The Best Of The Internets

This piece is worth a thorough read. Then a re-read. It’s that important.

[W]e need to confront the “developer experience” bait-and-switch. Tools that cost the poorest users to pay wealthy developers are bunk. To do better, we need to move the conversation to an evidence-based footing. I wish the arguments folks made against my positions were data-driven. There’s so much opening! Perhaps a firm is doing market analysis and only cares about ever reaching users who make more than $100K USD/yr or who are in enterprise settings. Perhaps research will demonstrate that interactivity isn’t as valuable as getting bits on screen (the usual SSR argument). Or, more likely, that acknowledgement (bits on screen) buys a larger-than-anticipated amount of perceptual padding (perhaps due to scanning). Perhaps the global network landscape is shifting so dramatically that the budget for client-side JS runtime has increased. Perhaps the median CPU improvement that doesn’t look set to materialize until 2021 at the earliest will happen much earlier; i.e., maybe the current baseline is wrong!

But we aren’t having that conversation. And we aren’t going to have it until we identify, call-out, and end the “developer experience” bait-and-switch.

Further reading from this site:

• Who Should Pay?
• How to Apply Progressive Enhancement When JavaScript Seems Like a Requirement
• The Web Should Just Work for Everyone
• PWAs + Desktop = Equity, Opportunity, and Reliability

Interesting project. Reminds me a lot of Eric Meyer’s diagnostic CSS from a little over a decade ago.

This super-thorough examination of aria-describedby is well worth a read.

aria-describedby is an important tool to help provide information where it might otherwise be missed. However, the attribute should rarely be the sole manner in which information is communicated, as doing so will exclude people not using screen readers from the descriptive content. The best way to use aria-describedby is as an alternate way to provide quick access to descriptions that are accessible by other means.

I totally need some time to play with this!

Looks like Google has rolled out Service Workers for search now (at least on Chrome for Android). It should speed up your searches.

Mandy Michael has another great piece on the importance of HTML semantics, this time with a focus on browsers in “reader mode” (and apps that offer similar experiences). Give it a read, then go tend to your markup.

Great minds think alike! Here’s Adrian Roselli on a means of adding link lists for printed pages (rather than offering expansions inline). Hard to believe my piece on the topic ran in A List Apart over twelve years ago!

This is a fantastic, modern approach!

Apropos of my recent A List Apart article, here’s some information about how GOV.UK is thinking about voice interfaces.

They break down their approach in three areas:

1. richness for search engines,
2. availability for knowledge engines, and
3. connectivity into bespoke digital assistant “skills.”

An excellent read on how Andy Bell applied progressive enhancement to a project. I particularly liked this statement (emphasis his):

Progressive enhancement isn’t necessarily more work and it certainly isn’t a non-JavaScript fallback, it’s a change in how we think about our projects. A complete mindset change is required here and it starts by remembering that you don’t build websites for yourself, you build them for others.

In case you missed it, Chrome will be turning JavaScript off if a user has turned Data Saver on and the site is begin delivered over a slow connection. Say goodbye to your heavy front-end frameworks folks. Server-side rendering is a requirement.

Progressive enhancement for the win!

PS - Have you read my book yet?