The State Of The Web on Vimeo

Here’s the video of my latest conference talk—I really like how it turned out.

The World Wide Web has come a long way in its three decades of existence. There’s so much we can do now with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: animation, layout, powerful APIs… we can even make websites that work offline! And yet the web isn’t exactly looking rosy right now. The problems we face aren’t technical in nature. We’re facing a crisis of expectations: we’ve convinced people that the web is slow, buggy, and inaccessible. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is no fate but what we make. In this perspective-setting talk, we’ll go on a journey to the past, present, and future of web design and development. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and by the end, you’ll be ready to make the web better.

I’ve also published a transcript.

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Responses

Aaron T. Grogg

As I paraphrased from in a previous post, “accessibility is a core frontend component”. It is not something that you should “add on” after the project is finished, like we used to do with “now make it work on phones and tablets”… it needs to be baked right in from the start. And that means we need not only the knowledge of how to do that, but also the tools to test if we’re doing it correctly. has written a couple of great articles on this topic:

And even has a course on the subject:

No one is saying this is easy, just that it is the right thing to do.

From comes Intro to GraphQL. Have not yet dabbled with this one, but I want to, and I know her writing is always easy to read and highly informative, so… bookmarking this one right here…

And speaking of “QL“s, shares SQLime, “Kinda like JSFiddle, but for SQL”. Nice!

Holy crap! I just watched the promo video for BrowserFlow… A better name might be HeadExplode… as in, “my head is exploding from all the ideas trying to get to the front of my brain queue”… Amazing!

shared several variations on the same “sticky list” theme. Be sure to view them all, and appreciate the subtle variations. Love how simple some things are getting now-days…

shared htmx, an extremely light, subset of features framework for creating SPAs. Intriguing. And certainly a lower threshold than any other SPA framework…

and friends have been working on a spec for a Native HTML Tab element. Certainly an unwieldy beast to try to tame, with so many variations in layout and functionality. One option I have been using a lot lately, that kinda fits into the accordion conversation is the details element.

You like? Me like…

Yes, it would be nice to control the opening/closing a little better, maybe adding some transitional CSS animation, but it is native, semantic, and does what I need.

Create eye-catching social images auto-magic-ally! This is a nice touch! In related news, my social media posts feel really, really lame now…

With more than 17k JS files in their repo, Etsy’s decision to switch to TypeScript was not easy. Luckily for us, they were nice enough to document and share the experience

Ever try to convince a large organization to do something that doesn’t seem like it contributes to the bottom-line? It seems like a pretty solid approach, in this case getting buy-in for creating a design system, is to make a number

And finally, back to for a second, for a little trip down memory lane, remembering where the web started, and how we got to where we are now… Revisiting such technology crutches as Flash, jQuery and Sass, and showing some long-overdue respect and thanks for helping push the web forward, giving we developers access to features and functionality that we desperately needed wanted, while we waited for the web standards and browsers to catch up… And a big, fat, roaring-loud hallelujah to the end pitch, to make the web better! Thanks, Jeremy.

Happy reading, Atg

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Private by Default

Feedbin has removed third-party iframes and JavaScript (oEmbed provides a nice alternative), as well as stripping out Google Analytics, and even web fonts that aren’t self-hosted. This is excellent!

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Patterns Day 2017: Rachel Andrew on Vimeo

Rachel’s fantastic talk from Patterns Day. There’s a lot of love for Fractal specifically, but there are also some great points about keeping a pattern library in sync with a live site, and treating individual components as reduced test-cases.

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Patterns Day 2017: Sareh Heidari on Vimeo

Time for another video from Patterns Day. Here’s Sareh Heidari walking us through Grandstand, the CSS framework at the BBC.

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From Pages to Patterns – Charlotte Jackson - btconfBER2016 on Vimeo

The video of Charlotte’s excellent pattern library talk that she presented yesterday in Berlin.

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ForEveryone.Net - Trailer on Vimeo

I can’t wait for this documentary to come out (I linked to its website a while back).

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