Resilient Web Design” by Jeremy Keith

If you haven’t already heard, Jeremy released this “web book” as he calls it. If you read or listen to Jeremy regularly (like I do) most of the content will feel familiar. Nonetheless, I gave it a read and have noted here a few excerpts that stuck out to me when I read it.

The book’s purpose (and the power of ideas over)

You won’t find any code in here to help you build better websites. But you will find ideas and approaches. Ideas are more resilient than code. I’ve tried to combine the most resilient ideas from the history of web design into an approach for building the websites of the future.

Interesting tidbits on why things are the way they are today:

That same interface might use the image of a 3½ inch floppy disk to represent the concept of saving data. The reason why floppy disks wound up being 3½ inches in size is because the disk was designed to fit into a shirt pocket. The icons in our software interfaces are whispering stories to us from the history of clothing and fashion.

Embracing the uncertainty of the web:

While it’s true that when designing with Dreamweaver, what you see is what you get, on the web there is no guarantee that what you see is what everyone else will get. Once again, web designers were encouraged to embrace the illusion of control rather than face the inherent uncertainty of their medium.

History of JavaScript. Love that last line:

The language went through a few name changes. First it was called Mocha. Then it was officially launched as LiveScript. Then the marketing department swept in and renamed it JavaScript, hoping that the name would ride the wave of hype associated with the then‐new Java language. In truth, the languages have little in common. Java is to JavaScript as ham is to hamster.

Imperative and declarative:

That’s a pattern that repeats again and again: a solution is created in an imperative language and if it’s popular enough, it migrates to a declarative language over time. When a feature is available in a declarative language, not only is it easier to write, it’s also more robust

Savage:

Despite JavaScript’s fragile error‐handling model, web designers became more reliant on JavaScript over time. In 2015, NASA relaunched its website as a web app. If you wanted to read the latest news of the agency’s space exploration efforts, you first had to download and execute three megabytes of JavaScript. This content—text and images—could have been delivered in the HTML, but the developers decided to use Ajax to retrieve this data instead. Until all that JavaScript was loaded, parsed, and executed, visitors to the site were left staring at a black background. Perhaps this was intended as a demonstration of the vast lonely emptiness of space. (emphasis added)

The rise of deploying web apps via traditional software tooling (packaged entirely as a js app):

It’s tempting to apply the knowledge and learnings from another medium to the web. But it is more structurally honest to uncover the web’s own unique strengths and weaknesses.

He continues:

On the face of it, the term “web platform” seems harmless. Describing the web as a platform puts it on par with other software environments. Flash was a platform. Android is a platform. iOS is a platform. But the web is not a platform. The whole point of the web is that it is cross‐platform...The web isn’t a platform. It’s a continuum.