A little progress

I’ve got a fairly simple posting interface for my notes. A small textarea, an optional file upload, some checkboxes for syndicating to Twitter and Flickr, and a submit button.

It works fine although sometimes the experience of uploading a file isn’t great, especially if I’m on a slow connection out and about. I’ve been meaning to add some kind of Ajax-y progress type thingy for the file upload, but never quite got around to it. To be honest, I thought it would be a pain.

But then, in his excellent State Of The Gap hit parade of web technologies, Remy included a simple file upload demo. Turns out that all the goodies that have been added to XMLHttpRequest have made this kind of thing pretty easy (and I’m guessing it’ll be easier still once we have fetch).

I’ve made a little script that adds a progress bar to any forms that are POSTing data.

Feel free to use it, adapt it, and improve it. It isn’t using any ES6iness so there are some obvious candidates for improvement there.

It’s working a treat on my little posting interface. Now I can stare at a slowly-growing progress bar when I’m out and about on a slow connection.

Reimagine the Date Picker – David Bushell – Web Dev (UK)

This is a superb way to deprecate a little JavaScript library. Now that you can just use HTML instead, the website for Pikaday has been turned into a guide to choosing the right design pattern for your needs. Bravo!

Pikaday is no longer a JavaScript date picker. Pikaday is now a friendly guide for front-end developers. I want to push developers away from the classic date picker entirely. Especially fat JavaScript libraries.

Custom Asidenotes – Eric’s Archived Thoughts

An excellent example of an HTML web component from Eric:

Extend HTML to do things automatically!

He layers on the functionality and styling, considering potential gotchas at every stage. This is resilient web design in action.

Write Code That Runs in the Browser, or Write Code the Browser Runs - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

So instead of asking yourself, “How can I write code that does what I want?” Consider asking yourself, “Can I write code that ties together things the browser already does to accomplish what I want (or close enough to it)?”

Close to the metal: web design and the browser

It seems like the misguided perception of needing to use complex tools and frameworks to build a website comes from a thinking that web browsers are inherently limited. When, in fact, browsers have evolved to a tremendous degree

AI is Stifling Tech Adoption | Vale.Rocks

Want to use all those great features that have been in landing in browsers over the past year or two? View transitions! Scroll-driven animations! So much more!

Well, your coding co-pilot is not going to going to be of any help.

Large language models, especially those on the scale of many of the most accessible, popular hosted options, take humongous datasets and long periods to train. By the time everything has been scraped and a dataset has been built, the set is on some level already obsolete. Then, before a model can reach the hands of consumers, time must be taken to train and evaluate it, and then even more to finally deploy it.

Once it has finally released, it usually remains stagnant in terms of having its knowledge updated. This creates an AI knowledge gap. A period between the present and AI’s training cutoff. This gap creates a time between when a new technology emerges and when AI systems can effectively support user needs regarding its adoption, meaning that models will not be able to service users requesting assistance with new technologies, thus disincentivising their use.

So we get this instead:

I’ve anecdotally noticed that many AI tools have a ‘preference’ for React and Tailwind when asked to tackle a web-based task, or even to create any app involving an interface at all.