to it.
Dave follows on from my post about design systems and automation.
At the same time, I have seen first hand how design systems can yield improvements in accessibility, performance, and shared knowledge across a willing team. I’ve seen them illuminate problems in design and code. I’ve seen them speed up design and development allowing teams to build, share, and validate prototypes or A/B tests before undergoing costly guesswork in production. There’s value in these tools, these processes.
It’s wild because in engineering terms this question, how does it fail?, should be the first one we ask, but oftentimes it is never even considered in front-end development. A good example is most client-side JS frameworks that render the entire UI in the browser, how would your app or site fail in that situation?
JavaScript is fickle. It can fail to load. It can be disabled. It can be blocked. It can fail to run. It probably is fine most of the time, but when it fails, everything tends to go bad. And having such a hard point of failure is not ideal.
This is a very important point:
It’s important not to try making the no-JS experience work like the full one. The interface has to be revisited. Some features might even have to be removed, or dramatically reduced in scope. That’s also okay. As long as the main features are there and things work nicely, it should be fine that the experience is not as polished.
I absolutely love this in-depth history of the web, written in a snappy, snarky tone.
In the beginning, there was no CSS.
This was very bad.
Even if you—like me—lived through all this stuff, I guarantee there’ll still be something in here you didn’t know.
A global communications network now exists that’s cheap enough or in some cases even free to access, offering a pseudonymous way for people to feel safe enough to share a private experience with complete strangers? I give Facebook and Twitter a bunch of shit for their rhetoric about a global community (no, Facebook’s billions of users are no more a community than the television-watching global community) and creating authentic connection, but I will very happily admit that this, this particular example with people sharing what it is like to be me and learning what is it like to be you is the good.
This is the thing that makes free, open, networked communication brilliant. This is the thing that brings down silos and creates common understanding and humanizes us all, that creates empathy and the first steps towards compassion.
That someone can read about this insight and have a way to react to it and share their perspective and not even know who else might read it, but feel safe in doing so and maybe even with the expectation that this sharing is a net good? That is good. That is what we should strive for.
I can’t decide if this is industrial sabotage or political protest. Either way, I like it.
99 second hand smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps.Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic