The Best Of The Internets

Bruce Lawson is dead-on with his critique of Apple’s feedback on Web Components:

Implementation is hard. Too hard for the developers at Apple, it appears. So Web developers must faff around adding ARIA and tab index and keyboard listeners (so most won’t) and the inevitable consequence of making accessibility hard is that assistive technology users will suffer.

We (browser makers and web developers) need to be willing to put in the effort to make things better for everyone else. Sadly, few seem interested.

Thanks for calling this out Bruce!

This is a brilliant post from Scott Jehl about optimizing page render by getting particular about how (and when) certain assets load. He uses the real-world site Wired as a test bed for putting the ideas into practice, cutting perceived load time by a full 8.5 seconds!

Abstraction can be helpful, but it also complicates things and leads to slower performance. Andrea Giammarchi provides lots of details here in examining a complex app scenario with the good old fashioned DOM vs. a handful of frameworks. Bonus points for the fact that most of the video evidence tests are being run on non-iOS devices!

No, the DOM is not your problem, the fact you brought an over-engineered abstraction on top of a deadly simple task, like a table that needs some quick update, is the real problem you don’t want to see.

If you dig Andrea’s post, you should also check out this post from the Filament Group.

A few thoughts on cleaner Sass output from Anthony Dispezio. He secret? Using generic mixins in concert with @extend.

Hmm… distribute the Web for endurance and longevity and make it private through blockchain-esque encryption. It’s an interesting idea, but I don’t know that Marketing will go for it.

A beautiful piece on what it means to be a link and what they mean to us.

In the ‘90s, we got tired of systems like Compuserve, AOL and Prodigy that wouldn’t play together nicely and only let us play in pre-approved ways. We might similarly grow disenchanted with apps that don’t connect easily, or only connect in ways that we can’t shape.

So many nice words about such an important piece about the Web. My humble contribution:

John’s piece came three years before Steve Champeon coined the term “progressive enhancement,” but it clearly and succinctly outlined its philosophy: “Make pages which are accessible, regardless of the browser, platform or screen that your reader chooses or must use to access your pages.” His insights—published a mere decade after the invention of the medium—still influence the work I do to this day.

John nails it:

I continue to believe, just as the Web is not print, though it emerged in many ways from the medium of print, it is not just another application platform. It has its own genius, which we could call as I did all those years ago, adaptability.