A Web Developers New Working Week

Why I’m not the biggest fan of Single Page Applications - Manuel Matuzović

I guess the biggest criticism here is that it feels like people who believe in the superiority of single page applications and the entire ecosystem focus more on developer experience (DX) than user experience. That sounds like a dangerous blanket statement, but after all these years, I never had the feeling that the argument “better DX leads to better UX” was ever true. It’s nothing more than a justification for the immense complexity and potentially significantly worse UX. And even if the core argument isn’t DX, other arguments like scalability, maintainability, competitive ability, easier recruiting (“everyone uses React”), and cost effectiveness, in my experience, only sound good, but rarely hold up to their promises.

Striking a Balance Between Native and Custom Select Elements | CSS-Tricks

I think this a solution worthy of Solomon. In this case, the Gordian knot is the select element and its inevitable recreation in order to style it.

What if we instead deliver a native select by default and replace it with a more aesthetically pleasing one if possible? That’s where the “hybrid” select idea comes into action. It’s “hybrid” because it consists of two selects, showing the appropriate one at the right moment:

• A native select, visible and accessible by default
• A custom select, hidden until it’s safe to be interacted with a mouse

The implementation uses a genius combination of a hover media query and an adjacent sibling selector in CSS. It has been tested on a number of device/platform/browser combinations but more tests are welcome!

What I love about this solution is that it satisfies the stakeholders insisting on a custom component but doesn’t abandon all the built-in accessibility that you get from native form controls.

Useful accessibility resources

A whoooole bunch of links about inclusive design, gathered together from a presentation.

Accessibility and Performance | MarcySutton.com

When I heard about Universal JavaScript apps (a.k.a. isomorphic JavaScript), despite the “framework hotness”, I saw real value for accessibility and performance together. With this technique, a JavaScript app is rendered as a complete HTML payload from the server using Node.js, which is then upgraded as client resources download and execute. All of a sudden your Angular app could be usable a lot sooner, even without browser JS. Bells started going off in my head: “this could help accessible user experience, too!”

The Web is Made of Edge Cases by Taylor Hunt on CodePen

Oh, this is magnificent! A rallying call for everyone designing and developing on the web to avoid making any assumptions about the people we’re building for:

People will use your site how they want, and according to their means. That is wonderful, and why the Web was built.

I would even say that the % of people viewing your site the way you do rapidly approaches zilch.