Dispatches From The Internets

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.

Consider How Your Forms Read

While listening to Radiolab’s “The Trust Engineers”, I’ll admit I got a little excited when they started talking about web form performance. And no, not “performance” in the time-to-download sense, but “performance” in terms of how well the forms performed in attempting to capture meaningful, actionable data.

I Don’t Want to Teach the World to Code… I Want to Teach the World to Problem Solve

It seems that every other day a new code school opens it doors. In my mid-sized city, Chattanooga, there are no fewer than three businesses centered around teaching “coding” classes that I am aware of. And there are at least a half-dozen free or community driven programs and camps on top of that. Most are aimed at youth, but some offer adult education as well. And that, of course, is over and above what’s available in our public and private schools (which is considerable) and a plethora of online options.

Client-side MVC’s Major Bug

Astute observations (as always) from Tim Kadlec. I’ll let Tim set the scene:

Over the past year I conducted performance audits on a handful of sites that all used client-side MVC’s, typically Angular but not always. Each site had their own optimizations that needed to take place to improve performance. Yet a pattern emerged: client-side MVC’s were the major bottleneck for each. It slowed down the initial rendering of the page (particularly on mobile) and it limited our ability to optimize the critical path.

Obviously Tim knows what he’s talking about.

He goes on to bring in the voices of the Filament Group and PPK (both of whom I’ve linked to previously for the same reasons): lots of smart people have come to the conclusion that relying on client-side generation of web pages is a bad idea. Tim goes so far as to say “if your client-side MVC framework does not support server-side rendering, that is a bug” and I can’t help but agree.

His post is great, you should read it. Frankly, I wish I’d written it.

Five Easy Ways to Be a Better Web Professional

My old friend Jason Garber—who I, sadly, haven’t seen in probably a decade—came up with a great list of “professional self-improvement tips for anyone working on the Web today”. I’ll give you the synopses, but you should do yourself a favor and read the full post for the background:

  1. Know Your History
  2. Know Your Medium
  3. Respect Those Who Came Before You
  4. Respect Your Audience
  5. Get Involved

I would absolutely echo these to anyone looking to become (or improve as) a web professional.