Remember when the responsive, “mobile” version of the BBC’s site swallowed their “desktop” site? We’ll it’s happening again, but with a PWA now: Twitter is starting to replace their aging .com with the PWA affectionately dubbed “Twitter Lite.” Exciting stuff!
There’s so much great stuff in here. Of particular note:
As part of our refined approach to building frontend features on GitHub.com, we focused on getting away with regular HTML foundation as much as we could, and only adding JavaScript behaviors as progressive enhancement. As a result, even those web forms and other UI elements that were enhanced using JS would usually also work with JavaScript disabled in the browser. In some cases, we were able to delete certain legacy behaviors altogether instead of having to rewrite them in vanilla JS.
If you need to brush up on what progressive enhancement is and how to do it with aplomb, consider picking up a copy of my book, Adaptive Web Design.
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:
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-describedbyis 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 usearia-describedbyis 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: