Link archive: June, 2022

10 Years of Meteor

While I’ve always been bothered by the downsides of SPAs, I always thought the gap would be bridged sooner or later, and that performance concerns would eventually vanish thanks to things like code splitting, tree shaking, or SSR. But ten years later, many of these issues remain. Many SPA bundles are still bloated with too many dependencies, hydration is still slow, and content is still duplicated in memory on the client even if it already lives in the DOM.

Yet something might be changing: for whatever reason, it feels like people are finally starting to take note and ask why things have to be this way.

Interesting to see a decade-long perspective. I especially like how Sacha revisits and reasseses design principles from ten years ago:

1. Data on the Wire. Don’t send HTML over the network. Send data and let the client decide how to render it.

Verdict: 👎

It’s since become apparent that you often do need to send HTML over the network, and things seem to be moving back towards handling as much as possible of your HTML compilation on the server, not on the client.

Fun Parallax Scrolling CSS for Matterday

This is such a great clear explanation from Lynn on how to add some tasteful parallax depth to scrolling pages.

How we think about browsers | The GitHub Blog

JavaScript doesn’t get executed on very old browsers when native syntax for new language features is encountered. However, thanks to GitHub being built following the principle of progressive enhancement, users of older browsers still get to interact with basic features of GitHub, while users with more capable browsers get a faster experience.

That’s the way to do it!

Concepts like progressive enhancement allow us to deliver the best experience possible to the majority of customers, while delivering a useful experience to those using older browsers.

Read on for the nitty-gritty details…

Notes From “In And Out Of Style” - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

I love these notes on my recent talk!

SPAs: theory versus practice | Read the Tea Leaves

At the risk of grossly oversimplifying things, I propose that the core of the debate can be summed up by these truisms:

1. The best SPA is better than the best MPA.
2. The average SPA is worse than the average MPA.

Still the Same — Real Life

Everything old is new again:

In our current “information age,” or so the story goes, we suffer in new and unique ways.

But the idea that modern life, and particularly modern technology, harms as well as helps, is deeply embedded in Western culture: In fact, the Victorians diagnosed very similar problems in their own society.

Utopian project kickstarter — Figma

Do you like the ideas behind Utopia? Do you use Figma?

If the answer to both those questions is “yes”, then James has made a very handy Figma community file for you:

This work-in-progress is intended as a starting point for designers to start exploring the Utopia approach, thinking about type and space in fluid scales rather than device-based breakpoints.

In and Out of Style · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

Some thoughts—and kind words—prompted by my recent talk, In And Out Of Style.

The Biggest Thing from WWDC 2022 - Webventures

Web Push on iOS will change the “we need to build a native app” decision.

I agree.

Push notifications are definitely not the sole reason to go native, but in my experience, it’s one of the first things clients ask for. They may very well be the thing that pushes your client over the edge and forces them, you and the entire project to accept the logic of the app store model.

The Demo → Demo Loop - daverupert.com

I’m 100% convinced that working demo-to-demo is the secret formula to making successful creative products.

Bjørn Karmann › Occlusion Grotesque

A typeface co-designed with a tree over the course of five years.

Yes, a tree.

Occlusion Grotesque is an experimental typeface that is carved into the bark of a tree. As the tree grows, it deforms the letters and outputs new design variations, that are captured annually.

The Message Behind the Medium of a Personal Blog - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

• Each voice is individual and matters
• Slow is ok
• Diversified and independent is good
• Not fitting a pattern is ok
• Not being easily commodified is ok

Just Put Stuff Out There · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

I’m honoured to mentioned in the same paragraph as Seth Godin and Chris Coyier (and I too have really been enjoying Chris’s writing).

AddyOsmani.com - Software Engineering - The Soft Parts

Write about what you learn. It pushes you to understand topics better. Sometimes the gaps in your knowledge only become clear when you try explaining things to others. It’s OK if no one reads what you write. You get a lot out of just doing it for you.

Lots of good advice from Addy:

Saying no is better than overcommitting.

The cost of convenience — surma.dev

I believe that we haven’t figured out when and how to give a developer access to an abstraction or how to evaluate when an abstraction is worth using. Abstractions are usually designed for a set of specific use-cases. The problems, however, start when a developer wants to do something that the abstraction did not anticipate.

Smart thoughts from Surma on the design of libraries, frameworks, and other abstractions:

Abstractions that take work off of developers are valuable! Of course, they are. The problems only occur when a developer feels chained to the abstractions in a situation where they’d rather do something differently. The important part is to not force patterns onto them.

This really resonated with parts of my recent talk at CSS Day when I was talking about Sass and jQuery:

If you care about DX and the adoption of your abstraction, it is much more beneficial to let developers use as much of their existing skills as possible and introduce new concepts one at a time.

Jeremy Keith | In And Out Of Style | CSS Day 2022 - YouTube

Here’s the video of my opening talk at this year’s CSS Day, which I thoroughly enjoyed!

It’s an exciting time for CSS! It feels like new features are being added every day. And yet, through it all, CSS has managed to remain an accessible language for anyone making websites. Is this an inevitable part of the design of CSS? Or has CSS been formed by chance? Let’s take a look at the history—and some alternative histories—of the World Wide Web to better understand where we are today. And then, let’s cast our gaze to the future!

The collapse of complex software | Read the Tea Leaves

Even when each new layer of complexity starts to bring zero or even negative returns on investment, people continue trying to do what worked in the past. At some point, the morass they’ve built becomes so dysfunctional and unwieldy that the only solution is collapse: i.e., a rapid decrease in complexity, usually by abolishing the old system and starting from scratch.

Introducing Opportunities & Experiments: Taking the Guesswork out of Performance - WebPageTest Blog

WebPageTest just got even better! Now you can mimic the results of what would’ve previously required actually shipping, like adding third-party scripts, switching from a client-rendered to a server-rendered architecture and other changes that could potentially have a big effect on performance. Now you can run an experiment to get the results before actual implementation.

Patterns | APG | WAI | W3C

This is a terrific resource! A pattern library of interactive components: tabs, switches, dialogs, carousels …all the usual suspects.

Each component has an example implementation along with advice and a checklist for ensuring its accessible.

It’s so great to have these all gathered together in one place!

News from WWDC22: WebKit Features in Safari 16 Beta | WebKit

Good news and bad news…

The good news is that web notifications are coming to iOS—my number one wish!

The bad news is that it won’t happen until next year sometime.

Am I on the IndieWeb Yet? | Miriam Eric Suzanne

Miriam has a wishlist for scaling up the indie web approach:

What I would like to see is a tool that helps bring the entire system together in one place. Somewhere that non-technical people can:

• build their own site, with support for feeds/mentions
• see what feeds are available on other sites, and subscribe to them
• easily respond to other sites, and see the resulting threads

(Oh, and by linking to this post, this should show up as a bookmark—I’m also testing Miriam’s webmention setup.)

Reflections on Design Systems and Boundaries - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

Jim shares his thoughts on my recent post about declarative design systems. He picks up on the way I described a declarative design systems as “a predefined set of boundary conditions that can be used to generate components”:

I like this definition of a design system: a set of boundaries. It’s about saying “don’t go there” rather than “you can only go here”. This embraces the idea of constraints as the mother of invention: it opens the door to creativity while keeping things bounded.

Paper Prototype CSS

A stylesheet to imitate paper—perfect for low-fidelity prototypes that you want to test.

The Cello and the Nightingales: How the World’s First Fake News United Humanity in Our First Collective Experience of Empathy for Nature – The Marginalian

Decades before fiber optic cable spanned the bottom of the ocean to link continents, the airborne voice of a spring songbird did.

Mario Popova writes of an interspecies broadcast:

Those were the early days of broadcasting and recorded music, when the technology was both too primitive and too expensive to make the joy of music as ambient as air; the days before we made our Faustian deal with the technocrats who made music cheap and musicians poor so that we could stream it anytime anywhere with no recompense or thought of the souls from which the stream pours.

The Art of Penguin Science Fiction

A century of sci-fi book covers.

The ‘Form’ Element Created the Modern Web. Was It a Big Mistake? | WIRED

Paul Ford:

The web was born to distribute information on computers, but the technology industry can never leave well enough alone. It needs to make everything into software. To the point that your internet browser is basically no longer a magical book of links but a virtual machine that can simulate a full-fledged computer.

What the Vai Script Reveals About the Evolution of Writing - SAPIENS

How a writing system went from being a dream (literally) to a reality, codified in unicode.

Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy

A well-written evisceration of cryptobollocks signed by Bruce Scheier, Tim Bray, Molly White, Cory Doctorow, and more.

If you’re a concerned US computer scientist, technologist or developer, you’ve got till June 10th to add your signature before this is submitted to congress.