Dispatches From The Internets

Lessons in Averaging

In the work that we do on the Web (as well as in our daily lives), we’re often confronted, informed, or judged based on averages. I never really stopped to think about it, beyond being bugged by the fact that averages aren’t truly representative of reality. Then I listened to 99% Invisible’s episode “On Average”. It was incredibly enlightening and the stories shared in that episode provide sage wisdom that is very relevant to the work that we do.

Progressive enhancement and team memberships

Iris Faraway discusses progressively enhancing a feature for the University of Bath. It’s a simple, straightforward example of how to create a universal baseline and improve (dramatically) on the experience using JavaScript.

Resilient Web Design

Jeremy Keith’s latest book. Free to read on any device you own. Installable as a progressive web app too (naturally).

[Insert Clickbait Headline About Progressive Enhancement Here]

Late last week, Josh Korr, a project manager at Viget, posted at length about what he sees as a fundamental flaw with the argument for progressive enhancement. In reading the post, it became clear to me that Josh really doesn’t have a good grasp on progressive enhancement or the reasons its proponents think it’s a good philosophy to follow. Despite claiming to be “an expert at spotting fuzzy rhetoric and teasing out what’s really being said”, Josh makes a lot of false assumptions and inferences. My response would not have fit in a comment, so here it is…

ClickClickClick

Ever wonder if websites can track your every move?

Privacy matters.

Les défis du “progressive enhancement”

This is a nice overview (in French) of how Hopwork handles progressive enhancement in their SaaS product. Their back-end is Java too. It’s nice to see folks talking about how to progressively enhance products in that language; we don’t hear about that often enough.

I totally forgot about print style sheets

This is an excellent summary of print style recommendations from Manuel Matuzovic. I’m glad I wrote the tweet that prompted it :-)

See also: