Two weeks ago, I argued that our users should never foot the bill for developer convenience and yesterday I stumbled on a post from EllisLab (the makers of ExpressionEngine) that echoes that sentiment, but from a different angle. The title might make you scratch your head: Save Thousands of Dollars by Paying More for Hosting.
Dispatches From The Internets
Who Should Pay 2: The Hosting
We can marry you off, wholesale
A scary fiction:
With perfect algorithmic efficiency, Facebook found you a beautiful wife who was practically guaranteed to produce a sickly child. Nothing too bad, mind you, but just ill enough to make you spend a little bit more than you would otherwise.
…
There’s no malice here. No human ever decided to profit from your misery. The constant A/B testing with billions of reactions just so happened to engineer a situation to help you breed a better human. More profitable human.
Sans Bullshit Sans
View content minus the jargon. ’Nuff said.
Ice Cream Sandwich Support Deprecation
So Google will not ship a version of Chrome newer than 42 for Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0). Queue the wailing and gnashing of teeth or just adopt progressive enhancement and move on. Browser and device proliferation is not a problem, myopic development practices are.
Accessibility Resources for Developers
This is a treasure trove of software development resources—Web and otherwise—compiled by Jeff Petty.
Dropdown Menus with More Forgiving Mouse Movement Paths
Chris Coyier put together a nice overview of ways to reduce user frustration when dealing with dropdown and flyout menus because, you know, some people still use a mouse.
Keeping srcset and sizes under control
Matt Wilcox walks through his methodical process for managing srcset and sizes. It’s a good read an will be helpful for keeping you from being unnecessarily verbose (or getting to granular).
Can We Please Stop Fighting The Native vs. Web App Wars?
Matt Asay does a great job dispelling some of the myths frequently spouted in the Web vs. platform-specific debate. It’s definitely worth a read.
Note: I no longer use “native” in this context, but it remains in quoted material.
A break from the past: the birth of Microsoft’s new web rendering engine
Charles Morris wrote a lengthy post about the germination of Microsoft’s new browser rendering engine. If you ever wondered where babies browsers come from, this is full of insights.
On a side note, this is one of the most exciting aspects of the new browser (and new Microsoft) for me:
Our mission to create a Web that “just works” won’t be successful without your help.
Apple, Business, and Standards
At Tuesday night’s Code & Creativity, digital governance expert Lisa Welchman equated digital projects to an atom. Content, IA, project management, networking, graphic design, application development, performance, and other concerns are flying this way and that like electrons—a swirling mass of energy and velocity. What holds this chaos together and keeps the electrons from flying off in all directions is the magnetic pull of protons in the nucleus of the atom.