We need a universally recognised icon/image/logo for "works offline".
Like the PWA or HTML5 logo. We need to be able to signal to visitors that our URLs are always available.
To the consumer, the terms Progressive Web App or Service Worker are meaningless. So I applied my legendary branding, PR and design skills to come up with something that will really resonate with a web user: the fact that this app works online, offline – anywhere.
So the new logo is a riff on the HTML5 logo, because this is purely web technologies. It has the shield, a wifi symbol on one side and a crossed out wifi symbol on the other, and a happy smile below to show that it’s happy both on and offline. Above it is the acronym “wank” which, of course, stands for “Works anywhere—no kidding!”
Take it to use on your sites. I give the fruits of my labour and creativity free, as a gift to humanity.
Me me me corner: The F-word episode 4 in which Vadim Makeev and I discuss Apple’s game of monopoly, form slappers, where’s Houdini, browser bugs and Web compat, chicken-killin’ Mike Taylor, and I make another Great Joke.
Thought Leadership o’the Week: Platform Adjacency Theory by Alex Russell. There’s a lot to get my head around in this article, so I don’t know what I think yet. But I’ll probably end up agreeing with him, because he’s always bloody right about everything (except fashion).
July’s CSS News – Wooo! Flexbox Gaps, Aspect Ratio Unit, Native Masonry Support, Subgrid in Chrome, prefers-reduced-data, :marker. Auntie Rachel has all the latest CSS news!
A/B Street – “Ever been stuck in traffic on a bus, wondering why is there legal street parking instead of a dedicated bus lane? A/B Street is a game exploring how small changes to a city affect the movement of drivers, cyclists, transit users, and pedestrians.”
I’ve been working on a client project and one of the tasks was remediating some data tables. As I began researching the subject, it became obvious that most of the practical, tested advice comes from my old mates Steve Faulkner and Adrian Roselli.
I’ve collated them here so they’re in one place when I need to do this again, and in case you’re doing similar. But all the glory belongs with them. Buy them a beer when you next see them.
News o’the Week: Antitrust: European Commission opens investigations into Apple’s App Store rules – “The investigations concern in particular the mandatory use of Apple’s own proprietary in-app purchase system and restrictions on the ability of developers to inform iPhone and iPad users of alternative cheaper purchasing possibilities outside of apps.”
Igalia Chat – Brian Kardell sits down with Jeremy Keith and Stuart Langridge to chat about rendering engine diversity, history and the health of the web browser ecosystem.
Meaningful connectivity – Alliance for Affordable Internet pushes for its new standard: “We have meaningful connectivity when we can use the internet every day using an appropriate device with enough data and a fast connection.”
Google blew a ten-year lead – “something happened at Google. I’m not sure what. But they stopped innovating on cloud software. Docs and Sheets haven’t changed in a decade. Google Drive remains impossible to navigate. Sharing is complicated.”
SVGuitar – library to create beautiful SVG guitar chord charts directly in the browser
Machine learning-generated Peanuts comics and an interesting rumination on what Art is: “In some ways, the model represents the disembodied essence of the Peanuts aesthetic, but do I have Charles Shulz soul? For many obvious reasons, I do not – this model knows nothing of the motivations, desires and intentions behind Charles Shulz and his works.”
Flow browser passes the Acid tests – “Our goal for Flow is to render websites correctly the first time that anyone tries them. Most of the Acid3 subtests are going to make a real difference.”
Introducing Alpine.js: A Tiny JavaScript Framework – “involves no build steps and provides all of the tools you need to build a basic user interface”. I haven’t used it yet but hear good things about it.
PHP Marks 25 Years – “This week the web is celebrating 25 years since Rasmus Lerdorf released version 1.0 of his “Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools).” PHP is now used by 78.9% of all the websites whose server-side programming language W3Techs can detect.” – I ❤️ PHP.
Me! Me! Me! corner: Beginners’ Guide To Writing Good HTML – my 5500 word article for beginners on writing good semantic HTML, using a Cheeky Girls fan site to walk through the thought process.
Remediating sites – “you need to make alterations to a web page that already exists, and where you can’t change the HTML, so your job is to write some bits of JavaScript to poke at the page”. Practical advice on developing & testing this with Greasemonkey from @sil
Disclosure widgets – details and summary, ARIA widgets for IE11, accordions and accessibility by Adrian Roselli
The Valuable 500 – “The global movement putting disability on the business leadership agenda. We need 500 national and multinational, private sector corporations to be the tipping-point for change and to unlock the business, social and economic value of people living with disabilities across the world. Because the potential of 1.3 billion should not be ignored.”
Stack Overflow’s 2020 Developer Survey surveyed 65,000 people. Some interesting nuggets: 46.5% of developers said “HTML/ CSS” is their “most dreaded” language; jQuery is still king, but is slowly losing ground to React.js and Angular year over year.
Does masonry belong in the CSS Grid specification? – The Firefox team have experimented with extending the CSS Grid spec to allow Masonry layout. It’s behind a flag in FF Nightly. The @csswg are looking for feedback.
Hammer and Nails – “Do you download source and build tools and run the compiler every time you run an app on your desktop? No? Then why is it fine to make web users do it?”. An intemperate rant by flame-haired FOSS Adonis (or is it “Anubis”?), Stuart Langridge.
Second-guessing the modern web – article looking at whether React-style development which pushes tons of JS to the client to parse and execute is the best thing ever. TL;DR: no.
Bye, Amazon – Inventor of XML, Tim Bray, quits as a VP at Amazon Web Services “in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19”.
Web Sites as ‘Public Accommodation’ under a Pandemic – “If you dodged an accessibility lawsuit because you have physical locations, what does it mean when those physical locations close? What about when the number of locations or the operating hours are reduced?”
“Look, it’s perfectly simple. Go back to work, but don’t use public transport. Travel in a chauffeur-driven ministerial limousine. Use common sense – under no circumstances shake hands with people you know to have the virus. Covid-19 appeared in December, which makes it a Sagittarius, so Taureans and Libras should wear masks. But it also appeared in China, which makes it a Rat, so anyone called Mickey or Roland is advised to wear gloves. We’re following the science, so here’s a graph.
Remember, this is Blighty, not a nation of Moaning Minnies, Fondant Fancies or Coughing Keirs (thanks, Dom!). England expects every interchangeable low-paid worker and old person in a care home to Do Their Duty: let’s just Get Dying Done. God save the Queen, Tally-ho!”
Link O’ The Week: Looking at coronavirus.data.gov.uk -Web superhero @dracos wrote up how he vastly improved the performance of the UK government Coronavirus data website. Spoiler alert: “The important thing is to have a resilient base layer of HTML and CSS, and then to enhance that with JavaScript.”
The F-Word podcast, Episode 2 – What’s new in Chrome 81 & Firefox 75, gaps in Safari release notes, webdev glossary, a11y for designers.
Storage for the web There are many different options for storing data in the browser. Which one is best for your needs? Pete LePage from Google finds out.
