Episode 52 - Going Offline | with Jeremy Keith - Relative Paths
I really enjoyed chatting with Mark and Ben on the Relative Paths podcast. We talked about service workers and Going Offline, but we also had a good musical discussion.
Music and Web Design | Brad Frost
I feel my trajectory as a musician maps to the trajectory of the web industry. The web is still young. We’re all still figuring stuff out and we’re all eager to get better. In our eagerness to get better, we’re reaching for more complexity. More complex abstractions, build processes, and tools. Because who wants to be bored playing in 4/4 when you can be playing in 7/16?
I hope we in the web field will arrive at the same realization that I did as a musician: complexity is not synonymous with quality.
Can I get an “Amen!”?
Related links
CSS Intelligence: Speculating On The Future Of A Smarter Language — Smashing Magazine
This is a really thoughtful look at the evolution of CSS and the ever-present need to balance power with learnability.
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
HTML for People
This is excellent! A free web book (it’s a book! it’s a website!) that teaches you how to make a website from scratch:
I feel strongly that anyone should be able to make a website with HTML if they want. This book will teach you how to do just that. It doesn’t require any previous experience making websites or coding. I will cover everything you need to know to get started in an approachable and friendly way.
👏
Developers Rail Against JavaScript ‘Merchants of Complexity’ - The New Stack
Perhaps the tide is finally turning against complex web frameworks.
Related posts
Simplify
Reminding myself just how much you can do with CSS these days.
Manual ’till it hurts
Try writing your HTML in HTML, your CSS in CSS, and your JavaScript in JavaScript.
Multi-page web apps
A question via email…
Principles and the English language
Mashing up George Orwell with axioms of web architecture.
Robustness and least power
A tale of two principles.