Tags: action

The datalist element is good. It was a bit bumpy there for a while, but browser implementations have improved over time. Now it’s by far the simplest and most robust way to create an autocompleting combobox widget.

Hook up an input element with a datalist element using the list and id attributes and you’re done. You can even use a bit of Ajax to dynamically update the option elements inside the datalist in response to the user’s input. The browser takes care of all the interaction. If you try to roll your own combobox implementation, it’s almost certainly going to involve a lot of JavaScript and still probably won’t account for all use cases.

Safari on iOS—and therefore all browsers on iOS—didn’t support datalist for quite a while. But once it finally shipped, it worked really nicely. The options showed up just like automplete suggestions above the keyboard.

But that broke a while back.

The suggestions still appeared, but if you tapped on one of them, nothing happened. The input element didn’t get updated. You had to tap on a little downward arrow inside the input in order to see the list of options.

That was really frustrating for anybody on iOS using The Session. By far the most common task on the site is searching for a tune, something that’s greatly (progressively) enhanced with a dynamically-updating datalist.

I just updated to iOS 18 specifically to see if this bug has been fixed, and it has:

Fixed updating the input value when selecting an option from a datalist element.

Hallelujah!

But now there’s some additional behaviour that’s a little weird.

As well as showing the options in the autocomplete list above the keyboard, Safari on iOS—and therefore all browsers on iOS—also pops up the options as a list (as if you had tapped on that downward arrow). If the list is more than a few options long, it completely obscures the input element you’re typing into!

I’m not sure if this is a bug or if it’s the intended behaviour. It feels like a bug, but I don’t know if I should file something.

For now, I’ve updated the datalist elements on The Session to only ever hold three option elements in order to minimise the problem. Seeing as the autosuggest list above the keyboard only ever shows a maximum of three suggestions anyway, this feels like a reasonable compromise.

The deskilling of web dev is harming the product but, more importantly, it’s damaging our health – this is why burnout happens – Baldur Bjarnason

A depressing but accurate description of the economics of web development.

Nuberodesign > Blog > In Praise of Buttons – Part One

I concur:

Just because a user interface uses 3D-buttons and some shading doesn’t mean that it has to look tacky. In fact, if you have to make the choice between tacky-but-usable and minimalistic-but-hard-to-use, tacky is the way to go. You don’t have to make that choice though: It’s perfectly possible to create something that is both good-looking and easy to use.

Designing better target sizes

This is a wonderfully in-depth interactive explainer on touch target sizes, with plenty of examples.

The Website vs. Web App Dichotomy Doesn’t Exist | jakelazaroff.com

Amen!

If there’s one takeaway from all this, it’s that the web is a flexible medium where any number of technologies can be combined in all sorts of interesting ways.

Eigensolutions: composability as the antidote to overfit • Lea Verou

I love, love, love the deep thinking that Lea has put into this, really digging into the guts of what design does.

Overfitting happens when solutions don’t generalize sufficiently and is a hallmark of poor design. Eigensolutions are the opposite: solutions that generalize so much they expose links between seemingly unrelated use cases. Designing eigensolutions takes a mindset shift from linear design to composability.

Lea ties this into web standards too. It’s really helped clarify for me why I want more declarative options for common use cases (like a share button)—it’s about raising the ceiling without raising the floor.

Against Scale

Claire L. Evans has written a beautiful piece on the difference between growth and scalability:

Life is nonhierarchical, and it shirks top-down control. But scalability relies on hierarchy, on the isolation of elements stripped of history and context. It is predicated on the assumption that nature is little more than a raw material to be processed and commodified until it is spent. This is, of course, unsustainable — at any scale.

Bruce Lawson’s personal site  : HTML popover, videos and display:blackhole

Bruce raises an interesting question with media playing in popovers—shouldn’t the media pause when the popover is closed? I agree with Bruce that this is a common use case that should be covered declaratively.

Just normal web things.

A plea to let users do web things on websites. In other words, stop over-complicating everything with buckets of JavaScript.

Honestly, this isn’t wishlist isn’t asking for much, and it’s a damning indictment of “modern” frontend development that we’ve come to this:

• Let me copy text so I can paste it.
• If something navigates like a link, let me do link things.
• …

My week at the Belfast TradFest culminated in a cathedral.

Everyone who has been taking classes during the week made their way to Belfast cathedral for a communal finish. Every class played a short piece to round out their week of workshops.

The whole experience was quite lovely. At one point, I was unexepectedly moved to tears by the performance of the cello class (not a common instrument in Irish traditional music).

When I got home, I decided to send a message to Neil Martin who taught that class. It was just a quick line or two to tell him how special it was.

He responded, saying he found the whole experience of the closing concert very moving and powerful.

I was glad I sent that note of thanks.

Then, a day later, I received my own note of thanks. It wasn’t music-related. Someone I had met and chatted with at a conference last year told me that they had just watched the video of my talk, The State Of The Web. They were very moved by it. Then they took the time to send me an email to tell me. As you can imagine, I was really touched to be on the receiving end of that.

I resolved that I would do it more myself. Whether it’s a piece of music, writing, or anything else, I’m going to try to remember to pass on my appreciation more often.

That’s a good place to end, isn’t it? A nice heart-warming reminder that small acts of thoughtfulness can make a big difference to someone else’s well-being.

But there’s a corollary to that lesson. Acts of thoughtlessness will almost certainly make a very big difference to someone else’s well-being.

This is something I know in theory but struggle with in practice. I’ve experienced the regret of wishing I hadn’t acted so stupidly in my dealings with work colleagues, for example.

There’ll be some discussion happening on a topic that I might have strong feelings about, and I let those strong feelings take over my behaviour. Quite frankly, I act like a dickhead.

Sure, I can analyse it in hindsight and identify what causes this unintended behaviour, but that sounds an awful lot like excusing it. In the end, it doesn’t matter what my intentions were or what the circumstances were. It’s my actions that matter. More specifically, it’s the effect of my actions on other people that matter.

So, yeah, I am going to try to do more of those small thoughtful acts, like sending thank-you messages to people. But frankly, that’s a stretch goal. The shamefully low bar I first have to pass is to simply treat people with the respect they deserve. To paraphrase the Hypocratic oath: first, don’t be an asshole.

There’s an oft-quoted adage:

They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.

This is usually applied in the inspirational, positive sense: get out there and make people feel good! But it works equally well as a warning.

You know how when you’re on hold to any customer service line you hear a message that thanks you for calling and claims your call is important to them. The message always includes a disclaimer about calls possibly being recorded “for training purposes.”

Nobody expects that any training is ever actually going to happen—surely we would see some improvement if that kind of iterative feedback loop were actually in place. But we most certainly want to know that a call might be recorded. Recording a call without disclosure would be unethical and illegal.

Consider chatbots.

If you’re having a text-based (or maybe even voice-based) interaction with a customer service representative that doesn’t disclose its output is the result of large language models, that too would be unethical. But, at the present moment in time, it would be perfectly legal.

That needs to change.

I suspect the necessary legislation will pass in Europe first. We’ll see if the USA follows.

In a way, this goes back to my obsession with seamful design. With something as inherently varied as the output of large language models, it’s vital that people have some way of evaluating what they’re told. I believe we should be able to see as much of the plumbing as possible.

The bare minimum amount of transparency is revealing that a machine is in the loop.

This shouldn’t be a controversial take. But I guarantee we’ll see resistance from tech companies trying to sell their “AI” tools as seamless, indistinguishable drop-in replacements for human workers.

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.

The cost of convenience — surma.dev

I believe that we haven’t figured out when and how to give a developer access to an abstraction or how to evaluate when an abstraction is worth using. Abstractions are usually designed for a set of specific use-cases. The problems, however, start when a developer wants to do something that the abstraction did not anticipate.

Smart thoughts from Surma on the design of libraries, frameworks, and other abstractions:

Abstractions that take work off of developers are valuable! Of course, they are. The problems only occur when a developer feels chained to the abstractions in a situation where they’d rather do something differently. The important part is to not force patterns onto them.

This really resonated with parts of my recent talk at CSS Day when I was talking about Sass and jQuery:

If you care about DX and the adoption of your abstraction, it is much more beneficial to let developers use as much of their existing skills as possible and introduce new concepts one at a time.

Patterns | APG | WAI | W3C

This is a terrific resource! A pattern library of interactive components: tabs, switches, dialogs, carousels …all the usual suspects.

Each component has an example implementation along with advice and a checklist for ensuring its accessible.

It’s so great to have these all gathered together in one place!

How to progressively enhance a nav menu | Go Make Things

A lot of folks assume that progressive enhancement means having to write the same code twice, but often, it can be as simple as extending the pattern you already have once the JS loads.

What would have happened if we never fixed the ozone hole?

We may not live in the best of all possible worlds, but we have dodged some bullets:

In the annals of environmental history, humanity’s response to the ozone crisis stands out as a rare success story. During the 1970s and ‘80s, evidence started to mount that certain household chemicals used in refrigerators, air conditioners, and aerosol cans like hairspray were eating a giant hole in Earth’s ozone layer, which prevents harmful ultraviolet radiation from reaching the surface. Facing the terrifying prospect of a future without any atmospheric sunscreen at all, in the late 1980s nations came together to sign the Montreal Protocol, a global treaty to phase out so-called ozone-depleting substances like chlorofluorocarbons.

But if things hadn’t turned out that way—if the scientific evidence linking man-made chemicals to ozone depletion wasn’t strong enough, or if ozone deniers (yes, there were ozone deniers) successfully stymied the Montreal Protocol—the world might look very different.

Tabs in HTML?

I’ve been having some really interesting chats with Brian about tabs, markup, progressive enhancement and accessibility. Here’s a braindump of his current thinking which is well worth perusing.

Whatever Happened to UI Affordances? – Terence Eden’s Blog

Flat, minimalist, clean, material - whatever you want to call it - is an annoying antipattern. Computers are here to make life easier for humans. Removing affordances is just a nasty thing to do to your users.

Let’s talk about failure

Denise shares a cautionary tale of service design gone wrong.

I helped pioneer UX design. What I see today horrifies me

Jesse has his Oppenheimer moment, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

What got lost along the way was a view of UX as something deeper and more significant than a step in the software delivery pipeline: an approach that grounds product design in a broad contextual understanding of the problem and goes beyond the line-item requirements of individual components. Also lost along the way were many of the more holistic and exploratory practices that enabled UX to deliver that kind of foundational value.