Applying Postel’s Law to relationships:
I aspire to be conservative in what and how I share (i.e., avoid drama) while understanding that other people will say all sorts of unmindful things.
Be liberal in what you accept:
Basically, if your form can’t register Beyoncé – it has failed.
I love the story that Terence relates here. It reminds me of all the fantastic work that Anna did documenting game console browsers.
Are you developing public services? Or a system that people might access when they’re in desperate need of help? Plain HTML works. A small bit of simple CSS will make look decent. JavaScript is probably unnecessary – but can be used to progressively enhance stuff.
What web development can learn from the Nintendo Game and Watch.
The Web now consists of an ever-growing number of different frameworks, methodologies, screen sizes, devices, browsers, and connection speeds. “Lateral thinking with withered technology” – progressively enhanced – might actually be an ideal philosophy for building accessible, performant, resilient, and original experiences for a wide audience of users on the Web.
I understand less than half of this great talk by Meredith L. Patterson, but it ticks all my boxes: Leibniz, Turing, Borges, and Postel’s Law.
(via Tim Berners-Lee)
A counterpart to the piece by Baldur that I linked to yesterday:
There are many challenges to face as the web grows.
Most of them are people problems. Habits. Inertia. A misalignment of priorities with user needs. Those can be overcome.
This isn’t a “the web is doomed, DOOMED, I tells ya” kind of blog post. It’s more in the “the web in its current form isn’t sustainable and will collapse into a simpler, more sustainable form, possibly several” genre.
Baldur points to the multiple causes of the web’s current quagmire.
I honestly have no idea on how to mitigate this harm or even how long the decline is going to take. My hope is that if we can make the less complex, more distributed aspects of the web safer and more robust, they will be more likely to thrive when the situation has forced the web as a whole to break up and simplify.
A good talk from from Chris Ferdinandi, who says:
One of the central themes of my talk on The Lean Web is that we as developers repeatedly take all of the great things the web and browsers give us out-of-the-box, break them, and then re-implement them poorly with JavaScript.
I don’t agree with Steven Pemberton on a lot of things—I’m not a fan of many of the Semantic Web technologies he likes, and I think that the Robustness Principle is well-suited to the web—but I always pay attention to what he has to say. I certainly share his concern that migrating everything to JavaScript is not good for interoperability:
This is why there are so few new elements in HTML5: they haven’t done any design, and instead said “if you need anything, you can always do it in Javascript”.
And they all have.
And they are all different.
Read this talk transcript, and even if you don’t agree with everything in it today, you may end up coming back to it in the future. He’s playing the long game:
The web is the way now that we distribute information. We will need the web pages we create now to be readable in 100 years time, just as we can still read 100-year-old books.
Requiring a webpage to depend on a particular 100-year-old implementation of Javascript is not exactly evidence of future-thinking.
This is absolutely brilliant!
Forgive my excitement, but this transcript of Charlie’s talk is so, so good—an equal mix of history and practical advice. Once you’ve read it, share it. I want everyone to have the pleasure of reading this inspiring piece!
It is this flirty declarative nature makes HTML so incredibly robust. Just look at this video. It shows me pulling chunks out of the Amazon homepage as I browse it, while the page continues to run.
Let’s just stop and think about that, because we take it for granted. I’m pulling chunks of code out of a running computer application, AND IT IS STILL WORKING.
Just how… INCREDIBLE is that? Can you imagine pulling random chunks of code out of the memory of your iPhone or Windows laptop, and still expecting it to work? Of course not! But with HTML, it’s a given.
This is the rarely-seen hour-long version of my Resilience talk. It’s the director’s cut, if you will, featuring an Arthur C. Clarke sub-plot that goes from the telegraph to the World Wide Web to the space elevator.
Marvellous insights from Mark on how the robustness principle can and should be applied to styeguides and pattern libraries (‘sfunny—I was talking about Postel’s Law just this morning at An Event Apart in Boston).
Being liberal in accepting things into the system, and being liberal about how you go about that, ensures you don’t police the system. You collaborate on it.
So, what about the output? Remember: be ’conservative in what you do’. For a design system, this means your output of the system – guidelines, principles, design patterns, code, etc etc. – needs to be clear, unambiguous, and understandable.
The full text of Jason’s great talk at this year’s CSS Summit. It’s a great read, clearing up many of the misunderstandings around progressive enhancement and showing some practical examples of progressive enhancement working at each level of the web’s technology stack
A profile of a legend.
I like this nice straightforward approach. Instead of jumping into the complexities of the final interactive component, Chris starts with the basics and layers on the complexity one step at a time, thereby creating a more robust solution.
If I had one small change to suggest, maybe aria-label might work better than offscreen text for the controls …as documented by Heydon.
A superb post by Dan on the bigger picture of what’s wrong with hashbang URLs. Well written and well reasoned.
Tim Bray calmly explains why hash-bang URLs are a very bad idea.
This is what we call “tight coupling” and I thought that anyone with a Computer Science degree ought to have been taught to avoid it.
