Link tags: action

A programmer’s loss of identity - ratfactor

We value learning. We value the merits of language design, type systems, software maintenance, levels of abstraction, and yeah, if I’m honest, minute syntactical differences, the color of the bike shed, and the best way to get that perfectly smooth shave on a yak. I’m not sure what we’re called now, “heirloom programmers”?

Do I sound like a machine code programmer in the 1950s refusing to learn structured programming and compiled languages? I reject that comparison. I love a beautiful abstraction just as much as I love a good low-level trick.

If the problem is that we’ve painted our development environments into a corner that requires tons of boilerplate, then that is the problem. We should have been chopping the cruft away and replacing it with deterministic abstractions like we’ve always done. That’s what that Larry Wall quote about good programmers being lazy was about. It did not mean that we would be okay with pulling a damn slot machine lever a couple times to generate the boilerplate.

NoLoJS: Reducing the JS Workload with HTML and CSS - Web Performance Calendar

You might not need (much) JavaScript for these common interface patterns.

While we all love the power and flexibility JS provides, we should also respect it, and our users, by limiting its use to only what it needs to do.

Yes! Client-side JavaScript should do what only client-side JavaScript can do.

Developing an alt text button for images on my website | James’ Coffee Blog

I like the idea of adding this to personal websites:

Mastodon shows an “Alt” button in the bottom right of images that have associated alt text. This button, when clicked, shows the alt text the author has written for the image.

Building WebSites With LLMS - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

And by LLMS I mean: (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(S).

I really like this approach: using separate pages instead of in-page interactions. I remember Simon talking about how great this works, and that was a few years back, before we had view transitions.

I build separate, small HTML pages for each “interaction” I want, then I let CSS transitions take over and I get something that feels better than its JS counterpart for way less work.

Don’t Fuck With Scroll

1. Violates User Expectations
2. Causes Motion Sickness
3. Reduces Accessibility for Disabled Users
4. Inconsistent Performance Across Devices
5. Impairs Usability for Power Users
6. Increases Page Load Times
7. Breaks Native Browser Features
8. Makes Scroll Position Unclear
9. Adds Maintenance Overhead
10. Disrespects the User’s Control

Lived experience

I hold this truth to be self-evident: the larger the abstraction layer a web developer uses on top of web standards, the shorter the shelf life of their codebase becomes, and the more they will feel the churn.

The deskilling of web dev is harming the product but, more importantly, it’s damaging our health – this is why burnout happens – Baldur Bjarnason

A depressing but accurate description of the economics of web development.

Nuberodesign > Blog > In Praise of Buttons – Part One

I concur:

Just because a user interface uses 3D-buttons and some shading doesn’t mean that it has to look tacky. In fact, if you have to make the choice between tacky-but-usable and minimalistic-but-hard-to-use, tacky is the way to go. You don’t have to make that choice though: It’s perfectly possible to create something that is both good-looking and easy to use.

Designing better target sizes

This is a wonderfully in-depth interactive explainer on touch target sizes, with plenty of examples.

The Website vs. Web App Dichotomy Doesn’t Exist | jakelazaroff.com

Amen!

If there’s one takeaway from all this, it’s that the web is a flexible medium where any number of technologies can be combined in all sorts of interesting ways.

Eigensolutions: composability as the antidote to overfit • Lea Verou

I love, love, love the deep thinking that Lea has put into this, really digging into the guts of what design does.

Overfitting happens when solutions don’t generalize sufficiently and is a hallmark of poor design. Eigensolutions are the opposite: solutions that generalize so much they expose links between seemingly unrelated use cases. Designing eigensolutions takes a mindset shift from linear design to composability.

Lea ties this into web standards too. It’s really helped clarify for me why I want more declarative options for common use cases (like a share button)—it’s about raising the ceiling without raising the floor.

Against Scale

Claire L. Evans has written a beautiful piece on the difference between growth and scalability:

Life is nonhierarchical, and it shirks top-down control. But scalability relies on hierarchy, on the isolation of elements stripped of history and context. It is predicated on the assumption that nature is little more than a raw material to be processed and commodified until it is spent. This is, of course, unsustainable — at any scale.

Bruce Lawson’s personal site  : HTML popover, videos and display:blackhole

Bruce raises an interesting question with media playing in popovers—shouldn’t the media pause when the popover is closed? I agree with Bruce that this is a common use case that should be covered declaratively.

Just normal web things.

A plea to let users do web things on websites. In other words, stop over-complicating everything with buckets of JavaScript.

Honestly, this isn’t wishlist isn’t asking for much, and it’s a damning indictment of “modern” frontend development that we’ve come to this:

• Let me copy text so I can paste it.
• If something navigates like a link, let me do link things.
• …

The cost of convenience — surma.dev

I believe that we haven’t figured out when and how to give a developer access to an abstraction or how to evaluate when an abstraction is worth using. Abstractions are usually designed for a set of specific use-cases. The problems, however, start when a developer wants to do something that the abstraction did not anticipate.

Smart thoughts from Surma on the design of libraries, frameworks, and other abstractions:

Abstractions that take work off of developers are valuable! Of course, they are. The problems only occur when a developer feels chained to the abstractions in a situation where they’d rather do something differently. The important part is to not force patterns onto them.

This really resonated with parts of my recent talk at CSS Day when I was talking about Sass and jQuery:

If you care about DX and the adoption of your abstraction, it is much more beneficial to let developers use as much of their existing skills as possible and introduce new concepts one at a time.

Patterns | APG | WAI | W3C

This is a terrific resource! A pattern library of interactive components: tabs, switches, dialogs, carousels …all the usual suspects.

Each component has an example implementation along with advice and a checklist for ensuring its accessible.

It’s so great to have these all gathered together in one place!

How to progressively enhance a nav menu | Go Make Things

A lot of folks assume that progressive enhancement means having to write the same code twice, but often, it can be as simple as extending the pattern you already have once the JS loads.

What would have happened if we never fixed the ozone hole?

We may not live in the best of all possible worlds, but we have dodged some bullets:

In the annals of environmental history, humanity’s response to the ozone crisis stands out as a rare success story. During the 1970s and ‘80s, evidence started to mount that certain household chemicals used in refrigerators, air conditioners, and aerosol cans like hairspray were eating a giant hole in Earth’s ozone layer, which prevents harmful ultraviolet radiation from reaching the surface. Facing the terrifying prospect of a future without any atmospheric sunscreen at all, in the late 1980s nations came together to sign the Montreal Protocol, a global treaty to phase out so-called ozone-depleting substances like chlorofluorocarbons.

But if things hadn’t turned out that way—if the scientific evidence linking man-made chemicals to ozone depletion wasn’t strong enough, or if ozone deniers (yes, there were ozone deniers) successfully stymied the Montreal Protocol—the world might look very different.

Tabs in HTML?

I’ve been having some really interesting chats with Brian about tabs, markup, progressive enhancement and accessibility. Here’s a braindump of his current thinking which is well worth perusing.

Whatever Happened to UI Affordances? – Terence Eden’s Blog

Flat, minimalist, clean, material - whatever you want to call it - is an annoying antipattern. Computers are here to make life easier for humans. Removing affordances is just a nasty thing to do to your users.