Link archive: September, 2020

Aegir.org | Canvassing

Strong same:

I’m glad I have this site to play with things, almost all web development and ‘front-end’ stuff leaves me cold these days. It’s all so process driven, so full of unnecessary complexities and dependencies, it’s as if the entire industry wants you to forget you can write HTML by hand and upload it somewhere and it’s a working website. It’s complexity for complexity’s sake, like what accountancy software companies did to the tax code: “Oh this is too complex you need to pay us lots of money to sort it out.” Annoying. I can see some resistance to it and there are still people making blogs and playing around with stuff, so hopefully the professional professionals will calm the fuck down at some point.

Building a client side proxy

This is a great way to use a service worker to circumvent censorship:

After the visitor opens the website once over a VPN, the service worker is downloaded and installed. The VPN can then be disabled, and the service worker will take over to request content from non-blocked servers, effectively acting as a proxy.

The Empty Box | CSS-Tricks

This is an excellent framing for minimal viable products—what would the black box theatre production be?

Forget about all the production and complexity you could build. What’s the purpose you want to convey at the core?

Identify core functionality.

Chris Ferdinandi: The Lean Web | July 2020 - YouTube

A great presentation on taking a sensible approach to web development. Great advice, as always, from the blogging machine that is Chris Ferdinandi.

The web is a bloated, over-engineered mess. And, according to developer and educator Chris Ferdinandi, many of our modern “best practices” are actually making the web worse. In this talk, Chris explores The Lean Web, a set of principles for a simpler, faster world-wide web.

The case for rereading | A Working Library

Reading, especially fiction, is often referred to as an escape, but I’ve never believed that. It’s true that a great story transports you somewhere else, that returning to your life afterwards can feel like an abrupt reentry. But I think that’s less because you escaped the real world, however briefly, and more that you got a clearer look at it. A great book rearranges time: it brings both history and speculative futures into the present, into a now you can occupy and taste and feel.

‘Real’ Programming Is an Elitist Myth | WIRED

The title says it all, really. This is another great piece of writing from Paul Ford.

I’ve noticed that when software lets nonprogrammers do programmer things, it makes the programmers nervous. Suddenly they stop smiling indulgently and start talking about what “real programming” is. This has been the history of the World Wide Web, for example. Go ahead and tweet “HTML is real programming,” and watch programmers show up in your mentions to go, “As if.” Except when you write a web page in HTML, you are creating a data model that will be interpreted by the browser. This is what programming is.

On not choosing WordPress for the W3C redesign project - Working in the open with W3C and Studio 24

The use of React complicates front-end build. We have very talented front-end developers, however, they are not React experts - nor should they need to be. I believe front-end should be built as standards-compliant HTML/CSS with JavaScript used to enrich functionality where necessary and appropriate.

Clearleft turns fifteen | Clearleft

Fifteen years ago…

15 years of Clearleft

Ah, look at this beautiful timeline that Cassie designed and built—so many beautiful little touches! It covers the fifteen years(!) of Clearleft so far.

But you can also contribute to it …by looking ahead to the next fifteen years:

Let’s imagine it’s 2035…

How do you hope the practice of design will have changed for the better?

Fill out an online postcard with your hopes for the future.

The failed promise of Web Components – Lea Verou

A spot-on summary of where we’ve ended up with web components.

Web Components had so much potential to empower HTML to do more, and make web development more accessible to non-programmers and easier for programmers.

But then…

Somewhere along the way, the space got flooded by JS frameworks aficionados, who revel in complex APIs, overengineered build processes and dependency graphs that look like the roots of a banyan tree.

Alas, that’s true. Lea wonders how this can be fixed:

I’m not sure if this is a design issue, or a documentation issue.

I worry that is a cultural issue.

Using a custom element from the directory often needs to be preceded by a ritual of npm flugelhorn, import clownshoes, build quux, all completely unapologetically because “here is my truckload of dependencies, yeah, what”.

Meta Tags — Preview, Edit and Generate

This is a handy tool if you’re messing around with Twitter cards and other metacrap.

Blacklight – The Markup

This is an excellent new tool for showing exactly what kind of tracking a site is doing:

Who is peeking over your shoulder while you work, watch videos, learn, explore, and shop on the internet? Enter the address of any website, and Blacklight will scan it and reveal the specific user-tracking technologies on the site—and who’s getting your data. You may be surprised at what you learn.

Best of all, you can inspect the raw data and analyse the methodology.

There are some accompanying explainers:

• I Scanned the Websites I Visit with Blacklight, and It’s Horrifying. Now What?
• How We Built a Real-time Privacy Inspector
• The High Privacy Cost of a “Free” Website

Indexing My Blog’s Links - Jim Nielsen’s Weblog

You might not think this is a big deal, and maybe it’s not, but I love the idea behind the indie web: a people-focused alternative to the corporate web. Seeing everything you’ve ever linked to in one place really drives home how much of the web’s content, made by individuals, is under corporate control and identity.

The Economics of the Front-End - Jim Nielsen’s Weblog

I do think large tech companies employ JavaScript frameworks because, amongst other things, it saves them money at their scale. And what Big Tech does trickles down in the form of default choices for many others (“they’re doing it and are insanely successful, so mimicking them can’t be a bad idea”). However, the scale at which smaller projects operate doesn’t necessarily translate to the same kind of cost savings.

The web we left behind by Kyle Jacobson (ESNEXT 2020) - YouTube

This is such an excellent presentation! It really resonates with me.

Kyle Jacobson is a developer who’s been working with the web for over 10 years, and he talks about lessons from the past that can make the future of the web not only easier to develop using battle-tested technologies, but also one friendlier for humans.

Built to Last

Don’t blame it on the COBOL:

It’s a common fiction that computing technologies tend to become obsolete in a matter of years or even months, because this sells more units of consumer electronics. But this has never been true when it comes to large-scale computing infrastructure. This misapprehension, and the language’s history of being disdained by an increasingly toxic programming culture, made COBOL an easy scapegoat. But the narrative that COBOL was to blame for recent failures undoes itself: scapegoating COBOL can’t get far when the code is in fact meant to be easy to read and maintain.

It strikes me that the resilience of programmes written in COBOL is like the opposite of today’s modern web stack, where the tangled weeds of nested dependencies ensures that projects get harder and harder to maintain over time.

In a field that has elevated boy geniuses and rockstar coders, obscure hacks and complex black-boxed algorithms, it’s perhaps no wonder that a committee-designed language meant to be easier to learn and use—and which was created by a team that included multiple women in positions of authority—would be held in low esteem. But modern computing has started to become undone, and to undo other parts of our societies, through the field’s high opinion of itself, and through the way that it concentrates power into the hands of programmers who mistake social, political, and economic problems for technical ones, often with disastrous results.

Geri Reid - Forms best practice

This is a terrific collection of guidelines for form design.

Russell Davies: Writing for snobs

They came for the writers of car brochures, but I wasn’t a writer of car brochures, so I said nothing.

When you browse Instagram and find former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s passport number

This was an absolute delight to read! Usually when you read security-related write-ups, the fun comes from the cleverness of the techniques …but this involved nothing cleverer than dev tools. In this instance, the fun is in the telling of the tale.

Sophie Zhang and The Social Dilemma | Revue

I watched The Social Dilemma last night and to say it’s uneven would be like saying the Himalayas are a little bumpy.

I’m shocked at how appealing so many people find the idea that social networks are uniquely responsible for all of society’s ills.

This cartoon super villain view of the world strikes me as a kind of mirror image of the right-wing conspiracy theories which hold that a cabal of elites are manipulating every world event in secret. It is more than a little ironic that a film that warns incessantly about platforms using misinformation to stoke fear and outrage seems to exist only to stoke fear and outrage — while promoting a distorted view of how those platforms work along the way.

Schedule / Inclusive Design 24 (#id24) 17 September 2020

No matter what time zone you’re in, you can tune in to some excellent-sounding talks tomorrow.

No sign-up. No registration. All sessions are streamed live and publicly on the Inclusive Design 24 YouTube channel.

Why Do We Interface?

A short web book on the past, present and future of interfaces, written in a snappy, chatty style.

From oral communication and storytelling 500,000 years ago to virtual reality today, the purpose of information interfaces has always been to communicate more quickly, more deeply, to foster relationships, to explore, to measure, to learn, to build knowledge, to entertain, and to create.

We interface precisely because we are human. Because we are intelligent, because we are social, because we are inquisitive and creative.

We design our interfaces and they in turn redefine what it means to be human.

The tangled webs we weave - daverupert.com

So my little mashup, which was supposed to be just 3 technologies ended up exposing me to ~20 different technologies and had me digging into nth-level dependency source code after midnight.

The technologies within technologies that Dave lists here is like emptying a bag of scrabble pieces.

The “modern” web stack really is quite something—we’ve done an amazing job of taking relatively straightforward tasks and making them complicated, over-engineered, and guaranteed to be out of date in no time at all.

The plumbing and glue code are not my favorite parts of the job. And often, you don’t truly know the limitations of any given dependency until you’re five thousand lines of code into a project. Massive sunk costs and the promise of rapid application development can come screeching to a halt when you run out of short cuts.

Tolerance | Trys Mudford

Trys ponders home repair projects and Postel’s Law.

As we build our pages, components, and business logic, establish where tolerance should be granted. Consider how flexible each entity should be, and on what axis. Determine which items need to be fixed and less tolerant. There will be areas where the data or presentation being accurate is more important than being flexible - document these decisions.

15 years of blogging (and 3 reasons I keep going) - Austin Kleon

Why keep blogging? For me, there are at least 3 good reasons:

1. To leave a trace.
2. To figure out what I have to say.
3. Because I like it.

AVIF has landed - JakeArchibald.com

There’s a new image format on the browser block and it’s very performant indeed. Jake has all the details you didn’t ask for.

Kokorobot — leanerweb

The problem is that most websites will adapt to the ever faster connections, which makes them gradually inaccessible for people with slower connections. Today, most websites are impossible to download with a dial-up connection, because they have become too corpulent.

This speaks to me:

Everything we do to make it harder to create a website or edit a web page, and harder to learn to code by viewing source, promotes that consumerist vision of the web.

Pretending that one needs a team of professionals to put simple articles online will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Overcomplicating the web means lifting up the ladder that used to make it possible for people to teach themselves and surprise everyone with unexpected new ideas.

There’s a list of links at the end of this piece to help you reach this goal:

It is vital that the web stay participatory. That means not just making sites small enough so the whole world can visit them, but small enough so that people can learn to build their own, by example. Bloat makes the web inaccessible.

What is the Value of Browser Diversity? - daverupert.com

I’ve thought about these questions for over a year and narrowed my feelings of browser diversity down to two major value propositions:

1. Browser diversity keeps the Web deliberately slow
2. Browser diversity fosters consensus and cooperation over corporate rule

Daring Fireball: Online Privacy Should Be Modeled on Real-World Privacy

Just because there is now a multi-billion-dollar industry based on the abject betrayal of our privacy doesn’t mean the sociopaths who built it have any right whatsoever to continue getting away with it. They talk in circles but their argument boils down to entitlement: they think our privacy is theirs for the taking because they’ve been getting away with taking it without our knowledge, and it is valuable.

Mapping a World of Cities

A timeline of city maps, from 1524 to 1930.

100words — 🐙 woohooctopus

Well, this is impressive (and brave)—competing a 100 words for 100 days during lockdown …with a baby.

And remember, this isn’t writing and publishing at least 100 words every day; it’s writing and publishing exactly 100 words (that’s the hard part).