Dispatches From The Internets

Seven years after Sara pitched it to the CSS Working Group, we still need a declarative (and intuitive) way to visually-hide content.

Ben explores multiple potential paths in this piece.

I feel this piece deep in my bones. If you are a PM, designer, or developer building stuff for the web, you owe it to yourself to give it a read.

I could quote the ever-living crap out of it, but I’ll just drop this one choice excerpt and let you take the rest in, in context:

[W]e’re not asking you to abandon your favorite frontend library on a whim and become a Rails developer, or a Phoenix developer, or a whatever. We’re simply asking you to acknowledge that for years you’ve completely hogged and dominated the #WebDev conversation, ignored our repeated attempts to point out the potential flaws, foot guns, and fallacies with the JS/SPA approach, and in some cases even ridiculed us for our choice of technology stack/language/etc.

The CSS4 image() function is really cool! It enables us to inject portions (fragments) of images, change image direction (flip), provide solid color fallbacks & more.

This is a great writeup from Kevin Powell.

I cannot even hope to capture all of the important topics covered in this piece in a summary. Just do yourself a favor and read it.

Excellent write-up of Bing Search’s wilder interactions, why they’re happening, and a bunch of fun t-shirt ideas.

Progressive enhancement doesn’t have to be more work

As of this year, I’ve officially been beating the drum of progressive enhancement for decades. With an “s.” And it’s still a philosophy that is foundational to building resilient, accessible projects on the web. Full stop.

Chris offers a great intro/reminder here. And when you want to dig in more, you should read my book.

I love this method to teaching folks about how to use prompt-driven AI by putting structure around how they are expected to use it. The different prompting approaches were spot-on too.

I love how people are considering the potential of conversational AIs (like ChatGPT) as assistive technology.

ChatGPT could be considered an “assistive technology” if it assists people with communication disability to get their message across more efficiently or effectively.

Setting aside my employers’ service offerings promoted in this piece, I appreciate its focus on creating more opportunities for everyone, regardless of ability or disability. The more ways we enable people to consume or interact with our products, the more they will tailor their experience to their own needs and take advantage of affordances that will make them more efficient, productive, and comfortable.

So much worthy of reflecting on on this piece!

I do not believe you can codesign your way to justice.

Certain institutions and design ideas are fundamentally oppressive, and the only way to achieve radical transformation at scale is with collective action and policy change.

Imagination is key, but imagination in the right way:

Imagination is not a splashy poster of a sci-fi movie but a daily act of resistance we must engage in despite how tired we might be.

Following this framing, author Alba Villamil walls through a ton of actionable above and examples of how to bring imagination to hear on our UX work. Well worth your time!