Baldur Bjarnason -
This is kind of brilliant:
Maybe what’s needed for websites and web apps is a kind of Prepper Web Dev?
Design for reading: tips for optimizing content for Reader modes and reading apps
The more I consume content in reading apps, the more I am reminded of the importance and the power of progressive enhancement as a strategy to create resilient and malleable experiences that work for everyone, regardless of how they choose to consume our content.
Top stuff from Sara here!
We have a tendency to always make an assumption about how our readers are reading our content—probably in the browser, with our fancy styles applied to it. But if we make a habit out of thinking about the Web in layers and CSS as an enhancement on top of the content layer, then we can start optimizing and enhancing our users’ reading experiences regardless of their context.
Thinking about the different ways in which users access the Web only shines light on the importance of a progressively enhanced approach to building for the Web. The more we think about the Web in layers and try to improve the experience of one layer before moving to the next, the more resilient experiences we can create. That’s what the essence of progressive enhancement is about.
Related links
Add a Service Worker to Your Site | CSS-Tricks - CSS-Tricks
Damn, I wish I had thought of giving this answer to the prompt, “What is one thing people can do to make their website better?”
If you do nothing else, this will be a huge boost to your site in 2022.
Chris’s piece is a self-contained tutorial!
Smashing Podcast Episode 21 With Chris Ferdinandi: Are Modern Best Practices Bad For The Web? — Smashing Magazine
I really enjoyed this interview between Drew and Chris. I love that there’s a transcript so you can read the whole thing if you don’t feel like huffduffing it.
New Adventures 2019 | Part Two: Progressive Web | Abstrakt
Here’s a thorough blow-by-blow account of the workshop I ran in Nottingham last week:
Jeremy’s workshop was a fascinating insight into resilience and how to approach a web project with ubiquity and consistency in mind from both a design and development point of view.
The Illusion of Control in Web Design · An A List Apart Article
Aaron gives a timely run-down of all the parts of a web experience that are out of our control. But don’t despair…
Recognizing all of the ways our carefully-crafted experiences can be rendered unusable can be more than a little disheartening. No one likes to spend their time thinking about failure. So don’t. Don’t focus on all of the bad things you can’t control. Focus on what you can control.
Start simply. Code defensively. User-test the heck out of it. Recognize the chaos. Embrace it. And build resilient web experiences that will work no matter what the internet throws at them.
Related posts
Browser support
Here’s Clearleft’s approach to browser support. You can use it too (it’s CC-licensed).
Speculation rules
A performance boost in Chrome.
Baseline progressive enhancement
If a browser feature can be used as a progressive enhancement, you don’t have to wait for all browsers to support it.
Read-only web apps
It’s fine to require JavaScript for read/write functionality. But have you considered a read-only mode without JavaScript?
Media queries with display-mode
I never would’ve known about the `display-mode` media feature if I hadn’t been writing about it.