#development
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The failed promise of Web Components – Lea Verou
A spot-on summary of where we’ve ended up with web components.
Web Components had so much potential to empower HTML to do more, and make web development more accessible to non-programmers and easier for programmers.
But then…
Somewhere along the way, the space got flooded by JS frameworks aficionados, who revel in complex APIs, overengineered build processes and dependency graphs that look like the roots of a banyan tree.
Alas, that’s true. Lea wonders how this can be fixed:
I’m not sure if this is a design issue, or a documentation issue.
I worry that is a cultural issue.
Using a custom element from the directory often needs to be preceded by a ritual of npm flugelhorn, import clownshoes, build quux, all completely unapologetically because “here is my truckload of dependencies, yeah, what”.
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Easily rename your Git default branch from master to main - Scott Hanselman
Nice and straightforward. Locally:
git branch -m master main git push -u origin mainThen on the server:
git branch -m master main git branch -u origin/mainOn github.com, go into the repo’s settings and update the default branch.
Thanks for this, Scott!
P.S. Don’t read the comments.
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Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud
The cloud gives us collaboration, but old-fashioned apps give us ownership. Can’t we have the best of both worlds?
We would like both the convenient cross-device access and real-time collaboration provided by cloud apps, and also the personal ownership of your own data embodied by “old-fashioned” software.
This is a very in-depth look at the mindset and the challenges involved in building truly local-first software—something that Tantek has also been thinking about.
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The Web We’ve Made
Let us not overlook the fact that a semantic HTML web site is inherently accessible by default. When we bend the web to our will, we break that. So we have a responsibility to correct it. Sure the new technologies are neat, but the end result is usually garbage. This all requires some next-level narcissism that our goals and priorities as developers are far more important than that of the audience we’re theoretically building software to serve.
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A Modern CSS Reset - Andy Bell
Some very smart ideas in here for resetting default browser styles, like only resetting lists that have classes applied to them:
ul[class], ol[class] { padding: 0; }I select only lists that do have a
classattribute because if a plain ol’<ul>or<ol>gets used, I want it to look like a list. A lot of resets, including my previous ones, aggressively remove that. -
Simplicity (II)
When you ever had to fix just a few lines of CSS and it took two hours to get an ancient version of Gulp up and running, you know what I’m talking about.
I feel seen.
When everything works, it feels like magic. When something breaks, it’s hell.
I concur with Bastian’s advice:
I have a simple rule of thumb when it comes to programming:
less code === less potential issuesAnd this observation rings very true:
This dependency hell is also the reason why old projects are almost like sealed capsules. You can hardly let a project lie around for more than a year, because afterwards it’s probably broken.
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Fresher service workers, by default
“Ah, this is good news!”, I thought, reading this update about how service worker scripts won’t be cached.
And that was the moment when I realised what an utter nerd I had become.
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Cancelling Requests with Abortable Fetch
This is a really good use-case for cancelling fetch requests: making API calls while autocompleting in search.
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CodePen - Instagram.exe
I’m not sure why but I genuinely love this Windows 95 style interface for Instagram coded up by Gabrielle Wee.
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Your Interactive Makes Me Sick - Features - Source: An OpenNews project
Browsers have had consistent scrolling behavior for years, even across vendors and platforms. There’s an established set of physics, and if you muck with the physics, you can assume you’re making some people sick.
Guidelines to consider before adding swooshy parallax effects:
- Respect the Physics
- Remember that We Call Them “Readers”
- Ask for Consent
Given all the work that goes into a powerful piece of journalism—research, interviews, writing, fact-checking, editing, design, coding, testing—is it really in our best interests to end up with a finished product that some people literally can’t bear to scroll through?
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On AMP for Email by Jason Rodriguez
Philosophically, I’m completely against Google’s AMP project and AMP for Email, too. I will always side with the open web and the standards that power it, and AMP is actively working against both. I’m all-in on a faster web for everyone, but I just can’t get behind Google’s self-serving method for providing that faster web.
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React Is A Terrible Idea (www.pandastrike.com)"Basically, both Google and Facebook are desperate to find a baseball cap that they can put on backwards. Angular is Google's baseball cap. React is Facebook's."
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Why I No Longer Use MVC Frameworks (www.infoq.com)"I can assure you that you are infinitely better off writing code than metadata, be it as a template or a complex query language like GraphQL."
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A Reasonable PHP Development Stack
Lately I've been doing a lot of development in Ruby, specifically with Sinatra and Sequel, and I've been liking that development stack a lot. So much so, that when I switch back to PHP for a project, I wish my PHP stack was more like my Ruby stack.continue reading...
