Rich Harris
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It’s not just a story about unloved APIs, it’s a story about power, standards design, and who owns the platform — and it makes me afraid for the future of the web.
A thoughtful, considered post by Rich Harris on the whole ballyhoo with alert and its ilk:
For all its flaws, the web is generally agreed to be a stable platform, where investments made today will stand the test of time. A world in which websites are treated as inherently transient objects, where APIs we commonly rely on today could be cast aside as unwanted baggage by tomorrow’s spec wranglers, is a world in which the web has already lost.
Responses
Related links
Baseline’s evolution on MDN | MDN Blog
These updated definitions makes sense to me:
- Newly available. The feature is marked as interoperable from the day the last core browser implements it. It marks the moment when developers can start getting excited and learning about a feature.
- Widely available. The feature is marked as having wider support thirty months or 2.5 years later. It marks the moment when it’s safe to start using a feature without explicit cross-browser compatibility knowledge.
Using Google Fonts Breaches GDPR – Interdependent Thoughts
Remember when I said you should avoid third-party dependencies?
The UI fund
This is an excellent initiate spearheaded by Nicole and Sarah at Google! They want to fund research into important web UI work: accessibility, form controls, layout, and so on. If that sounds like something you’ve always wanted to do, but lacked the means, fill in the form.
History of the Web - YouTube
I really enjoyed this trip down memory lane with Chris:
From the Web’s inception, an ancient to contemporary history of the Web.
The Core Web Vitals hype train
Goodhart’s Law applied to Google’s core web vitals:
If developers start to focus solely on Core Web Vitals because it is important for SEO, then some folks will undoubtedly try to game the system.
Personally, my beef with core web vitals is that they introduce even more uneccessary initialisms (see, for example, Harry’s recent post where he uses CWV metrics like LCP, FID, and CLS—alongside TTFB and SI—to look at PLPs, PDPs, and SRPs. I mean, WTF?).
Related posts
Get the FLoC out
Google Chrome is prioritising third parties over end users.
Numbers
“I am not a number, I am a free website!”
Browsers
I’m on Team Firefox.
The imitation game
The only way to win is not to play.
Backdoor Service Workers
The tragedy of the iframe commons.
# Liked by Dmitrii on Tuesday, August 10th, 2021 at 5:27pm