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Tammy takes a deep dive into our brains to examine the psychology of web performance. It opens with this:
If you don’t consider time a crucial usability factor, you’re missing a fundamental aspect of the user experience.
I wish that more UX designers understood that!
The power of interoperability:
Web components won’t take web development by storm, or show us the One True Way to build websites. They don’t need to dethrone JavaScript frameworks. We probably won’t even all learn how to write them!
What web components will do — at least, I hope — is let us collectively build a rich ecosystem of dynamic components that work with any web stack. No more silos. That’s the web component success story.
Scott has written a perfect description of HTML web components:
They are custom elements that
- are not empty, and instead contain functional HTML from the start,
- receive some amount of progressive enhancement using the Web Components JavaScript lifecycle, and
- do not rely on that JavaScript to run for their basic content or functionality.
Web Push on iOS is nearing its one year anniversary. It’s still mostly useless.
Sad, but true. And here’s why:
On iOS, for a website to be able to ask the user to grant the push notification permission, it needs to be installed to the home screen.
No other browser on any of the other platforms requires you to install a website for it to be able to send push notifications.
Apple is within their rights to withhold Web Push to installed apps. One could argue it’s not even an unreasonable policy - if Apple made installing a web app at least moderately straightforward. As it is, they have buried it and hidden important functionality behind it.
I really, really hope that the Safari team are reading this.
The web is backward and forward compatible. Anything you learn about HTML, CSS and browser API’s will serve you well for the next 25 years, which is not something you can say about the current fashion in JavaScript libraries. By ejecting from the thrash of React and other heavy-handed frameworks and doubling down on web fundamentals, you’ll be future-proofing both your career and your codebases.
The internet has always been made of people, but it has not always been people-first. The indieweb reminds us that humanity is the most important thing, and that nobody should own our ability to connect, form relationships, express ourselves, be creative, learn from each other, and embrace our differences and similarities.
Ben’s ode to the indie web:
One could look at the movement as kind of a throwback to the very early web, which was a tapestry of wildly different sites and ideas, at a time when everybody’s online communications were templated through web services owned by a handful of billion dollar corporations. I’d prefer to think of it as a manifesto for diversity of communications, the freedom to share your knowledge and lived experiences on your own terms, and maintaining the independence of freedom of expression from business interests.
I concur:
Just because a user interface uses 3D-buttons and some shading doesn’t mean that it has to look tacky. In fact, if you have to make the choice between tacky-but-usable and minimalistic-but-hard-to-use, tacky is the way to go. You don’t have to make that choice though: It’s perfectly possible to create something that is both good-looking and easy to use.
Why the heck is everyone reaching for React as soon as something on the screen needs to update? And why do we insist on squishing our frontend concerns together with our backend concerns?
I’m glad I’m not the only one constantly asking myself those questions.
Look: is the idea of physically separating “code that runs business logic and builds markup” from “code that handles realtime interactions” really that awful? You can write both in JS if you like, I promise I won’t judge, but we can’t keep pretending that they’re basically the same.
This looks like a handy RSS-to-Mastodon service.
You are viewing a humanly curated list of fine personal & independent email newsletters that are updated regularly. No algorithms ever!
And remember: you can subscribe to most newsletters via RSS rather than email.
My secret is safe.
The modern web is constantly, endlessly hoovering up massive amounts of data about you, only some of which is correct, and then feeding you its best guess of what will glue your eyeballs to the screen just a little bit longer, no matter what that is, whether it’s actually good for you or not.
I know I sound like an old man when I go on and on about RSS, but really, it’s sitting right there and is apparently what a lot of people miss.
I love how straightforward these bits of CSS are—time to rip out some of those old complicated hacks and workarounds!
If you care about the indie web growing, by all means write, by all means create, by all means curate. But most of all, just read. Or listen, or experience. Spend an afternoon clicking around, like everybody used to. The more people who do that, the more everything else will slot into place without even having to think much about it.
Beautiful writing from Rebecca Solnit, that encapsulates what I’ve been trying to say:
You want tomorrow to be different than today, and it may seem the same, or worse, but next year will be different than this one, because those tiny increments added up. The tree today looks a lot like the tree yesterday, and so does the baby.
Ever wondered why you’re always being encouraged to download the app?
But zero percent of app users have installed an ad-blocker, because they don’t exist, because you’d go to prison if you made one. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it.
I understand that OpenAI/Microsoft can’t build ChatGPT within our legal framework. Well they could but it would be prohibitively expensive (it already is now without paying the people who did the work). But I missed the part where that is our problem as a society.
This!
I am tired of talking about these things as tech issues. They are not. They are social and political.
While some executives in Davos may get excited about its infinite possibilities this week, to a younger consumer AI Art is already ‘a bit cringe’.
This is a wonderfully in-depth interactive explainer on touch target sizes, with plenty of examples.
The return of RSS and POSSE points to a revival of the personal website ecosystem that thrived in the early blog era. Writers, researchers, technologists and more are relaunching their independent homepages, complete with feeds, as both a public notebook and a channel for sharing insights. The personal website is the ultimate sovereign territory online, enabling creators to share content on their own terms.
I feel like Joan Westenberg has come up with the perfect tag line for personal websites (emphasis mine):
By passing high-quality, human-centric content through their own lens of discernment before syndicating it to social networks, these curators create islands of sanity amidst oceans of machine-generated content of questionable provenance.
I’m very excited that John is speaking at this year’s UX London!
React was never able to stand on its own merits as a framework (as its merits are few). Now the cracks are really starting to show.
It’s so nice to see when someone else finds Huffduffer to be useful!
To be honest, you can skip the “review”, but I just had to link to this for the perfection of the opening three sentences, which sum of my feelings exactly:
I resent AI. Not AI itself–that’s just code, despite what tech guys with flashlights under their chins tell you. I resent the imposition, the idea that since LLMs exist, it follows that they should exist in every facet in my life.
How the spirit of Brexit scuppered the dream of a Victorian chunnel.
In 1851, a telegraph wire linked London and Paris directly. Might it be possible for a railway to follow? Many engineers believed it was: they proposed a tunnel, joining the roads and railways of Britain to those of mainland Europe.
Okay, if you weren’t already excited for Patterns Day, get a load of what Rich is going to be talking about!
You’ve got your ticket, right?
This seems like a good analogy to me.
Angela has turned her talk from FFconf into a five-part series of articles. I’m biased because I already agree with everything in here, but it’s well worth reading.
Personally, I want software to push me not towards reusing what exists, but away from that (and that’s harder). Whether I’m producing a plan or hefty biography, push me towards thinking critically about the work, rather than offering a quick way out.
Next time you’re frustrated by a website that doesn’t provide an RSS feed, try using this tool:
Transform any old website with a list of links into an RSS Feed
I like how Paul has recreated his own version of This Is My Jam and I really like how he’s done it with an HTML web component.
Here’s a handy service that allows you to use Mastodon as an RSS reader!
I see what you nerds have done with AI image-creation software so far. Look at Midjourney’s “Best of” page. If you don’t know a lot about art but you know what you like, and what you like is large-breasted elf maidens, you are entering the best possible future.
If there’s one takeaway from all this, it’s that the web is a flexible medium where any number of technologies can be combined in all sorts of interesting ways.
What strikes me about my personal experience with LLMs is that I have learned precisely when to use them and when their use would only slow me down. I have also learned that LLMs are a bit like Wikipedia and all the video courses scattered on YouTube: they help those with the will, ability, and discipline, but they are of marginal benefit to those who have fallen behind. I fear that at least initially, they will only benefit those who already have an advantage.
One of the reasons to own your content is to make it last. When you have control of the text you write or the photos you post, it’s up to you whether that content stays on the internet. When you post to someone else’s platform, you’ve given up that control. It’s not up to you whether the company that hosts your content will stay in business or change everything to break your content.
The main reason I’m so hot on Light DOM is that I find the styling story of Web Components using Shadow DOM annoying.
Anil says the glass is half full:
Across today’s internet, the stores that deliver all the apps on our phones are cracking open, the walls between social media platforms are coming down as the old networks fail, the headlong rush towards AI is making our search engines and work apps weirder (and often worse!). But amidst it all, the human web, the one made by regular people, is resurgent. We are about to see the biggest reshuffling of power on the internet in 25 years, in a way that most of the internet’s current users have never seen before.
Maggie explores different ways of visualising journeys on the web, including browser histories:
Perhaps web browsing histories should look more like Git commit histories? Perhaps distinct branches could representing different topics and research avenues?
In the past few years, there’s been an accelerating swing back toward decentralization. Users are fed up with the concentration of power, and the prevalence of privacy and free expression violations, and many users are fleeing to smaller, independently operated projects.
Simon summarises the year in large language models. Level-headed as always, and wisely avoiding predictions.
- Large Language Models
- They’re actually quite easy to build
- You can run LLMs on your own devices
- Hobbyists can build their own fine-tuned models
- We don’t yet know how to build GPT-4
- Vibes Based Development
- LLMs are really smart, and also really, really dumb
- Gullibility is the biggest unsolved problem
- Code may be the best application
- The ethics of this space remain diabolically complex
- My blog in 2023