A handy one-pager for front-end web developers:
Here are ways to keep track of what you can use, of what’s new in web browsers, and ways you can influence the development of the platform by making your voice heard.
This is a very smart way to handle feedback about a product.
Remember when every company rushed to make an app? Airlines, restaurants, even your local coffee shop. Back then, it made some sense. Browsers weren’t as powerful, and apps had unique features like notifications and offline access. But fast-forward to today, and browsers can do all that. Yet businesses still push native apps as if it’s 2010, and we’re left downloading apps for things that should just work on the web.
This is all factually correct, but alas as Cory Doctorow points out, you can’t install an ad-blocker in a native app. To you and me, that’s a bug. To short-sighted businesses, it’s a feature.
(When I say “ad-blocker”, I mean “tracking-blocker”.)
Straightforward smart sensible advice that you can apply to any feature on a website.
Logical properties, container queries, :has, :is, :where, min(), max(), clamp(), nesting, cascade layers, subgrid, and more.
This seems to be the attitude of many of my fellow nerds—designers and developers—when presented with tools based on large language models that produce dubious outputs based on the unethical harvesting of other people’s work and requiring staggering amounts of energy to run:
This is the future! I need to start using these tools now, even if they’re flawed, because otherwise I’ll be left behind. They’ll only get better. It’s inevitable.
Whereas this seems to be the attitude of those same designers and developers when faced with stable browser features that can be safely used today without frameworks or libraries:
I’m sceptical.
Develop a simple, focused app that does what it says on the tin — not one where the tin talks back at you.
It’s a shame that the newest Safari release is overshadowed by Apple’s shenanigans and subsequent U-turn because there’s some great stuff in there.
I really like what they’re doing with web apps added to the dock:
Safari adds support for the
shortcutsmanifest member on macOS Sonoma. This gives you a mechanism in the manifest file for defining custom menu commands that will appear in the File menu and the Dock context menu.
Lots of new features landing in Safari, and it’s worth paying attention to the new icon requirements now that websites can be added to the dock:
To provide the best user experience on macOS, supply at least one opaque, full-bleed
maskablesquare icon in the web app manifest, either as SVG (any size) or high resolution bitmap (1024×1024).
🎶 What a good year for the style sheets! 🎶
These updated definitions makes sense to me:
- Newly available. The feature is marked as interoperable from the day the last core browser implements it. It marks the moment when developers can start getting excited and learning about a feature.
- Widely available. The feature is marked as having wider support thirty months or 2.5 years later. It marks the moment when it’s safe to start using a feature without explicit cross-browser compatibility knowledge.
Pirijan talks us through the design principles underpinning Kinopio, a tool I like very much:
- Embrace Smallness by Embracing Code as a Living Design System
- Building for Fidget-Ability, hmmm
- Embrace Plain Text
- A Single Interface for Mobile and Desktop
- Refine by Pruning
This is the kind of press release I like.
All twelve are out, and all twelve are excellent deep dives into exciting web technologies landing in browsers now.
Good news and bad news…
The good news is that web notifications are coming to iOS—my number one wish!
The bad news is that it won’t happen until next year sometime.
This is a thoughtful proposal for a browser feature from Bram. Very convincing!
Twitter is a chatroom, and the problem that Twitter really solved was the discoverability problem. The internet is a big place, and it is shockingly hard to otherwise find people whose thoughts you want to read more of, whether those thoughts are tweets, articles, or research papers. The thing is, I’m not really sure that Twitter ever realized that this is the problem they solved, that this is where their core value lies. Twitter kept experimenting with algorithms and site layouts and Moments and other features to try to foist more discoverability onto the users without realizing that their users were discovering with the platform quite adeptly already. Twitter kept trying to amplify the signal without understanding that what users needed was better tools to cut down the noise.
Twitter, like many technology companies, fell into the classical trap by thinking that they, the technologists, were the innovators. Technologists today are almost never innovators, but rather plumbers who build pipelines to move ideas in the form of data back and forth with varying efficacy. Users are innovators, and its users that made Twitter unique.
Robin adds a long-zoom perspective on my recent post:
I am extremely confident that pretty much any HTML I write today will render the same way in 50 years’ time. How confident am I that my CSS will work correctly? Mmmm…70%. Hand-written JavaScript? Way less, maybe 50%. A third-party service I install on a website or link to? 0% confident. Heck, I’m doubtful that any third-party service will survive until next year, let alone 50 years from now.
This is a great succinct definition of progressive enhancement:
Progressive enhancement is a web development strategy by which we ensure that the essential content and functionality of a website is accessible to as many users as possible, while providing an improved experience using newer features for users whose devices are capable of supporting them.
Another thoughtful reponse to my recent post.
Reflections on native browser features and third-party library adoption.