Technology doesn’t have to be terrible. Here’s an absolutely wonderful use of an e-ink display:
I made as much use of vanilla HTML and CSS as possible. I used a small amount of JavaScript but no framework or other libraries.
Smart advice on future-proofing and backward-compatibility:
There isn’t a single, specific device, browser, and person we cater to when creating a web experience. Websites and web apps need to adapt to a near-infinite combination of these circumstances to be effective. This adaptability is a large part of what makes the web such a successful medium.
Consider doing the hard work to make it easy and never remove feature queries and @supports statements. This creates a robust approach that can gracefully adapt to the past, as well as the future.
This is something I bump against over and over again: so-called evergreen browsers that can’t actually be updated because of operating system limits.
From what I could gather, the version of Chrome was tied to ChromeOS which couldn’t be updated because of the hardware. No new ChromeOS meant no new Chrome which meant stuck at version 76.
But what about the iPad? I discovered that my Mom’s iPad was a 1st generation iPad Air. Apple stopped supporting that device in iOS 12, which means it was stuck with whatever version of Safari last shipped with iOS 12.
So I had two older browsers that couldn’t be updated. It was device obsolescence because you couldn’t install the latest browser.
Websites stop working and the only solution is to buy a whole new device.
Such an elegant idea!
Bookfeed.io is a simple tool that allows you to specify a list of authors, and generates an RSS feed with each author’s most recently released book.
Small pieces, loosely joined.
Personal website owners – what do you think about collecting all of the feeds you are producing in one way or the other on a
/feedspage?
Sounds like a good idea! I’ll get on that.
An interesting look at the mortality causes for Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 8, and what they can tell us for the hoped-for death of Internet Explorer 11.
I disagree with the conclusion (that we should actively block IE11—barring any good security reasons, I don’t think that’s defensible), but I absolutely agree that we shouldn’t be shipping polyfills in production just for IE11. Give it your HTML. Give it your CSS. Withhold modern JavaScript. If you’re building with progressive enhancement (and you are, right?), then giving IE11 users a sub-par experience is absolutely fine …it’s certainly better than blocking them completely.
Jason contemplates his two decades of blog posts, some of which he now feels very differently about:
Tim Berners-Lee’s idea that cool URIs don’t change is almost part of my DNA at this point, so deleting them seems wrong. Approximately no one ever reads any post on this site that’s more than a few years old, but is that an argument for or against deleting them? (If a tree falls in the woods, etc…) Should I delete but leave a note they were deleted? Should I leave the original posts but append updates citing my current displeasure?
A terrific explanation of the aria-live attribute from Ire. If you’re doing anything with Ajax, this is vital knowledge.
This is a good walkthrough of the flow you’d need to implement if you want to notify users of an updated service worker.
Service workers, push notifications, and variable fonts are now shipping in Edge.
Squee! The next time there’s an update for OS X and iOS, Safari will magically have service worker support! Not only that, but Safari on iOS will start using the information in web app manifests for adding to home screen.
That’s an impressive turnaround.
I’m syndicating my notes to micro.blog now.
Ooh, this is a tricky scenario. If you decide to redirect all URLs (from, say, a www subdomain to no subdomain) and you have a service worker running, you’re going to have a bad time. But there’s a solution here to get the service worker to remove itself.
The server-side specifics are for NGINX but this is also doable with Apache.
Interstellar travel time dilation and status updates: a clever narrative combo.
A nifty mashup in which Twitter bots update twice a day with weather updates. I am now friends with Brighton Weather. I feel so in touch with nature.