Journal
My talk, “Hiding elements on the web” for FreeAgent’s tech blog
I recorded a talk on “Hiding elements on the web” for @freeagent’s tech blog. It’s a tricky #FrontEnd & #a11y topic so I try to cover some good practices and responsible choices. Hope it helps someone. (Also it’s my first video. Lots of room to improve!)
What open-source design systems are built with web components?
Alex Page, a Design System engineer at Spotify, has just asked:
What open-source design systems are built with web components? Anyone exploring this space? Curious to learn what is working and what is challenging. #designsystems #webcomponents
And there are lots of interesting examples in the replies.
My first Web Component: a disclosure widget
After a couple of years of reading about web components (and a lot of head-scratching), I’ve finally got around to properly creating one… or at least a rough first draft!
Saving CSS changes in DevTools without leaving the browser
Browser devtools have made redesigning a site such a pleasure. I love writing and adjusting a CSS file right in the sources panel and seeing design changes happen as I type, and saving it back to the file. (…) Designing against live HTML allows happy accidents and discoveries to happen that I wouldn't think of in an unconstrained design mockup
I feel very late to the party here. I tend to tinker in the DevTools Element Styles panel rather than save changes. So, inspired by Scott, I’ve just tried this out on my personal website. Here’s what I did.
Partnering with Google on web.dev (on adactio.com)
At work in our Design System team, we’ve been doing a lot of content and documentation writing for a new reference website. So it was really timely to read Jeremy Keith of Clearleft’s new post on the process of writing Learn Responsive Design for Google’s web.dev resource. The course is great, very digestible and I highly recommend it to all. But I also love this new post’s insight into how Google provided assistance, provided a Content handbook as “house style” for writing on web.dev and managed the process from docs and spreadsheets to Github. I’m sure there will be things my team can learn from that Content Handbook as we go forward with our technical writing.
Theming to optimise for user colour scheme preference
“Dark mode” has been a buzz-phrase in web development since around 2019. It refers to the ability provided by modern operating systems to set the user interface’s appearance to either light or dark. Web browsers and technologies support this by allowing developers to detect whether or not the OS provides such settings, and if so which mode the user prefers. Developers can create alternate light and dark themes for their websites and switch between these intelligently (responsively?) to fit with the user’s system preference.
I’ve been meaning to do some work on this front for a while and finally got around to it. (You might even be reading this post with your computer’s dark colour scheme enabled and seeing the fruits of my labour.) Here’s how I set things up and the lessons I learned along the way.
Building a toast component (by Adam Argyle)
Great tutorial (with accompanying video) from Adam Argyle which starts with a useful definition of what a Toast is and is not:
Toasts are non-interactive, passive, and asynchronous short messages for users. Generally they are used as an interface feedback pattern for informing the user about the results of an action. Toasts are unlike notifications, alerts and prompts because they're not interactive; they're not meant to be dismissed or persist. Notifications are for more important information, synchronous messaging that requires interaction, or system level messages (as opposed to page level). Toasts are more passive than other notice strategies.
Web animation tips
Warning: this entry is a work-in-progress and incomplete. That said, it's still a useful reference to me which is why I've published it. I’ll flesh it out soon!
There are lots of different strands of web development. You try your best to be good at all of them, but it ain’t gonna happen—there’s only so much time in the day!
Animation is an area where I know a little but would love to know more, and from a practical perspective I’d certainly benefit from having some road-ready solutions to common challenges. As ever I want to favour web standards over libraries where possible, and take an approach that’s accessible, progressively-enhanced and performance-optimised.
Here’s my attempt to break down web animation into bite-sized chunks for ocassional users like myself.
Limbo
Enjoyed this funny and touching film about a Syrian asylum seeker searching for happiness on a remote Scottish island.
I’ve started reading Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel.