Responsible JavaScript: Part III – A List Apart

This chimes nicely with my recent post on third-party scripts. Here, Jeremy treats third-party JavaScript at technical debt and outlines some solutions to staying on top of it.

Convenience always has a price, and the web is wracked by our collective preference for it. JavaScript, in particular, is employed in a way that suggests a rapidly increasing tendency to outsource whatever it is that We (the first party) don’t want to do. At times, this is a necessary decision; it makes perfect financial and operational sense in many situations.

But make no mistake, third-party JavaScript is never cheap. It’s a devil’s bargain where vendors seduce you with solutions to your problem, yet conveniently fail to remind you that you have little to no control over the side effects that solution introduces.

From Pages to Patterns: An Exercise for Everyone · An A List Apart Article

I’m so proud of Charlotte right now: last week she gave a conference talk and today she has an article published in A List Apart. Superb work on both fronts!

She does a great job of talking through a collaborative exercise to help teams move from thinking in pages to thinking in patterns.

Let Links Be Links · An A List Apart Article

A superb piece by Ross Penman on the importance of being true to the spirit of the web.

HTML Web Components Make Progressive Enhancement And CSS Encapsulation Easier! | CSS-Tricks

Three great examples of HTML web components:

What I hope is that you now have the same sort of epiphany that I had when reading Jeremy Keith’s post: HTML Web Components are an HTML-first feature.

HTML Web Components | Go Make Things

Chris walks through a really good example of an HTML web component he made for NASA: wrapping a regular form element in a custom element to add Ajax functionality.

This approach let me slash the JavaScript used for this project in half, easily progressively enhance the UI, and provide an authoring approach that’s much easier to read and make sense of.