Care

Using the Platform | TimKadlec.com

Tim ponders the hard work that goes into adding standards to browsers, giving us a system with remarkable longevity.

So much care and planning has gone into creating the web platform, to ensure that even as new features are added, they’re added in a way that doesn’t break the web for anyone using an older device or browser. Can you say the same for any framework out there?

His parting advice is perfect:

Use the platform until you can’t, then augment what’s missing. And when you augment, do so with care because the responsibility of ensuring the security, accessibility, and performance that the platform tries to give you by default now falls entirely on you.

Let’s reinvent the wheel ⚒ Nerd

Vasilis gives the gist of his excellent talk at the border:none event that just wrapped up in Nuremberg. The rant at the end chimed very much with my feelings on this topic:

I showed a little interaction experiment that one of my students made, with incredible attention to detail. Absolutely brilliant in so many ways. You would expect that all design agencies would be fighting to get someone like that into their design team. But to my amazement she now works as a react native developer.

I have more of these very talented, very creative designers who know how to code, who really understand how the web works, who can actually design things for the web, with the web as a medium, who understand the invisible details, who know about the UX of HTML, who know what’s possible with modern HTML and CSS. Yet when they start working they have to choose: you either join our design team and are forced to use a tool that doesn’t get it, or you join the development team and are forced to use a ridiculous framework and make crap.

When should you be using Web Workers? — DasSur.ma

Although this piece is ostensibly about why we should be using web workers more, there’s a much, much bigger point about the growing power gap between the devices we developers use and the typical device used by the rest of the planet.

While we are getting faster flagship phones every cycle, the vast majority of people can’t afford these. The more affordable phones are stuck in the past and have highly fluctuating performance metrics. These low-end phones will mostly likely be used by the massive number of people coming online in the next couple of years. The gap between the fastest and the slowest phone is getting wider, and the median is going down.

Designing a Grid-Aware Branch

Hannah runs through the details of making a grid-aware website:

The design adjusts between “low”, “moderate”, and “high” based on the quantity of fossil fuels on your local energy grid.

I like this idea, but I really think it needs to be on by default, rather than being opt-in.

And I’m really intrigued by the idea of a grid-aware browser!

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.