Many thanks to the lovely @paciellogroup people who all made me feel very welcome at their shindig in Brighton last night.
Jeremy Keith
Making websites. Writing books. Speaking at conferences. Living in Brighton. Working at Clearleft. Playing music. Taking photos. Answering email.Journal 2331 Links 6154 Articles 64 Notes 2642
Friday, October 14th, 2016
Thursday, October 13th, 2016
Thoughtful CSS Architecture | Sparkbox | Web Design and Development
A good overview of ideas and techniques for structuring CSS and naming classes.
Wednesday, October 12th, 2016
Saw @BalletBoyz at The Brighton Dome …now decompressing with a beer and Street Fighter at Brewdog.
Does Progressive Enhancement Have a Place in Today’s Web? - George Brocklehurst, thoughtbot - YouTube
Spoiler: the answer is “Yes!”.
It’s a way of building web applications that’s very similar to making a sandwich.
This talk is itself a tasty sandwich of good stuff.
Thimble by Mozilla - An online code editor for learners & educators.
This is a really, really nice tool for creating HTML, CSS, and JavaScript without needing a separate text editor. And then you can publish the results to a URL.
It’s a bit like CodePen but it shows the whole HTML document, which makes it particularly useful for teaching front-end development to beginners (ideal for Codebar!).
CodePen for snippets; Thimble for pages.
Enhancing a comment form: From basic to custom error message to BackgroundSync | justmarkup
This is a truly fantastic example of progressive enhancement applied to a form.
What I love about this is that it shows how progressive enhancement isn’t a binary on/off choice: there are layers and layers of enhancements here, from simple inline validation all the way to service workers and background sync, with many options in between.
Superb!
Tuesday, October 11th, 2016
Marked this year’s Ada Lovelace Day with another excellent evening of @CodebarBrighton in @68MiddleSt.
You Might Not Need JavaScript
Una has put together a nice collection of patterns that use CSS for interactions. JavaScript would certainly be more suitable for many of these, but they still provide some great ideas for robust fallbacks.
Photographing the photographer.
Pragmatic, Practical, and Progressive Theming with Custom Properties by Harry Roberts
Harry demonstrates a really good use for CSS custom properties—allowing users to theme an interface.
Bacon, black pudding, egg, and toast.
Monday, October 10th, 2016
There’s an ISS flyover while University Challenge is on the telly.
How am I supposed to choose?
Rainbow, as observed from @Clearleft HQ.
Rainbow watchers.
The Web is not Fashionable. - The blog of Ada Rose Edwards
This is such a great perspective on what it’s like to build for the web over the long term. The web will always be a little bit broken, and that’s okay—we can plan for that.
The Web has history. If you build with web technology it will stick around. We try not to break the web even if it means the mistakes and bad decisions we have made in the past (and will make in the future) get set in stone.
My brain is reeling after getting a sneak peek at the fantastic service worker recipe that @GlennJones is cooking up.
Dan McKinley :: Choose Boring Technology
A somewhat contentious title but there’s some really smart thinking here about choosing and evaluating technology.
The slidedeck version is even clearer.
Your Private Encrypted Browser | Tenta Browser
A browser for Android that specifically touts privacy and security as its key features.
Taking Pattern Libraries To The Next Level – Smashing Magazine
Here’s an epic brain dump by Vitaly on the challenges of putting together a pattern library and then maintaining it.
Sacrificing consistency for usability is fine. A slightly open-ended, inconsistent but heavily used pattern library is better than a perfectly consistent pattern library that is never used.