Tags: drop

The Snowdrop: Lost In the Arctic

If you liked David Grann’s book The Wager, here’s another shipwreck tale, this time from the other side of the world.

In two of my recent talks—In And Out Of Style and Design Principles For The Web—I finish by looking at three different components:

1. a button,
2. a dropdown, and
3. a datepicker.

In each case you could use native HTML elements:

1. button,
2. select, and
3. input type="date".

Or you could use divs with a whole bunch of JavaScript and ARIA.

In the case of a datepicker, I totally understand why you’d go for writing your own JavaScript and ARIA. The native HTML element is quite restricted, especially when it comes to styling.

In the case of a dropdown, it’s less clear-cut. Personally, I’d use a select element. While it’s currently impossible to style the open state of a select element, you can style the closed state with relative ease. That’s good enough for me.

Still, I can understand why that wouldn’t be good enough for some cases. If pixel-perfect consistency across platforms is a priority, then you’re going to have to break out the JavaScript and ARIA.

Personally, I think chasing pixel-perfect consistency across platforms isn’t even desirable, but I get it. I too would like to have more control over styling select elements. That’s one of the reasons why the work being done by the Open UI group is so important.

But there’s one more component: a button.

Again, you could use the native button element, or you could use a div or a span and add your own JavaScript and ARIA.

Now, in this case, I must admit that I just don’t get it. Why wouldn’t you just use the native button element? It has no styling issues and the browser gives you all the interactivity and accessibility out of the box.

I’ve been trying to understand the mindset of a developer who wouldn’t use a native button element. The easy answer would be that they’re just bad people, and dismiss them. But that would probably be lazy and inaccurate. Nobody sets out to make a website with poor performance or poor accessibility. And yet, by choosing not to use the native HTML element, that’s what’s likely to happen.

I think I might have finally figured out what might be going on in the mind of such a developer. I think the issue is one of control.

When I hear that there’s a native HTML element—like button or select—that comes with built-in behaviours around interaction and accessibility, I think “Great! That’s less work for me. I can just let the browser deal with it.” In other words, I relinquish control to the browser (though not entirely—I still want the styling to be under my control as much as possible).

But I now understand that someone else might hear that there’s a native HTML element—like button or select—that comes with built-in behaviours around interaction and accessibility, and think “Uh-oh! What if there unexpected side-effects of these built-in behaviours that might bite me on the ass?” In other words, they don’t trust the browsers enough to relinquish control.

I get it. I don’t agree. But I get it.

If your background is in computer science, then the ability to precisely predict how a programme will behave is a virtue. Any potential side-effects that aren’t within your control are undesirable. The only way to ensure that an interface will behave exactly as you want is to write it entirely from scratch, even if that means using more JavaScript and ARIA than is necessary.

But I don’t think it’s a great mindset for the web. The web is filled with uncertainties—browsers, devices, networks. You can’t possibly account for all of the possible variations. On the web, you have to relinquish some control.

Still, I’m glad that I now have a bit more insight into why someone would choose to attempt to retain control by using div, JavaScript and ARIA. It’s not what I would do, but I think I understand the motivation a bit better now.

Designing Beautiful Shadows in CSS

This is a great tutorial—I just love the interactive parts that really help make things click.

mmm.page

This is a fun drag’n’drop way to make websites. And I like the philosophy:

Websites shouldn’t all look the same. We prefer campy, kitschy, messy, imperfect.

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.

4 Rules for Intuitive UX – Learn UI Design

1. Obey the Law of Locality
2. ABD: Anything But Dropdowns
3. Pass the Squint Test
4. Teach by example

Drop caps & design systems - Vox Product Blog

Sit down and listen to a story from uncle Ethan.

I got a message from a screen-reader user of The Session recently, letting me know of a problem they were having. I love getting any kind of feedback around accessibility, so this was like gold dust to me.

They pointed out that the drag’n’drop interface for rearranging the order of tunes in a set was inaccessible.

Of course! I slapped my forehead. How could I have missed this?

It had been a while since I had implemented that functionality, so before even looking at the existing code, I started to think about how I could improve the situation. Maybe I could capture keystroke events from the arrow keys and announce changes via ARIA values? That sounded a bit heavy-handed though: mess with people’s native keyboard functionality at your peril.

Then I looked at the code. That was when I realised that the fix was going to be much, much easier than I thought.

I documented my process of adding the drag’n’drop functionality back in 2016. Past me had his progressive enhancement hat on:

One of the interfaces needed for this feature was a form to re-order items in a list. So I thought to myself, “what’s the simplest technology to enable this functionality?” I came up with a series of select elements within a form.

The problem was in my feature detection:

There’s a little bit of mustard-cutting going on: does the dragula object exist, and does the browser understand querySelector? If so, the select elements are hidden and the drag’n’drop is enabled.

The logic was fine, but the execution was flawed. I was being lazy and hiding the select elements with display: none. That hides them visually, but it also hides them from screen readers. I swapped out that style declaration for one that visually hides the elements, but keeps them accessible and focusable.

It was a very quick fix. I had the odd sensation of wanting to thank Past Me for making things easy for Present Me. But I don’t want to talk about time travel because if we start talking about it then we’re going to be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws.

I pushed the fix, told the screen-reader user who originally contacted me, and got a reply back saying that everything was working great now. Success!

Forget New Year’s resolutions. This art prompts thinking in ‘deep time.’ - CSMonitor.com

Projects for the long now:

• A 100 year book publication,
• A 693 year piece of music,
• A 1,000 year photograph,
• A 10,000 year clock, and
• The pitch drop experiment.

Design Patterns on CodePen

This ever-growing curated collection of interface patterns on CodePen is a reliable source of inspiration.

Easy Toggle State

I think about 90% of the JavaScript I’ve ever written was some DOM scripting to handle the situation of “when the user triggers an event on this element, do something to this other element.” Toggles, lightboxes, accordions, tabs, tooltips …they’re all basically following the same underlying pattern. So it makes sense to me to see this pattern abstracted into a little library.

FontDrop!

A handy browser-based tool for examining font files to see which features they support.

How To Make A Drag-and-Drop File Uploader With Vanilla JavaScript — Smashing Magazine

A step-by-step guide to implementing drag’n’drop, and image previews with the Filereader API. No libraries or frameworks were harmed in the making of this article.

Draggable JS – JavaScript drag and drop library

This looks like a very nice little JavaScript library for drag’n’drop. The site works as an example of the functionality in action.

Brought to you by Shopify, the company enabling Breitbart.

Progressive enhancement and team memberships

A really nice pattern, similar to one I wrote about a little while back. There’s also this little gem of an observation:

Progressive enhancement is also well-suited to Agile, as you can start with the core functionality and then iterate.

CSS Mega Dropdown | CodyHouse

I’m no fan of mega menus, and if a site were being designed from scratch, I’d do everything I could to avoid them, but on some existing projects they’re an unavoidable necessity (the design equivalent of technical debt). In those situations, this looks like a really nice, responsive approach.

You Know What? Fuck Dropdowns

An entertaining presentation from South By Southwest on the UI element of last resort.

It’s funny because it’s true.

I’ve spent the last week implementing a new feature over at The Session. I had forgotten how enjoyable it is to get completely immersed in a personal project, thinking about everything from database structures right through to CSS animations,

I won’t bore you with the details of this particular feature—which is really only of interest if you play traditional Irish music—but I thought I’d make note of one little bit of progressive enhancement.

One of the interfaces needed for this feature was a form to re-order items in a list. So I thought to myself, “what’s the simplest technology to enable this functionality?” I came up with a series of select elements within a form.

It’s not the nicest of interfaces, but it works pretty much everywhere. Once I had built that—and the back-end functionality required to make it all work—I could think about how to enhance it.

I brought it up at the weekly Clearleft front-end pow-wow (featuring special guest Jack Franklin). I figured that drag’n’drop would be the obvious enhancement, but I didn’t know if there were any “go-to” libraries for implementing it; I haven’t paid much attention to the state of drag’n’drop since the old IE implement was added to HTML5.

Nobody had any particular recommendations so I did a bit of searching. I came across Dragula, which looked pretty solid. It’s made by the super-smart Nicolás Bevacqua, who I know shares my feelings about progressive enhancement. To my delight, I was able to get it working within minutes.

There’s a little bit of mustard-cutting going on: does the dragula object exist, and does the browser understand querySelector? If so, the select elements are hidden and the drag’n’drop is enabled. Then, whenever an item in the list is dragged and dropped, the corresponding (hidden) select element is updated …so that time I spent making the simpler non-drag’n’drop interface was time well spent: I didn’t need to do anything extra on the server to handle the data from the updated interface.

It’s a simple example but it demonstrates that the benefits of starting with the simpler universal interface before upgrading to the smoother experience.

Photo upload and progressive enhancement for FixMyStreet / mySociety

Matthew describes a very nice bit of progressive enhancement for drag’n’drop file uploads (similar to the CSS Tricks article I linked to recently).

It uses the Dropzone JS which looks like it aligns nicely with the progressive enhancement approach.

Drag and Drop File Uploading | CSS-Tricks

This is a terrific example of progressive enhancement in action: going from a simple file input to a lovely interactive drag’n’drop interface.

The code uses jQuery but it could be easily adapted to vanilla JavaScript, and anyway, it’s not so much the code that matters, it’s the approach.