Links

Transpiled for-of Loops are Bad for the Client - daverupert.com

This story is just a personal reminder for me to repeatedly question what our tools spit out. I don’t want to be the neophobe in the room but I sometimes wonder if we’re living in a collective delusion that the current toolchain is great when it’s really just morbidly complex. More JavaScript to fix JavaScript concerns the hell out of me.

Yes! Even if you’re not interested in the details of Dave’s story of JavaScript optimisation, be sure to read his conclusion.

I am responsible for the code that goes into the machine, I do not want to shirk the responsibility of what comes out. Blind faith in tools to fix our problems is a risky choice. Maybe “risky” is the wrong word, but it certainly seems that we move the cost of our compromises to the client and we, speaking from personal experience, rarely inspect the results.

upfront conversation with Amber Wilson - #upfront

Amber shares her story of becoming a web developer and a public speaker. She is an inspiration to me!

Voice Guidelines | Clearleft

I love what Ben is doing with this single-serving site (similar to my design principles collection)—it’s a collection of handy links and resources around voice UI:

Designing a voice interface? Here’s a useful list of lists: as many guiding principles as we could find, all in one place. List compiled and edited by Ben Sauer @bensauer.

BONUS ITEM: Have him run a voice workshop for you!

How to write a talk - Notist

Rachel describes her process of putting technical talks together:

This method of creating a talk is the one that I find gets me from blank page to finished slide deck most effectively.

She also acknowledges that many other processes are available.

If you are stuck, and your usual method isn’t working, don’t be afraid to try a different approach even if just to get the ideas moving and take you away from staring at the blank page! You might discover that some types of talk benefit from an alternate starting point. There really are no rules here, other than that you do end up with a talk before you need to walk out on that stage.

Salvage (Upsideclown)

A tale of the Fermi paradox featuring data preservation via tardigrade as a means of transmitting information beyond the great filter.

Design Systems | susan jean robertson

Susan reviews Alla’s superb book on design systems:

If you’re interested in or wanting to create a design system or improve the one you have or get buy in to take your side project at work and make it part of the normal work flow, read this book. And even better, get your colleagues to do the same, so you’ll have a shared understanding before you begin the hard work to build your own system.

Susan also published her highlights from the book. I really like that!

The Story of CSS Grid, from Its Creators · An A List Apart Article

It must be the day for documenting the history of CSS. Here’s an article by Aaron on the extraordinary success story of CSS Grid. A lot of the credit for that quite rightly goes to Rachel and Jen:

Starting with Rachel Andrew coming in and creating a ton of demos and excitement around CSS Grid with Grid by Example and starting to really champion it and show it to web developers and what it was capable of and the problems that it solves.

Then, a little bit later, Jen Simmons created something called Labs where she put a lot of demos that she created for CSS Grid up on the web and, again, continued that momentum and that wave of enthusiasm for CSS Grid with web developers in the community.

Building a CSS-only image gallery (with fallbacks)

A great step-by-step walkthrough of building a really nice image gallery without any JavaScript.

The end result is really impressive but there’s still the drawback that the browser history will be updated every time you click on an image thumbnail (because the functionality relies on ID attributes referenced via :target). Depending on your use-case, that may or may not be desirable.

A Look Back at the History of CSS | CSS-Tricks

The evolution of CSS, as told by the author of the excellent History of the Web newsletter.

Alt-texts: The Ultimate Guide - Axess Lab

Great advice for writing usable alt attributes. This gem seems obvious in hindsight but I hadn’t considered it before:

End the alt-text with a period. This will make screen readers pause a bit after the last word in the alt-text, which creates a more pleasant reading experience for the user.

Mozilla Developer Roadshow Asia Jeremy Keith - YouTube

At the 14 minute mark I had to deal with an obstreperous member of the audience. He wasn’t heckling exactly …he just had a very bad experience with web components, and I think my talk was triggering for him.

@20 (Ftrain.com)

Paul Ford marks two decades of publishing on his own site.

Some days I want to erase this whole thing—much of the writing is sloppy and immature, and I was, too. But why bother to hit the red button? The path of the Internet has seen fit to do that for me.

The Era of Newshammer - daverupert.com

Dave has redesigned his site. Now it’s extra Dave-y.

Failing to distinguish between a tractor trailer and the bright white sky | booktwo.org

James talks about automation and understanding.

Just because a technology – whether it’s autonomous vehicles, satellite communications, or the internet – has been captured by capital and turned against the populace, doesn’t mean it does not retain a seed of utopian possibility.

Paperclip Maximizer

Play the part of an AI pursuing its goal without care for existential threats. This turns out to be ludicrously addictive. I don’t want to tell you how long I spent playing this.

Keep your eye on the prize: remember that money (and superintelligence) is just a means to an end …and that end is making more paperclips.

Service Worker Registration  |  Web Fundamentals  |  Google Developers

Hmm …seems like I should probably wait for the load event before triggering navigator.serviceworker.register().

Defining design principles at EMBL | Journal | The Personal Disquiet of Mark Boulton

Mark describes the process he favours for creating (discovering?) design principles, like the ones for EMBL (I must remember to add those to the collection).

All you do is be mindful of when the team repeats design desires. This could be several members of the team say the same thing in a slightly different way, or that you keep circling around and around a problem but struggle to articulate it. By being mindful at all times to this a team can quickly pull together principles that are derived from doing the work on their particular problem rather than principles which are imposed on the work. An important difference.

Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android: What developers need to know - Microsoft Edge Dev Blog

This is such a strange announcement from Microsoft. It’s worded as though they chose to use the WebKit engine on iOS. But there is no choice: if you want to put a browser on iOS, you must use the WKWebView control. Apple won’t allow any other rendering engine (that’s why Chrome on iOS is basically a skin for Safari; same for Opera on iOS). It’s a disgraceful monopolistic policy on Apple’s part.

A word to the Microsoft marketing department: please don’t try to polish the turd in the shit sandwich you’ve been handed by Apple.

FriendChip Beacons - With support of Eddystone and Physical Web

I quite like the idea of broadcasting my URL from a friendchip bracelet.

“async” attribute on img, and corresponding “ready” event · Issue #1920 · whatwg/html

It looks like the async attribute is going to ship in Chrome for img elements:

This attribute would have two states:

• “on”: This indicates that the developer prefers responsiveness and performance over atomic presentation of content.
• “off”: This indicates that the developer prefers atomic presentation of content over responsiveness.