Tags: convenience

The Cost of Convenience - DEV Community

The pros and cons of dependencies in your toolchain.

Web tech is better. Developer norms are worse. | Go Make Things

The web historically moves in waves.

Libraries are created to push complex features in an easier way. Then the libraries themselves get complicated, often more so than the benefits they provide.

Eventually, (some of) the core features of those libraries make their way into the browser itself, but the libraries linger like water on the shore, slowly receding.

And before the sand has a chance to fully dry, a new set of libraries washes in to push the web even further.

Boring by default

More on battling entropy:

Ever needed to change “just a small thing” on an old page you build years ago? I recently had the pleasure and the simple task of changing some colors in CSS lead to a whole day of me wrangling with old deprecated Grunt tasks and trying to get the build task running.

The solution:

That’s why starting with HTML, CSS and JavaScript without the need to ever compile anything on your local machine is a good idea. Changing some colors on such a page would indeed only take minutes and not a whole day.

I like this mindset:

Be boring by default and enhance on the way.

Cheating Entropy with Native Web Technologies - Jim Nielsen’s Weblog

This post really highlights one of the biggest issues with the convoluted build tools used for “modern” web development. If you return to a project after any length of time, this is what awaits:

I find entropy staring me back in the face: library updates, breaking API changes, refactored mental models, and possible downright obsolescence. An incredible amount of effort will be required to make a simple change, test it, and get it live.

Always bet on HTML:

Take a moment and think about this super power: if you write vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS, all you have to do is put that code in a web browser and it runs. Edit a file, refresh the page, you’ve got a feedback cycle. As soon as you introduce tooling, as soon as you introduce an abstraction not native to the browser, you may have to invent the universe for a feedback cycle.

Maintainability matters—if not for you, then for future you.

The more I author code as it will be run by the browser the easier it will be to maintain that code over time, despite its perceived inferior developer ergonomics (remember, developer experience encompasses both the present and the future, i.e. “how simple are the ergonomics to build this now and maintain it into the future?) I don’t mind typing some extra characters now if it means I don’t have to learn/relearn, setup, configure, integrate, update, maintain, and inevitably troubleshoot a build tool or framework later.

Visitors, Developers, or Machines

Garrett’s observation is spot-on here:

I’ve been trying to understand the appeal of these frameworks by giving them an objective chance. I’ve expanded my knowledge of JavaScript and tried to give them the benefit of the doubt. They do have their places, but the only explanation I can come up with is that developers are taking a similar approach as Ruby and focusing on developer convenience and productivity. Only, instead of Ruby’s performance being tied to the CPU level, JavaScript frameworks push the performance burden to the client.

In both cases, the tradeoff happens in the name of developer happiness and productivity, but the strategies have entirely different consequences. With Ruby, the CPU is still (mostly) the responsibility of the development team, and it can be upgraded. With JavaScript, the page weight becomes an externality pushed onto visitors.

When I talk about evaluating technology for front-end development, I like to draw a distinction between two categories of technology.

On the one hand, you’ve got the raw materials of the web: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This is what users will ultimately interact with.

On the other hand, you’ve got all the tools and technologies that help you produce the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: pre-processors, post-processors, transpilers, bundlers, and other build tools.

Personally, I’m much more interested and excited by the materials than I am by the tools. But I think it’s right and proper that other developers are excited by the tools. A good balance of both is probably the healthiest mix.

I’m never sure what to call these two categories. Maybe the materials are the “external” technologies, because they’re what users will interact with. Whereas all the other technologies—that mosty live on a developer’s machine—are the “internal” technologies.

Another nice phrase is something I heard during Chris’s talk at An Event Apart in Seattle, when he quoted Brad, who talked about the front of the front end and the back of the front end.

I’m definitely more of a front-of-the-front-end kind of developer. I have opinions on the quality of the materials that get served up to users; the output should be accessible and performant. But I don’t particularly care about the tools that produced those materials on the back of the front end. Use whatever works for you (or whatever works for your team).

As a user-centred developer, my priority is doing what’s best for end users. That’s not to say I don’t value developer convenience. I do. But I prioritise user needs over developer needs. And in any case, those two needs don’t even come into conflict most of the time. Like I said, from a user’s point of view, it’s irrelevant what text editor or version control system you use.

Now, you could make the argument that anything that is good for developer convenience is automatically good for user experience because faster, more efficient development should result in better output. While that’s true in theory, I highly recommend Alex’s post, The “Developer Experience” Bait-and-Switch.

Where it gets interesting is when a technology that’s designed for developer convenience is made out of the very materials being delivered to users. For example, a CSS framework like Bootstrap is made of CSS. That’s different to a tool like Sass which outputs CSS. Whether or not a developer chooses to use Sass is irrelevant to the user—the final output will be CSS either way. But if a developer chooses to use a CSS framework, that decision has a direct impact on the user experience. The user must download the framework in order for the developer to get the benefit.

So whereas Sass sits at the back of the front end—where I don’t care what you use—Bootstrap sits at the front of the front end. For tools like that, I don’t think saying “use whatever works for you” is good enough. It’s got to be weighed against the cost to the user.

Historically, it’s been a similar story with JavaScript libraries. They’re written in JavaScript, and so they’re going to be executed in the browser. If a developer wanted to use jQuery to make their life easier, the user paid the price in downloading the jQuery library.

But I’ve noticed a welcome change with some of the bigger JavaScript frameworks. Whereas the initial messaging around frameworks like React touted the benefits of state management and the virtual DOM, I feel like that’s not as prevalent now. You’re much more likely to hear people—quite rightly—talk about the benefits of modularity and componentisation. If you combine that with the rise of Node—which means that JavaScript is no longer confined to the browser—then these frameworks can move from the front of the front end to the back of the front end.

We’ve certainly seen that at Clearleft. We’ve worked on multiple React projects, but in every case, the output was server-rendered. Developers get the benefit of working with a tool that helps them. Users don’t pay the price.

For me, this question of whether a framework will be used on the client side or the server side is crucial.

Let me tell you about a Clearleft project that sticks in my mind. We were working with a big international client on a product that was going to be rolled out to students and teachers in developing countries. This was right up my alley! We did plenty of research into network conditions and typical device usage. That then informed a tight performance budget. Every design decision—from web fonts to images—was informed by that performance budget. We were producing lean, mean markup, CSS, and JavaScript. But we weren’t the ones implementing the final site. That was being done by the client’s offshore software team, and they insisted on using React. “That’s okay”, I thought. “React can be used server-side so we can still output just what’s needed, right?” Alas, no. These developers did everything client side. When the final site launched, the log-in screen alone required megabytes of JavaScript just to render a form. It was, in my opinion, entirely unfit for purpose. It still pains me when I think about it.

That was a few years ago. I think that these days it has become a lot easier to make the decision to use a framework on the back of the front end. Like I said, that’s certainly been the case on recent Clearleft projects that involved React or Vue.

It surprises me, then, when I see the question of server rendering or client rendering treated almost like an implementation detail. It might be an implementation detail from a developer’s perspective, but it’s a key decision for the user experience. The performance cost of putting your entire tech stack into the browser can be enormous.

Alex Sanders from the development team at The Guardian published a post recently called Revisiting the rendering tier . In it, he describes how they’re moving to React. Now, if this were a move to client-rendered React, that would make a big impact on the user experience. The thing is, I couldn’t tell from the article whether React was going to be used in the browser or on the server. The article talks about “rendering”—which is something that browsers do—and “the DOM”—which is something that only exists in browsers.

So I asked. It turns out that this plan is very much about generating HTML and CSS on the server before sending it to the browser. Excellent!

With that question answered, I’m cool with whatever they choose to use. In this case, they’re choosing to use CSS-in-JS (although, to be pedantic, there’s no C anymore so technically it’s SS-in-JS). As long as the “JS” part is JavaScript on a server, then it makes no difference to the end user, and therefore no difference to me. Not my circus, not my monkeys. For users, the end result is the same whether styling is applied via a selector in an external stylesheet or, for example, via an inline style declaration (and in some situations, a server-rendered CSS-in-JS solution might be better for performance). And so, as a user-centred developer, this is something that I don’t need to care about.

Except…

I have misgivings. But just to be clear, these misgivings have nothing to do with users. My misgivings are entirely to do with another group of people: the people who make websites.

There’s a second-order effect. By making React—or even JavaScript in general—a requirement for styling something on a web page, the barrier to entry is raised.

At least, I think that the barrier to entry is raised. I completely acknowledge that this is a subjective judgement. In fact, the reason why a team might decide to make JavaScript a requirement for participation might well be because they believe it makes it easier for people to participate. Let me explain…

It wasn’t that long ago that devs coming from a Computer Science background were deriding CSS for its simplicity, complaining that “it’s broken” and turning their noses up at it. That rhetoric, thankfully, is waning. Nowadays they’re far more likely to acknowledge that CSS might be simple, but it isn’t easy. Concepts like the cascade and specificity are real head-scratchers, and any prior knowledge from imperative programming languages won’t help you in this declarative world—all your hard-won experience and know-how isn’t fungible. Instead, it seems as though all this cascading and specificity is butchering the modularity of your nicely isolated components.

It’s no surprise that programmers with this kind of background would treat CSS as damage and find ways to route around it. The many flavours of CSS-in-JS are testament to this. From a programmer’s point of view, this solution has made things easier. Best of all, as long as it’s being done on the server, there’s no penalty for end users. But now the price is paid in the diversity of your team. In order to participate, a Computer Science programming mindset is now pretty much a requirement. For someone coming from a more declarative background—with really good HTML and CSS skills—everything suddenly seems needlessly complex. And as Tantek observed:

Complexity reinforces privilege.

The result is a form of gatekeeping. I don’t think it’s intentional. I don’t think it’s malicious. It’s being done with the best of intentions, in pursuit of efficiency and productivity. But these code decisions are reflected in hiring practices that exclude people with different but equally valuable skills and perspectives.

Rachel describes HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points:

If we make it so that you have to understand programming to even start, then we take something open and enabling, and place it back in the hands of those who are already privileged.

I think there’s a comparison here with toxic masculinity. Toxic masculinity is obviously terrible for women, but it’s also really shitty for men in the way it stigmatises any male behaviour that doesn’t fit its worldview. Likewise, if the only people your team is interested in hiring are traditional programmers, then those programmers are going to resent having to spend their time dealing with semantic markup, accessibility, styling, and other disciplines that they never trained in. Heydon correctly identifies this as reluctant gatekeeping:

By assuming the role of the Full Stack Developer (which is, in practice, a computer scientist who also writes HTML and CSS), one takes responsibility for all the code, in spite of its radical variance in syntax and purpose, and becomes the gatekeeper of at least some kinds of code one simply doesn’t care about writing well.

This hurts everyone. It’s bad for your team. It’s even worse for the wider development community.

Last year, I was asked “Is there a fear or professional challenge that keeps you up at night?” I responded:

My greatest fear for the web is that it becomes the domain of an elite priesthood of developers. I firmly believe that, as Tim Berners-Lee put it, “this is for everyone.” And I don’t just mean it’s for everyone to use—I believe it’s for everyone to make as well. That’s why I get very worried by anything that raises the barrier to entry to web design and web development.

I’ve described a number of dichotomies here:

• Materials vs. tools,
• Front of the front end vs. back of the front end,
• User experience vs. developer experience,
• Client-side rendering vs. server-side rendering,
• Declarative languages vs. imperative languages.

But the split that worries the most is this:

• The people who make the web vs. the people who are excluded from making the web.

Is Tech Too Easy to Use? - The New York Times

Seams!

Of all the buzzwords in tech, perhaps none has been deployed with as much philosophical conviction as “frictionless.” Over the past decade or so, eliminating “friction” — the name given to any quality that makes a product more difficult or time-consuming to use — has become an obsession of the tech industry, accepted as gospel by many of the world’s largest companies.

CSS Frameworks Or CSS Grid: What Should I Use For My Project? — Smashing Magazine

Rachel does some research to find out why people use CSS frameworks like Bootstrap—it can’t just be about grids, right?

It turns out there are plenty of reasons that people give for using frameworks—whether it’s CSS or JavaScript—but Rachel shares some of my misgivings on this:

In our race to get our site built quickly, our desire to make things as good as possible for ourselves as the designers and developers of the site, do we forget who we are doing this for? Do the decisions made by the framework developer match up with the needs of the users of the site you are building?

Not for the first time, I’m reminded of Rachel’s excellent post from a few years ago: Stop solving problems you don’t yet have.

Why do people decide to use frameworks?

Some sensible answers to this question here…

…of which, exactly zero mention end users.

Uber, Lyft, Taxis, Design and the Age of Ambivalence + Subtraction.com

Design has disrupted taxis in a massive, almost unprecedented way. But good design doesn’t merely aim to disrupt—it should set out to actually build viable solutions. Designers shouldn’t look at a problem and say, “What we’re going to do is just fuck it up and see what happens.” That’s a dereliction of duty.

The “Developer Experience” Bait-and-Switch | Infrequently Noted

JavaScript is the web’s CO2. We need some of it, but too much puts the entire ecosystem at risk. Those who emit the most are furthest from suffering the consequences — until the ecosystem collapses. The web will not succeed in the markets and form-factors where computing is headed unless we get JS emissions under control.

Damn, that’s a fine opening! And the rest of this post by Alex is pretty darn great too. He’s absolutely right in calling out the fetishisation of developer experience at the expense of user needs:

The swap is executed by implying that by making things better for developers, users will eventually benefit equivalently. The unstated agreement is that developers share all of the same goals with the same intensity as end users and even managers. This is not true.

I have a feeling that this will be a very bitter pill for many developers to swallow:

If one views the web as a way to address a fixed market of existing, wealthy web users, then it’s reasonable to bias towards richness and lower production costs. If, on the other hand, our primary challenge is in growing the web along with the growth of computing overall, the ability to reasonably access content bumps up in priority. If you believe the web’s future to be at risk due to the unusability of most web experiences for most users, then discussion of developer comfort that isn’t tied to demonstrable gains for marginalized users is at best misguided.

Oh,captain, my captain!

Tools that cost the poorest users to pay wealthy developers are bunk.

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Thank you. Thank you very much, Mike; it really is an honour and a privilege to be here. Kia Ora! Good morning.

This is quite intimidating. I’m supposed to open the show and there’s all these amazing, exciting speakers are going to be speaking for the next two days on amazing, exciting topics, so I’d better level up: I’d better talk about something exciting. So, let’s do it!

Economics

Yeah, we need to talk about capitalism. Capitalism is one of a few competing theories on how to structure an economy and the theory goes that you have a marketplace and the marketplace rules all and it is the marketplace that self-regulates through its kind of invisible hand. Pretty good theory, the idea being that through this invisible hand in the marketplace, wealth can be distributed relatively evenly; sort of a bell-curve distribution of wealth where some people have more, some people have less, but it kind of evens out. You see bell-curve distributions right for things like height and weight or IQ. Some have more, some have less, but the difference isn’t huge. That’s the idea, that economies could follow this bell-curve distribution.

But, without any kind of external regulation, what tends to happen in a capitalistic economy is that the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and it runs out of control. Instead of a bell-curve distribution you end up with something like this which is a power-law distribution, where you have the wealth concentrated in a small percentage and there’s a long tail of poverty.

That’s the thing about capitalism: it sounds great in theory, but not so good in practice.

Monopoly

The theory, I actually agree with, the theory being that competition is good and that competition is healthy. I think that’s a sound theory. I like competition: I think there should be a marketplace of competition, to try and avoid these kind of monopolies or duopolies that you get in these power-law distributions. The reason I say that is that we as web designers and web developers, we’ve seen what happens when monopolies kick in.

We were there: we were there when there was a monopoly; when Microsoft had an enormous share of the browser market, it was like in the high nineties, percentage of browser share with Internet Explorer, which they achieved because they had an enormous monopoly in the desktop market as well, they were able to bundle Internet Explorer with the Windows Operating System. Not exactly an invisible hand regulating there.

But we managed to dodge this bullet. I firmly believe that the more browsers we have, the better. I think a diversity of browsers is a really good thing. I know sometimes as developers, “Oh wouldn’t it be great if there was just one browser to develop for: wouldn’t that be great?” No. No it would not! We’ve been there and it wasn’t pretty. Firefox was pretty much a direct result of this monopoly situation in browsers. But like I say, we dodged this bullet. In some ways the web interpreted this monopoly as damage and routed around it. This idea of interpreting something as damaged and routing around it, that’s a phrase that comes from network architecture

Networks

As with economies, there are competing schools of thought on how you would structure a network; there’s many ways to structure a network.

One way, sort of a centralised network approach is, you have this hub and spoke model, where you have lots of smaller nodes connecting to a single large hub and then those large hubs can connect with one another and this is how the telegraph worked, then the telephone system worked like this. Airports still pretty much work like this. You’ve got regional airports connecting to a large hub and those large hubs connect to one another, and it’s a really good system. It works really well until the hub gets taken out. If the hub goes down, you’ve got these nodes that are stranded: they can’t connect to one another. That’s a single point of failure, that’s a vulnerability in this network architecture.

It was the single point of failure, this vulnerability, that led to the idea of packet-switching and different network architectures that we saw in the ARPANET, which later became the Internet. The impetus there was to avoid the single point of failure. What if you took these nodes and gave them all some connections?

This is more like a bell-curve distribution of connections now. Some nodes have more connections than others, some have fewer, but there isn’t a huge difference between the amount of connections between nodes. Then the genius of packet-switching is that you just need to get the signal across the network by whatever route works best at the time. That way, if a node were to disappear, even a relatively well-connected one, you can route around the damage. Now you’re avoiding the single point of failure problem that you would have with a hub and spoke model.

Like I said, this kind of thinking came from the ARPANET, later the Internet and it was as a direct result of trying to avoid having that single point of failure in a command-and-control structure. If you’re in a military organisation, you don’t want to have that single point of failure. You’ve probably heard that the internet was created to withstand a nuclear attack and that’s not exactly the truth but the network architecture that we have today on the internet was influenced by avoiding that command-and-control, that centralised command-and-control structure.

Some people kind of think there’s sort of blood on the hands of the internet because it came from this military background, DARPA…Defence Advance Research Project. But actually, the thinking behind this was not to give one side the upper hand in case of a nuclear conflict: quite the opposite. The understanding was, if there were the chance of a nuclear conflict and you had a hub and spoke model of communication, then actually you know that if they take out your hub, you’re screwed, so you’d better strike first. Whereas if you’ve got this kind of distributed network, then if there’s the possibility of attack, you might be more willing to wait it out and see because you know you can survive that initial first strike. And so this network approach was not designed to give any one side the upper hand in case of a nuclear war, but to actually avoid nuclear war in the first place. On the understanding that this was in place for both sides, so Paul Baran and the other people working on the ARPANET, they were in favour of sharing this technology with the Russians, even at the height of the Cold War.

The World Wide Web

In this kind of network architecture, there’s no hubs, there’s no regional nodes, there’s just nodes on the network. It’s very egalitarian and the network can grow and shrink infinitely; it’s scale-free, you can just keep adding nodes to network and you don’t need to ask permission to add a node to this network. That same sort of architecture then influenced the World Wide Web, which is built on top of the Internet and Tim Berners-Lee uses this model where anybody can add a website to the World Wide Web: you don’t need to ask for permission, you just add one more node to the network; there’s no plan to it, there’s no structure and so it’s a mess! It’s a sprawling, beautiful mess with no structure.

Walled Gardens

And it’s funny, because in the early days of the Web it wasn’t clear that the Web was going to win; not at all. There was competition. You had services like Compuserve and AOL. I’m not talking about AOL the website. Before it was a website, it was this thing separate to the web, which was much more structured, much safer; these were kind of the walled gardens and they would make wonderful content for you and warn you if you tried to step outside the bounds of their walled gardens into the wild, lawless lands of the World Wide Web and say, ooh, you don’t want to go out there. And yet the World Wide Web won, despite its chaoticness, its lawlessness. People chose the Web and despite all the content that Compuserve and AOL and these other walled gardens were producing, they couldn’t compete with the wild and lawless nature of the Web. People left the walled gardens and went out into the Web.

And then a few years later, everyone went back into the walled gardens. Facebook, Twitter, Medium. Very similar in a way to AOL and Compuserve: the nice, well-designed places, safe spaces not like those nasty places out in the World Wide Web and they warn you if you’re about to head out into the World Wide Web. But there’s a difference this time round: AOL and Compuserve, they were producing content for us, to keep us in the walled gardens. With the case of Facebook, Medium, Twitter, we produce the content. These are the biggest media companies in the world and they don’t produce any media. We produce the media for them.

How did this happen? How did we end up with this situation when we returned into the walled gardens? What happened?

Facebook, I used to wonder, what is the point of Facebook? I mean this in the sense that when Facebook came along, there were lots of different social networks, but they all kinda had this idea of being about a single, social object. Flickr was about the photograph and upcoming.org was about the event and Dopplr was about travel. And somebody was telling me about Facebook and saying, “You should get on Facebook.” I was like, “Oh yeah? What’s it for?” He said: “Everyone’s on it.” “Yeah, but…what’s it for? Is it photographs, events, what is it?” And he was like, “Everyone’s on it.” And now I understand that it’s absolutely correct: the reason why everyone is on Facebook is because everyone is on Facebook. It’s a direct example of Metcalfe’s Law.

Again, it’s a power-law distribution: that the value of the network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes on a network. Basically, the more people on the network the better. The first person to have a fax machine, that’s a useless lump of plastic. As soon as one more person has a fax machine, it’s exponentially more useful. Everyone is on Facebook because everyone is on Facebook. Which turns it into a hub. It is now a centralised hub, which means it is a single point of failure, by the way. In security terms, I guess you would talk about it having a large attack surface.

Let’s say you wanted to attack media outlets, I don’t know, let’s say you were trying to influence an election in the United States of America… Instead of having to target hundreds of different news outlets, you now only need to target one because it has a very large attack surface.

It’s just like, if you run WordPress as a CMS, you have to make sure to keep it patched all the time because it’s a large attack surface. It’s not that it’s any more or less secure or vulnerable than any other CMS, it’s just that it’s really popular and therefore is more likely to be attacked. Same with a hub like Facebook.

OK. Why then? Why did we choose to return to these walled gardens? Well, the answer’s actually pretty obvious, which is: they’re convenient. Walled gardens are nice to use. The user experience is pretty great; they’re well-designed, they’re nice.

The disadvantage is what you give up when you gain this convenience. You give up control. You no longer have control over the content that you publish. You don’t control who’s going to even see what you publish. Some algorithm is taking care of that. These silos—Facebook, Twitter, Medium—they now have control of the hyperlinks. Walled gardens give you convenience, but the cost is control.

The Indie Web

This is where this idea of the indie web comes in, to try and bridge this gap that you could somehow still have the convenience of using these beautiful, well-designed walled gardens and yet still have the control of owning your own content, because let’s face it, having your own website, that’s a hassle: it’s hard work, certainly compared to just opening up Facebook, opening a Facebook account, Twitter account, Medium account and just publishing, boom. The barrier to entry is really low whereas setting up your own website, registering a domain, do you choose a CMS? There’s a lot of hassle involved in that.

But maybe we can bridge the gap. Maybe we can get both: the convenience and the control. This is the idea of the indie web. At its heart, there’s a fairly uncontroversial idea here, which is that you should have your own website. I mean, there would have been a time when that would’ve been a normal statement to make and these days, it sounds positively disruptive to even suggest that you should have your own website.

Longevity

I have my own personal reasons for wanting to publish on my own website. If anybody was here back in the…six years ago, I was here at Webstock which was a great honour and I was talking about digital preservation and longevity and for me, that’s one of the reasons why I like to have the control over my own content, because these things do go away. If you published your content on, say, MySpace: I’m sorry. It’s gone. And there was a time when it was unimaginable that MySpace could be gone; it was like Facebook, you couldn’t imagine the web without it. Give it enough time. MySpace is just one example, there’s many more. I used to publish in GeoCities. Delicious; Magnolia, Pownce, Dopplr. Many, many more.

Now, I’m not saying that everything should be online for ever. What I’m saying is, it should be your choice. You should be able to choose when something stays online and you should be able to choose when something gets taken offline. The web has a real issue with things being taken offline. Linkrot is a real problem on the web, and partly that’s to do with the nature of the web, the fundamental nature of the way that linking works on the web.

Hyperlinks

When Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau were first coming up with the World Wide Web, they submitted a paper to a hypertext conference, I think it was 1991, 92, about this project they were building called the World Wide Web. The paper was rejected. Their paper was rejected by these hypertext experts who said, this system: it’ll never work, it’s terrible. One of the reasons why they rejected it was it didn’t have this idea of two-way linking. Any decent hypertext system, they said, has a concept of two-way linking where there’s knowledge of the link at both ends, so in a system that has two-way linking, if a resource happens to move, the link can move with it and the link is maintained. Now that’s not the way the web works. The web has one-way linking; you can just link to something, that’s it and the other resource has no knowledge that you’re linking to it but if that resource moves or goes away, the link is broken. You get linkrot. That’s just the way the web works.

But. There’s a little technique that if you sort of squint at it just the right way, it sort of looks like two-way linking on the web and involves a very humble bit of HTML. The rel attribute. Now, you’ve probably seen the rel attribute before, you’ve probably seen it on the link element. Rel is short for relationship, so the value of the rel attribute will describe the relationship of the linked resource, whatever’s inside the href; so I’m sure you’ve probably typed this at some point where you say rel=stylesheet on a link element. What you’re saying is, the linked resource, what’s in the href, has the relationship of being a style sheet for the current document.

link rel="stylesheet" href="..."

You can use it on A elements as well. There’s rel values like prev for previous and next, say this is the relationship of being the next document, or this is the relationship of being the previous document. Really handy for pagination of search results, for example.

a rel="prev" href="..."
a rel="next" href="..."

And then there’s this really silly value, rel=me.

a rel="me" href="..."

Now, how does that work? The linked document has a relationship of being me? Well, I use this. I use this on my own website. I have A elements that link off to my profiles on these other sites, so I’m saying, that Twitter profile over there: that’s me. And that’s me on Flickr and that’s me on GitHub.

a rel="me" href="https://twitter.com/adactio"
a rel="me" href="https://flickr.com/adactio"
a rel="me" href="https://github.com/adactio"

OK, but still, these are just regular, one-way hyperlinks I’m making. I’ve added a rel value of “me” but so what?

Well, the interesting thing is, if you go to any of those profiles, when you’re signing up, you can add your own website: that’s one of the fields. There’s a link from that profile to your own website and in that link, they also use rel=me.

a rel="me" href="https://adactio.com"

I’m linking to my profile on Twitter saying, rel=me; that’s me. And my Twitter profile is linking to my website saying, rel=me; that’s me. And so you’ve kind of got two-way linking. You’ve got this confirmed relationship, these claims have been verified. Fine, but what can you do with that?

RelMeAuth

Well, there’s a technology called RelMeAuth that uses this, kind of piggy-backs on something that all these services have in common: Twitter and Flickr and GitHub. All of these services have OAuth, authentication. Now, if I wanted to build an API, I should probably, for a right-API, I probably need to be an OAuth provider. I am not smart enough to become an OAuth provider; that sounds way too much like hard work for me. But I don’t need to because Twitter and Flickr and GitHub are already OAuth providers, so I can just piggy-back on the functionality that they provide, just be adding rel=me.

Here’s an example of this in action. There’s an authentication service called IndieAuth and I literally sign in with my URL. I type in my website name, it then finds the rel=me links, the ones that are reciprocal; I choose which one I feel like logging in with today, let’s say Twitter, I get bounced to Twitter, I have to be logged in on Twitter for this to work and then I’ve authenticated. I’ve authenticated with my own website; I’ve used OAuth without having to write OAuth, just by adding rel=me to a couple of links that were already on my site.

Micropub

Why would I want to authenticate? Well, there’s another piece of technology called micropub. Now, this is definitely more complicated than just adding rel=me to a few links. This is an end-point on my website and can be an end-point on your website and it accepts POST requests, that’s all it does. And if I’ve already got authentication taken care of and now I’ve got an end-point for POST requests, I’ve basically got an API, which means I can post to my website from other places. Once that end-point exists, I can use somebody else’s website to post to my website, as long as they’ve got this micropub support. I log in with that IndieAuth flow and then I’m using somebody else’s website to post to my website. That’s pretty nice. As long as these services have micropub support, I can post from somebody else’s posting interface to my own website and choose how I want to post.

In this example there, I was using a service called Quill; it’s got a nice interface. You can do long-form writing on it. It’s got a very Medium-like interface for long-form writing because a lot of people—when you talk about why are they on Medium—it’s because the writing experience is so nice, so it’s kind of been reproduced here. This was made by a friend of mine named Aaron Parecki and he makes some other services too. He makes OwnYourGram and OwnYourSwarm, and what they are is they’re kind of translation services between Instagram and Swarm to micropub.

Instagram and Swarm do not provide micropub support but by using these services, authenticating with these services using the rel=me links, I can then post from Instagram and from Swarm to my own website, which is pretty nice. If I post something on Swarm, it then shows up on my own website. And if I post something on Instagram, it goes up on my own website. Again I’m piggy-backing. There’s all this hard work of big teams of designers and engineers building these apps, Instagram and Swarm, and I’m taking all that hard work and I’m using it to post to my own websites. It feels kind of good.

Syndication

There’s an acronym for this approach, and it’s PESOS, which means you Publish Elsewhere and Syndicate to your Own Site. There’s an alternative to this approach and that’s POSSE, or you Publish on your Own Site and then you Syndicate Elsewhere, which I find preferable, but sometimes it’s not possible. For example, you can’t publish on your own site and syndicate it to Instagram; Instagram does not allow any way of posting to it except through the app. It has an API but it’s missing a very important method which is post a photograph. But you can syndicate to Medium and Flickr and Facebook and Twitter. That way, you benefit from the reach, so I’m publishing the original version on my own website and then I’m sending out copies to all these different services.

For example, I’ve got this section on my site called Notes which is for small little updates of say, oh, I don’t know, 280 characters and I’ve got the option to syndicate if I feel like it to say, Twitter or Flickr. When I post something on my own website—like this lovely picture of an amazingly good dog called Huxley—I can then choose to have that syndicated out to other places like Flickr or Facebook. The Facebook one’s kind of a cheat because I’m just using an “If This Then That” recipe to observe my site and post any time I post something. But I can syndicate to Twitter as well. The original URL is on my website and these are all copies that I’ve sent out into the world.

Webmention

OK, but what about…what about when people comment or like or retweet, fave, whatever it is they’re doing, the copy? They don’t come to my website to leave a comment or a fave or a like, they’re doing it on Twitter or Flickr. Well, I get those. I get those on my website too and that’s possible because of another building block called webmention. Webmention is another end-point that you can have on your site but it’s very, very simple: it just accepts pings. It’s basically a ping tracker. Anyone remember pingback? We used to have pingbacks on blogs; and it was quite complicated because it was XML-RPC and all this stuff. This is literally just a post that goes “ping”.

Let’s say you link to something on my website; I have no way of knowing that you’ve linked to me, I have no way of knowing that you’ve effectively commented on something I’ve posted, so you send me a ping using webmention and then I can go check and see, is there really a link to this article or this post or this note on this other website and if there is: great. It’s up to me now what I do with that information. Do I display it as a comment? Do I store it to the database? Whatever I want to do.

And you don’t even have to have your own webmention end-point. There’s webmentions as a service that you can subscribe to. Webmention.io is one of those; it’s literally like an answering service for pings. You can check in at the end of the day and say, “Any pings for me today?” Like a telephone answering service but for webmentions.

And then there’s this really wonderful service, a piece of open source software called Bridgy, which acts as a bridge. Places like Twitter and Flickr and Facebook, they do not send webmentions every time someone leaves a reply, but Bridgy—once you’ve authenticated with the rel=me values—Bridgy monitors your social media accounts and when somebody replies, it’ll take that and translate it into a webmention and send it to your webmention end-point. Now, any time somebody makes a response on one of the copies of your post, you get that on your own website, which is pretty neat.

It’s up to you what you do with those webmentions. I just display them in a fairly boring manner, the replies appear as comments and I just say how many shares there were, how many likes, but this is a mix of things coming from Twitter, from Flickr, from Facebook, from anywhere where I’ve posted copies. But you could make them look nicer too. Drew McLellan has got this kind of face-pile of the user accounts of the people who are responding out there on Twitter or on Flickr or on Facebook and he displays them in a nice way.

Drew, along with Rachel Andrew, is one of the people behind Perch CMS; a nice little CMS where a lot of this technology is already built in. It has support for webmention and all these kind of things, and there’s a lot of CMSs have done this where you don’t have to invent this stuff from scratch. If you like what you see and you think, “Oh, I want to have a webmention end-point, I want to have a micropub end-point”, chances are it already exists for the CMS you’re using. If you’re using something like WordPress or Perch or Jekyll or Kirby: a lot of these CMSs already have plug-ins available for you to use.

Building Blocks

Those are a few technologies that we can use to try and bridge that gap, to try and still get the control of owning your own content on your own website and still have the convenience of those third party services that we get to use their interfaces, that we get to have those conversations, the social effects that come with having a large network. Relatively simple building blocks: rel=me, micropub and webmention.

But they’re not the real building blocks of the indie web; they’re just technologies. Don’t get too caught up with the technologies. I think the real building blocks of the indie web can be found here in the principles of the indie web.

There’s a great page of design principles about why are we even doing this. There are principles like own your own data; focus on the user experience first; make tools for yourself and then see how you can scale them and share them with other people. But the most important design principle, I think, that’s on that list comes at the very end and it’s this: that we should 🎉 have fun (and the emoji is definitely part of the design principle).

Your website is your playground; it’s a place for you to experiment. You hear about some new technologies, you want to play with them? You might not get the chance at work but you can try out that CSS grid and the service worker or the latest JavaScript APIs you want to play with. Use your website as a playground to do that.

I also think we should remember the original motto of the World Wide Web, which was: let’s share what we know. And over the next few days, you’re going to hear a lot of amazing, inspiring ideas from amazing, inspiring people and I hope that you would be motivated to maybe share your thoughts. You could share what you know on Mark Zuckerberg’s website. You could share what you know on Ev Williams’s website. You could share what you know on Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey’s website. But I hope you’ll share what you know on your own website.

Thank you.

I got a follow-up comment to my follow-up post about the follow-up comment I got on my original post about Google Analytics. Keep up.

I made the point that, from a front-end performance perspective, server logs have no impact whereas a JavaScript-based analytics solution must have some impact on the end user. Paul Anthony says:

Google won the analytics war because dropping one line of JS in the footer and handing a tried and tested interface to customers is an obvious no brainer in comparison to setting up an open source option that needs a cron job to parse the files, a database to store the results and doesn’t provide mobile interface.

Good point. Dropping one snippet of JavaScript into your front-end codebase is certainly an easier solution …easier for you, that is. The cost is passed on to your users. This is a classic example of where user needs and developer needs are in opposition. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

Given the choice between making something my problem, and making something the user’s problem, I’ll choose to make it my problem every time.

It’s true that this often means doing more work. That’s why it’s called work. This is literally what our jobs are supposed to entail: we put in the work to make life easier for users. We’re supposed to be saving them time, not passing it along.

The example of Google Analytics is pretty extreme, I’ll grant you. The cost to the user of adding that snippet of JavaScript—if you’ve configured things reasonably well—is pretty small (again, just from a performance perspective; there’s still the cost of allowing Google to track them across domains), and the cost to you of setting up a comparable analytics system based on server logs can indeed be disproportionately high. But this tension between user needs and developer needs is something I see play out again and again.

I’ve often thought the HTML design principle called the priority of constituencies could be adopted by web developers:

In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementors over specifiers over theoretical purity. In other words costs or difficulties to the user should be given more weight than costs to authors.

In Resilient Web Design, I documented the three-step approach I take when I’m building anything on the web:

1. Identify core functionality.
2. Make that functionality available using the simplest possible technology.
3. Enhance!

Now I’m wondering if I should’ve clarified that second step further. When I talk about choosing “the simplest possible technology”, what I mean is “the simplest possible technology for the user”, not “the simplest possible technology for the developer.”

For example, suppose I were going to build a news website. The core functionality is fairly easy to identify: providing the news. Next comes the step where I choose the simplest possible technology. Now, if I were a developer who had plenty of experience building JavaScript-driven single page apps, I might conclude that the simplest route for me would be to render the news via JavaScript. But that would be a fragile starting point if I’m trying to reach as many people as possible (I might well end up building a swishy JavaScript-driven single page app in step three, but step two should almost certainly be good ol’ HTML).

Time and time again, I see decisions that favour developer convenience over user needs. Don’t get me wrong—as a developer, I absolutely want developer convenience …but not at the expense of user needs.

I know that “empathy” is an over-used word in the world of user experience and design, but with good reason. I think we should try to remind ourselves of why we make our architectural decisions by invoking who those decisions benefit. For example, “This tech stack is best option for our team”, or “This solution is the best for the widest range of users.” Then, given the choice, favour user needs in the decision-making process.

There will always be situations where, given time and budget constraints, we end up choosing solutions that are easier for us, but not the best for our users. And that’s okay, as long as we acknowledge that compromise and strive to do better next time.

But when the best solutions for us as developers become enshrined as the best possible solutions, then we are failing the people we serve.

That doesn’t mean we must become hairshirt-wearing martyrs; developer convenience is important …but not as important as user needs. Start with user needs.

Who Should Pay?, From the Notebook of Aaron Gustafson

When I look around, I see our community spending a lot of time coming up with new tools and techniques to make our jobs easier. To ship faster. And it’s not that I’m against efficiency, but I think we need to consider the implications of our decisions. And if one of those implications is making our users suffer—or potentially suffer—in order to make our lives easier, I think we need to consider their needs above our own.

Aaron wrote a great post a little while back called A Fundamental Disconnect. In it, he points to a worldview amongst many modern web developers, who see JavaScript as a universally-available technology in web browsers. They are, in effect, viewing a browser’s JavaScript engine as a runtime environment, and treating web development no different to any other kind of software development.

The one problem I’ve seen, however, is the fundamental disconnect many of these developers seem to have with the way deploying code on the Web works. In traditional software development, we have some say in the execution environment. On the Web, we don’t.

Treating JavaScript support in “the browser” as a known quantity is as much of a consensual hallucination as deciding that all viewports are 960 pixels wide. Even that phrasing—“the browser”—shows a framing that’s at odds with the reality of developing for the web; we don’t have to think about “the browser”, we have to think about browsers:

Lakoffian self-correction: if I’m about to talk about doing something “in the browser”, I try to catch myself and say “in browsers” instead.

While we might like think that browsers have all reached a certain level of equilibrium, as Aaron puts it “the Web is messy”:

And, as much as we might like to control a user’s experience down to the very pixel, those of us who have been working on the Web for a while understand that it’s a fool’s errand and have adjusted our expectations accordingly. Unfortunately, this new crop of Web developers doesn’t seem to have gotten that memo.

Please don’t think that either Aaron or I are saying that you shouldn’t use JavaScript. Far from it! It’s simply a matter of how you wield the power of JavaScript. If you make your core tasks dependent on JavaScript, some of your potential users will inevitably be left out in the cold. But if you start by building on a classic server/client model, and then enhance with JavaScript, you can have your cake and eat it too. Modern browsers get a smooth, rich experience. Older browsers get a clunky experience with full page refreshes, but that’s still much, much better than giving them nothing at all.

Aaron makes the case that, while we cannot control which browsers people will use, we can control the server environment.

Stuart takes issue with that assertion in a post called Fundamentally Disconnected. In it, he points out that the server isn’t quite the controlled environment that Aaron claims:

Aaron sees requiring a specific browser/OS combination as an impractical impossibility and the wrong thing to do, whereas doing this on the server is positively virtuous. I believe that this is no virtue.

It’s true enough that the server isn’t some rock-solid never-changing environment. Anyone who’s ever had to do install patches or update programming languages knows this. But at least it’s one single environment …whereas the web has an overwhelming multitude of environments; one for every browser/OS/device combination.

Stuart finishes on a stirring note:

The Web has trained its developers to attempt to build something that is fundamentally egalitarian, fundamentally available to everyone. That’s why the Web’s good. The old software model, of something which only works in one place, isn’t the baseline against which the Web should be judged; it’s something that’s been surpassed.

However he wraps up by saying that…

…the Web is the largest, most widely deployed, most popular and most ubiquitous computing platform the world has ever known. And its programming language is JavaScript.

In a post called Missed Connections, Aaron pushes back against that last point:

The fact is that you can’t build a robust Web experience that relies solely on client-side JavaScript.

While JavaScript may technically be available and consistently-implemented across most devices used to access our sites nowadays, we do not control how, when, or even if that JavaScript is ultimately executed.

Stuart responds in a post called Reconnecting (and, by the way, how great is it to see this kind of thoughtful blog-to-blog discussion going on?).

I am, in general and in total agreement with Aaron, opposed to the idea that without JavaScript a web app doesn’t work.

But here’s the problem with progressively enhancing from server functionality to a rich client:

A web app which does not require its client-side scripting, which works on the server and then is progressively enhanced, does not work in an offline environment.

Good point.

Now, at this juncture, I could point out that—by using progressive enhancement—you can still have the best of both worlds. Stuart has anticpated that:

It is in theory possible to write a web app which does processing on the server and is entirely robust against its client-side scripting being broken or missing, and which does processing on the client so that it works when the server’s unavailable or uncontactable or expensive or slow. But let’s be honest here. That’s not an app. That’s two apps.

Ah, there’s the rub!

When I’ve extolled the virtues of progressive enhancement in the past, the pushback I most often receive is on this point. Surely it’s wasteful to build something that works on the server and then reimplement much of it on the client?

Personally, I try not to completely reinvent all the business logic that I’ve already figured out on the server, and then rewrite it all in JavaScript. I prefer to use JavaScript—and specifically Ajax—as a dumb waiter, shuffling data back and forth between the client and server, where the real complexity lies.

I also think that building in this way will take longer …at first. But then on the next project, it takes less time. And on the project after that, it takes less time again. From that perspective, it’s similar to switching from tables for layout to using CSS, or switching from building fixed-with sites to responsive design: the initial learning curve is steep, but then it gets easier over time, until it simply becomes normal.

But fundamentally, Stuart is right. Developers don’t like to violate the DRY principle: Don’t Repeat Yourself. Writing code for the server environment, and then writing very similar code for the browser—I mean browsers—is a bad code smell.

Here’s the harsh truth: building websites with progressive enhancement is not convenient.

Building a client-side web thang that requires JavaScript to work is convenient, especially if you’re using a framework like Angular or Ember. In fact, that’s the main selling point of those frameworks: developer convenience.

The trade-off is that to get that level of developer convenience, you have to sacrifice the universal reach that the web provides, and limit your audience to the browsers that can run a pre-determined level of JavaScript. Many developers are quite willing to make that trade-off.

Developer convenience is a very powerful and important force. I wish that progressive enhancement could provide the same level of developer convenience offered by Angular and Ember, but right now, it doesn’t. Instead, its benefits are focused on the end user, often at the expense of the developer.

Personally, I’m willing to take that hit. I’ve always maintained that, given the choice between making something my problem, and making something the user’s problem, I’ll choose to make it my problem every time. But I absolutely understand the mindset of developers who choose otherwise.

But perhaps there’s a way to cut this Gordian knot. What if you didn’t need to write your code twice? What if you could write code for the server and then run the very same code on the client?

This is the promise of isomorphic JavaScript. It’s a terrible name for a great idea.

For me, this is the most exciting aspect of Node.js:

With Node.js, a fast, stable server-side JavaScript runtime, we can now make this dream a reality. By creating the appropriate abstractions, we can write our application logic such that it runs on both the server and the client — the definition of isomorphic JavaScript.

Some big players are looking into this idea. It’s the thinking behind AirBnB’s Rendr.

Interestingly, the reason why many large sites are investigating this approach isn’t about universal access—quite often they have separate siloed sites for different device classes. Instead it’s about performance. The problem with having all of your functionality wrapped up in JavaScript on the client is that, until all of that JavaScript has loaded, the user gets absolutely nothing. Compare that to rendering an HTML document sent from the server, and the perceived performance difference is very noticable.

“We don’t have any non-JavaScript users” No, all your users are non-JS while they’re downloading your JS

— Jake Archibald (@jaffathecake) May 28, 2012

Here’s the ideal situation:

1. A browser requests a URL.
2. The server sends HTML, which renders quickly, along with with some mustard-cutting JavaScript.
3. If the browser doesn’t cut the mustard, or JavaScript fails, fall back to full page refreshes.
4. If the browser does cut the mustard, keep all the interaction in the client, just like a single page app.

With Node.js on the server, and JavaScript in the client, steps 3 and 4 could theoretically use the same code.

So why aren’t we seeing more of these holy-grail apps that achieve progressive enhancement without code duplication?

Well, partly it’s back to that question of controlling the server environment.

@sil @adactio @dracos That architecture is a hard choice to make because it ties you to a small set of runtimes on the server.

— Dan Webb (@danwrong) September 22, 2014

@sil @adactio @dracos plus, I think there’s something positive about hard separation of client and server code. Gets you thinking right.

— Dan Webb (@danwrong) September 22, 2014

This is something that Nicholas Zakas tackled a year ago when he wrote about Node.js and the new web front-end. He proposes a third layer that sits between the business logic and the rendered output. By applying the idea of isomorphic JavaScript, this interface layer could be run on the server (as Node.js) or on the client (as JavaScript), while still allowing you to have the rest of your server environment running whatever programming language works for you.

It’s still early days for this kind of thinking, and there are lots of stumbling blocks—trying to write JavaScript that can be executed on both the server and the client isn’t so easy. But I’m pretty excited about where this could lead. I love the idea of building in a way that provide the performance and universal access of progressive enhancement, while also providing the developer convenience of JavaScript frameworks.

In the meantime, building with progressive enhancement may have to involve a certain level of inconvenience and duplication of effort. It’s a price I’m willing to pay, but I wish I didn’t have to. And I totally understand that others aren’t willing to pay that price.

But while the mood might currently seem to be in favour of using monolithic JavaScript frameworks to build client-side apps that rely on JavaScript in browsers, I think that the tide might change if we started to see poster children for progressive enhancement.

Three years ago, when I was trying to convince clients and fellow developers that responsive design was the way to go, it was a hard sell. It reminded me of trying to sell the benefits of using web standards instead of using tables for layout. Then, just as the Doug’s redesign of Wired and Mike’s redesign of ESPN helped sell the idea of CSS for layout, the Filament Group’s work on the Boston Globe made it a lot easier to sell the idea of responsive design. Then Paravel designed a responsive Microsoft homepage and the floodgates opened.

Now …who wants to do the same thing for progressive enhancement?

Thieves Are Your Best Customers in Waiting – Stuntbox

A great article from David with some concrete proposals for media companies.

By the way, how nice is David’s new responsive design? Very nice. Very nice indeed.