All Posts, page 9

Tim Kadlec explores strategies for dealing with the Save-Data header without degrading the experience, because not every user that enables it will be aware of the potential consequences:

The possibilities are endless. If you treat data as a constraint in your design and development process, you’ll likely be able to brainstorm a large number of different ways to keep data usage to a minimum while still providing an excellent experience. Doing less doesn’t mean it has to feel broken.

PC Gamer’s Steven T. Wright interviews Lucas Pope on the process of creating Return of the Obra Dinn:

“When you’re developing a game as one person, you have a lot of advantages and a lot of disadvantages,” he says. “One of the advantages is that you can afford to make a game for two years without even really knowing what it is, which is exactly what I did. One of the disadvantages is that you have to do something different visually to stand out. This means I have to solve all sorts of problems that nobody else has solved, at least recently. But I think that can be fun in its own right.”

The game’s development seems to have been more of a process of discovery and improvisation than one of decisive creativity. That explains a lot.

Dave Rupert is, like me, a longtime Jekyll user. He’s trying out Eleventy — which I’m super curious about — and getting good results. The massive performance difference when compared to Jekyll is very compelling to me, but so is the flexibility to write little bits of code to extend functionality without much fuss:

On the Cathedral vs. Bazaar spectrum, Eleventy operates more on the bazaar end. By that I mean it doesn’t prescribe much. You want a bunch of filters? Write your own, Eleventy only comes with two. You want multiple layouts? Write a bit of JS to get those registered. Did you remember to setup an .eleventyignore? Even the Sass and JS pipelines are BYO.

Zeynep Tufekci on the miracle of open source software:

As a social scientist myself, I can say that convincing a colleague from the past that Wikipedia and Linux actually work the way they do would be a pretty huge lift. Given the assumption, common to many 20th-century schools of thought, that humans act in incorrigibly selfish ways, the notion that tens of thousands of people would collaborate to create, respectively, a living monument to human knowledge and a foundational piece of computing infrastructure, free of charge, simply sounds too fanciful.

Max Böck:

Posting a new short “note” on my site currently requires me to commit a new markdown file to the repository on Github. That’s doable (for a developer), but not really convenient, especially when you’re on the go and just want to share a quick link.

It me.

The new link sharing basically has three main parts:

• a small Javascript bookmarklet to act as a “share button”
• a form that collects and sends the shared link data, and
• a serverless function to process it and create a new file.

Gotta get on this train! I’m already working on it, though my solution will be based on the Micropub spec. But that live preview is sweet and now I want it too.

Ben Thompson on internet content moderation:

The top of the stack is about broadcasting — reaching as many people as possible — and while you may have the right to say anything you want, there is no right to be heard. Internet service providers, though, are about access — having the opportunity to speak or hear in the first place. In other words, the further down the stack, the more legality should be the sole criteria for moderation; the further up the more discretion and even responsibility there should be for content.

This passage made me feel a little queasy but I think I agree?

I ultimately reject the idea that publishing on the Internet is a right that must be guaranteed by 3rd parties. Stand on the street corner all you like, at least your terrible ideas will be limited by the physical world. The Internet, though, with its inherent ability to broadcast and congregate globally, is a fundamentally more dangerous medium that is by-and-large facilitated by third parties who have rights of their own.

Test packages directly in the browser, without installing anything locally. Perfect for quickly evaluating packages before bringing them into your important projects.

Taking npm packages for a test drive: incredibly useful.

Laura González:

In elevating frontend to the land of Serious Code we have not just made things incredibly over-engineered but we have also set fire to all the ladders that we used to get up here in the first place.

Karen Olsson thinks about the importance of the many books she owns but will never read:

Perhaps in some cases it has actually meant more to me to possess a book than to read it, because as long as its contents remain unknown to me, it retains its mystery. The unread book is a provocation, a promise of something that might dissipate if I slogged my way through the text. I’ve read a little of Cave, City, and Eagle’s Nest: An Interpretive Journey Through the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2, a sumptuous art book about a 16th-century pictorial manuscript from Mexico […]. I keep this book around even though I don’t wish to make anything of it in a literal sense—I don’t want to write fiction or nonfiction or a nutty screenplay about a mesoamerican document, but I wish for it to somehow whisper in my ear while I write something not at all about the map, for its enigmatic presence to leave some ineffable trace.

I love this idea, and I must admit that I suffer from the same affliction. Design books, self-help books, nonfiction books… I want them to somehow transmit that “ineffable trace” to me just by virtue of sitting on my desk, mostly unread; no matter how many cookbooks I buy, it seems I always end up going to Serious Eats when I need a recipe.

I’m trying to read more by divorcing the physicality of owning a book from the process of reading it, so I bought an eReader. Now I get paper versions of the books I want to own, and digital versions of the ones I want to read. Totally normal, I know.

Eric Bailey posted a terrific list of principles that should be kept in mind when working on web accessibility.

Digital accessibility work is not easy, but it is vital. It is a holistic, multifaceted discipline that touches on multiple interconnected social and technological issues.