Links, page 8

Some great pointers from Dave Rupert:

If you feel the need to write, write.

An interesting comparison from Danny Moerkerke:

Remember when document.querySelector first got wide browser support and started to end jQuery’s ubiquity? It finally gave us a way to do natively what jQuery had been providing for years: easy selection of DOM elements. I believe the same is about to happen to frontend frameworks like Angular and React.

Veritasium:

This is a video I’ve long wanted to make, about what makes video look like video and, up until 10 years ago or so, not as appealing as film. I grew up with the two technologies (film and video) in parallel and to me they always seemed like two ways of achieving the same ends: recording and replaying moving images. But their histories are quite distinct. Film was always a way to capture moving images for later replaying. Video started out as a way to transfer images from one place to another instantaneously.

Andy Bell:

The majority of the web community are probably building—y’know—modest websites. There’s a reason why WordPress powers 33.5% of the web: because most of the web isn’t big applications or design systems—it’s straight-up websites. We would all do well to remember that.

Kevin Marks:

There’s a widespread movement in design circles to reduce the contrast between text and background, making type harder to read. Apple is guilty. Google is, too. So is Twitter.

My plea to designers and software engineers: Ignore the fads and go back to the typographic principles of print — keep your type black, and vary weight and font instead of grayness. You’ll be making things better for people who read on smaller, dimmer screens, even if their eyes aren’t aging like mine. It may not be trendy, but it’s time to consider who is being left out by the web’s aesthetic.

Dave Rupert thinks version number bumps would be a good move for HTML and CSS, marketing-wise. I agree!

A single number bump replaces a mountain of marketing. Every discerning technologist knows it only makes sense to invest in technologies that are moving forward. To invest in a stagnant technology would be a dereliction of duty.

I think this has effected web technologies deeply. HTML5 was released in 2008 and its handful of new elements and APIs was a boom for the language. Even Steve Jobs advocated for it over Flash. Web Standards had won, Firefox and Webkit were our champions. “We need to upgrade to HTML5” was a blanket excuse for auditing your website and cleaning up your codebase.

Jeremy Wagner:

It’s easy to slap something up on a web server, but it’s quite another to be a steward of it in a way that makes the web a better place. That starts with redefining our productivity with the goal of serving the interests of others instead of our own.

This New York Times report on Kashgar is a good visual companion piece to last year’s excellent Buzzfeed News report on the subject.

Outside the camps, Uighurs live in a virtual cage. China has built a vast net of controls that shows the Communist Party’s vision of automated authoritarianism. Neighbors become informants. Children are interrogated. Mosques are monitored.

Joshua Benton:

This is a great idea: In order to reduce the number of its old stories that get recirculated as new, The Guardian is making a story’s age more prominent, both to readers and to those who might only see a link on social media without clicking through.

Matt Zoller Seitz:

TV doesn’t feel the same when you watch it that way. It’s more of a solitary experience, no matter how many fellow fans discuss it with you on social media. And it necessarily reduces the level of excitement surrounding a season or series finale because the show has been deprived of that measured pace of one episode per week, with six days of contemplation and anticipation in between each chapter, all leading inexorably to that last run of episodes during which the fans, who’ve spent years living and breathing this thing, come to terms with the totality of the accomplishment, and ready themselves for the exquisite and horrible moment when the storytellers swing that sword at our necks and the birds take flight and the credits roll for the last time.

Danny Dimian, Visual Effects Supervisor, and Josh Beveridge, Head of Character Animation, for “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” share exclusive breakdowns and talk about their inspiration and the techniques they used to create a new visual language for their Academy Award-winning film.

Casper Beyer:

Research has shown that modals that cannot be closed have the highest conversion rates.

Putting this on Medium: *chef’s kiss*

Great writing on this well-researched story, by Jason Hoffman:

At first glance, the bug appeared to be fairly routine, most likely a small problem somewhere in the website’s code or a strange coincidence. After just a few hours though, it became clear that the stakes for this one particular bug were far graver than anyone could have anticipated. If Firefox were to release this version of their browser as-is, they risked breaking an unknown, but still predictably rather large number of websites, all at once. Why that is has everything to do with the way MooTools was built, where it drew influence from, and the moment in time it was released. So to really understand the problem, we’ll have to go all the way back to the beginning.

Avi Asher-Schapiro makes some good points about The Inventor that I failed to consider:

Missing from the film, however, is any sustained effort to understand how Theranos interacted with the larger economic and social forces that nurtured it. In the hands of Gibney, the rise and fall of Theranos is reduced to a sort of personality puzzle, driven by the banal questions like: What was Elizabeth Holmes thinking? Is she a liar? How could seemingly competent investors be so misled?

That’s a shame, because the story of Theranos is so much more than that. At its root, it’s a parable that cuts to the central dysfunctions in the American economic and political order, one that should dismantle our notions of meritocracy and put a strict limit on our forbearance for elites. It illuminates how the rich and well connected occupy different strata of life, enjoy a completely different set of opportunities from the rest of us, experience a different kind of justice, and are so often immune from consequences. Though the film gives some glimpses of these dynamics, they are always in the background, shadowed by other far less compelling narrative impulses.

Jeremy Keith:

It’s relatively easy to write and speak about new technologies. You’re excited about them, and there’s probably an eager audience who can learn from what you have to say.

It’s trickier to write something insightful about a tried and trusted (perhaps even boring) technology that’s been around for a while. You could maybe write little tips and tricks, but I bet your inner critic would tell you that nobody’s interested in hearing about that old tech. It’s boring.

The result is that what’s being written about is not a reflection of what’s being widely used.

Bridget Stewart:

How many features are built-in to a framework or library that your app doesn’t need yet (and may never need)? How much can you hold back from the package you send to the web? How dependent are these modules and bits of code on one another? To me, that sounds like a lot of analysis up front to pick apart a tool before I even write a single line of code to be truly productive. It is also the antithesis of Progressive Enhancement, which strives to start with the bare minimum necessary to make it work and build up from there.