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All Posts, page 23

  1. Notes on Prototyping
    benfrain.com

    Ben Frain gives some very useful and pragmatic advice on how to build web front-end prototypes.

    Producing something of high fidelity, perfectly matching any flat designs, runs counter to the notion of creating something quickly. The challenge for the prototyper is therefore how to cut corners that don’t impact the fidelity of the prototype.

    Jeremy Keith adds:

    In my experience, it’s vital that the prototype does not morph into the final product …no matter how tempting it sometimes seems.

    Prototypes are made to be discarded (having validated or invalidated an idea). Making a prototype and making something for production require very different mindsets: with prototyping it’s all about speed of creation; with production work, it’s all about quality of execution.

  2. Declaration
    adactio.com

    Jeremy Keith:

    I really like this design pattern. Cover 80% of the use cases with a declarative solution in HTML, but also provide an imperative alternative in JavaScript that gives more power. HTML5 has plenty of examples of this pattern. But I feel like the history of web standards has a few missed opportunities too.

    In recent years there’s been a push to expose low-level browser features to developers. They’re inevitably exposed as JavaScript APIs. In most cases, that makes total sense. I can’t really imagine a declarative way of accessing the fetch or cache APIs, for example. But I think we should be careful that it doesn’t become the only way of exposing new browser features. I think that, wherever possible, the design pattern of exposing new features declaratively and imperatively offers the best of the both worlds—ease of use for the simple use cases, and power for the more complex use cases.

  3. The Way We Talk About CSS
    rachelandrew.co.uk

    Rachel Andrew:

    There is frequently talk about how developers whose main area of expertise is CSS feel that their skills are underrated. I do not think we help our cause by talking about CSS as this whacky, quirky language. CSS is unlike anything else, because it exists to serve an environment that is unlike anything else. However we can start to understand it as a designed language, with much consistency. It has codified rules and we can develop ways to explain and teach it, just as we can teach our teams to use Bootstrap, or the latest JavaScript framework.

  4. Undertale

    2015 video game

    Played 30 September 2018 on Mac

    Brilliant in mechanics and narrative. Absolutely fantastic soundtrack. Got a bit too high on its own supply at the end there, which left me somewhat emotionally detached. That disconnect might just have been due to expectations, though: I was anticipating a more adult-ish, less “anime” overarching feeling. But I guess anime is real.

  5. My struggle to learn React
    bradfrost.com

    Brad Frost:

    JavaScript is eating the world and the rest of the frontend stack with it. Those server-side languages people used to write in? Node. HTML? JSX. Styling? We do that in JS now too. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are three sturdy, capable languages that each have their own histories, nuances, and best practices. I do worry that as we author more and more in JS we risk losing those hard-won HTML/CSS best practices. Of course, it’s totally possible to preserve those HTML/CSS best practices even as we write everything in JS, which is why I want to make sure libraries like React are accessible to frontend people like me who don’t come from a JavaScript/programming background.

  6. Upgrade

    2018 film

    Watched 13 September 2018

    Cool and exciting, but the low budget/high ambition combo leaves it stuck in a sort of uncanny valley — the kind of sci-fi that never quite manages to hide its seams. Still, very enjoyable and made me wish for more cyberpunk movies. I’ll probably go watch Ghost in the Shell for the fiftieth time now.

  7. The top four web performance challenges
    adactio.com

    At the top of Jeremy’s list, other people’s Javascript:

    At number one with a bullet, it’s all the crap that someone else tells us to put on our websites. Analytics. Ads. Trackers. Beacons. “It’s just one little script”, they say. And then that one little script calls in another, and another, and another.

    It’s so disheartening when you’ve devoted your time and energy into your web font loading strategy, and optimising your images, and unbundling your JavaScript …only to have someone else’s JavaScript just shit all over your nice performance budget.

  8. Google Wants to Kill the URL
    wired.com

    Lily Hay Newman, for Wired:

    Google's Chrome browser turns 10 today, and in its short life it has introduced a lot of radical changes to the web. From popularizing auto-updates to aggressively promoting HTTPS web encryption, the Chrome security team likes to grapple with big, conceptual problems. That reach and influence can be divisive, though, and as Chrome looks ahead to its next 10 years, the team is mulling its most controversial initiative yet: fundamentally rethinking URLs across the web.