An excellent appraisal of the importance of the rule of least power.
I really like the way that the thinking here is tied back to Bert Bos’s original design principles for CSS.
This is a deep dive into the future of CSS layout—make a cup of tea and settle in for some good nerdiness!
An oldie but a goodie: Clay Shirky looks at the design principles underlying HTML in order to figure out what made it so successful. Even though this is fourteen years old, there are plenty of still-relevant insights here.
A quick chat with me in the hallway after my talk in Seattle.
Apple dragged their feet in adding support for PWAs in Safari, and when they finally did, limited the capabilities of a PWA so that native-like app functionality wouldn’t be possible, like notifications or a home screen icon shortcut – to name just a few of the many restrictions imposed by Apple.
But it goes beyond that. On iOS, the only web rendering engine allowed is Apple’s own WebKit, which runs Safari. Third-party iOS browsers such as Chrome can only use WebKit, not their own engines (as would be permitted in Windows, Android, or macOS). And it’s WebKit that governs PWA capabilities.
Safari is very good web browser, delivering fast performance and solid privacy features.
But at the same time, the lack of support for key web technologies and APIs has been both perplexing and annoying at the same time.
The enormous popularity of iOS makes it all the more annoying that Apple continues to hold back developers from being able to create great experiences over the web that work across all platforms.
SPAs were a clever solution to a temporary limitation. But that limitation no longer exists.
Use modern server rendering. Use actual pages. Animate with CSS. Preload with intent. Ship less JavaScript.
Here’s to the next twenty years.