When GotoConf Amsterdam asked me to speak, I thought it’d be another machine learning or Progressive Web Apps talk. Instead the organisers asked me to cover CSS. An under-represented language in their “programming languages” track. Now, I’ve been a fan of CSS from the very beginning. I assumed that people in a hard-core development conference won’t be as excited. They’d have not looked at CSS in detail. Instead, my assumption was that it is more of a necessary annoyance to them. So I wrote a talk about what using CSS means and how we don’t use it to its strengths.

Here are the notes of my talk.

A boring fight

The other day I watched “Captain America: Civil War “again. And once again it bored me and I didn’t quite get the concept of it. The idea of super heroes forced to be responsible for their collateral damage is not new. Asking for control over them is not new either. “The Incredibles” did a great job with that.

I was more bored about the premise of all these cool super heroes fighting against each other. We know their powers. We know that they are deep down friends who saved each other’s lives on countless occasions. We know that their powers match. There is no violence, no real drive, no anger in these encounters. It feels like Marvel introduced too many cool characters and now tries to find a way to let people take sides. Sell more toys, create artificial drama.

I get the same impression when we talk about using CSS or JavaScript for layout. Both have their merits, both have their powers. Both have fanbases ready to dig up the most detailed information to advocate for one over the other. But I find this boring. Both used together is what brought the web forward. And it is holding us back that there are two massive camps. One end sees CSS as a thing of the past and in our module driven world we should do all in a scripting space. The other sees CSS and its preprocessors and build scripts as more than enough to do everything. Remember DHTML days when we did everything with JavaScript? Remember the “CSS only solutions” backlash? When we (ab)used checkboxes for complex interactivity to avoid using any JavaScript?

Giana Blantin put it nicely:

Can these two groups:
“CSS is so easy, it isn’t even coding”
“CSS is so hard, we need to replace it with JS!”
please talk to each other?

A lot of the misconceptions of CSS is because developers don’t understand how it differs from programming. Instead, we fiddle with it and change things around. After breaking something, we conclude that it is not good enough and we need to replace it.

Often this is overshooting the mark. Much like using OpenGL for simple gradient creation we don’t need to bring out the big guns all the time. CSS has a few tricks up its sleeve that we can’t match with client-side scripting. And it has nothing to do with syntax or language features. It is about sharing responsibility.

Who is at fault and who should be tolerant?

CSS, much like HTML is fault tolerant. This can be confusing. What it means is that end users should not suffer from the mistakes of the developer. Products built with CSS still show up when the developer made a mistake. They don’t look perfect, but they work. When a CSS parser encounters a property it doesn’t understand – it skips it. When it encounters a value it can’t deal with or the property doesn’t support – it skips it. That way we stay backwards compatible.

A button that has a background colour and a gradient will show the colour on older environments. It also shows it in environments that don’t support gradients because of performance issues. Faster, more hi-fi and supporting environments will show a gradient.

You don’t need to know the environment and you don’t need to make that decision. The OS, the browser and the proxies involved make these decisions for you.

JavaScript is not fault tolerant. This can be disastrous. You are much more in control when using JavaScript. But you are also much more responsible.

JavaScript on the client can break for dozens of causes. The browser can be non-supportive, the connection can be flaky. The mobile provider your end users have may see it as their job to minify and pack scripts going down the wire. When JavaScript encounters something it doesn’t understand – it breaks. It packs in and doesn’t show anything, thus punishing the user of your product for your errors. Or those errors introduced by the other people and scripts involved delivering your code to the end users.

In other words:

• CSS - You apply your styles and you hope it worked.
• JavaScript - You control the styling and you can and should verify that it worked

CSS means embracing the “squishiness” of the web, as Brad Frost put it. The web isn’t a fixed canvas you can set pixels on. A lot of things on it are beyond your control:

• The browsers of your users
• The resolution, pixel density and colour settings of their devices
• Their connection reliability and speed
• Their connection restrictiveness – resource blocking is a thing
• Their font size and zoom needs
• The availability of resources on their machines for your product (is the CPU already burning?)
• The amount of text content and image sizes in your product – CMS anyone?

This can be daunting and often we want to control the environment our products run in – if only to keep our sanity. This means though that we block out a lot of potential users.

In this unknown environment we have to decide who takes on the job to deal with its performance problems:

• CSS - It is the job of the browser to perform well, use GPU resources and skip functionality.
• JavaScript - It’s your job to test for support. And to ensure rendering, painting and reflow is fast. And to keep animation in sync.

CSS is damn good at that and browser makers put a lot of effort into tweaking the interface performance.

So why do we under-estimate CSS and over-value the benefits of JavaScript? I guess one thing to blame is a classic – Internet Explorer.

CSS and its bumpy history

CSS had to grow up fast and didn’t get the support from browsers that it needed to be a reliable tool.

CSS was very limited at first and meant as a replacement for visual HTML and attributes. Begone all those font, bgcolor, align, center, HR and friends. Patchy browser support and very odd errors without debugging options didn’t help it. We knew things were wrong but we couldn’t do anything about it. We even couldn’t ask anyone as browser makers weren’t available for feedback.

When the iPhone came out CSS had its day in the limelight. The “HTML5 is the future” story needed a lot of extra functionality. With Apple calling the shots there and standardisation taking too long a lot was “Webkit only”. T

his meant prefixes in CSS and once again forking for different rendering engines. Browser makers innovated and showed dominance over others with prefixed functionality. As developers this meant repetition and having to pick a support plan for each of them. And of course one to support older, outdated browsers. These new browser wars around prefixes caused a lot of arguments and confusion.

And last but not least there was until recently no layout model in CSS. Instead we hacked using positioning and floating. Positioning, especially absolute positioning in pixels isn’t sensible on the web. People can resize the font and contents will overlap. Positioning with floating needs clearing elements.

It is not what you call a reliable base line or one that was simple to understand if you’re not “web native”

We needed to make CSS work regardless of browser support

Our solution was to patch with JavaScript. We can read out conditions and react to them creating HTML and applying styling. As JavaScript is a programming language we have full control over what is happening. We have conditions, loops, comparisons – all the things a programmer misses in CSS. This, to a degree is a misunderstanding of CSS as a concept. A selector that matches several elements is – in essence – a loop. We can even use :nth-child() to target an element in a collection.

In general CSS has been going leaps and bounds since we had to use JavaScript to patch it. Especially disappointing browser support is a much smaller problem.

• Evergreen browsers are a thing – all browsers are on a constant upgrade path. We even learn from browser makers what’s coming down the line.
• Browser tooling gives detailed insights into what CSS applies to what. We even get visual tools like animation editors and colour pickers.

  

• CSS support across browsers is well documented: caniuse.com is an incredible resource. It not only shows which browser and which environment supports what. It also explains bugs in the implementations, offers links to the specs and the bug reports. It even has an API to embed this information into documentation and developer tools.

  

• We have support channels and bug tracking for almost all browsers. Some even allow you to file a bug using Twitter. The teams of browser makers are active on social media and reachable.
• Pre-processors like Sass and Less have turned up the heat to innovate the CSS spec faster. Much like jQuery inspired JavaScript of today, these lead to functionality people want.
• The community spends a lot of time making CSS more maintainable. Approaches like Object Oriented CSS by Nicole Sullivan and Atomic Design by Brad Frost have been around for ages and should help reduce complexity.

What CSS can do for you

Here are some amazing things CSS can do now and you should consider using.

Calculated CSS values

One thing that always seemed to be missing in CSS was a way to calculate values. The classic example is an absolutely positioned element that is 100% wide but needs padding. In the olden days we needed to do that by nesting another element and apply the padding to that one. For quite some time though we could use CSS calc() for that and apply a width of calc(100% – 1em).

Calculations are very well supported across browsers. There shouldn’t be any qualms about using them.

Media Queries

CSS Media Queries allow you to react to changes of the viewport of the document. In essence they mean that you apply part of your style sheet when the viewport meets a certain criteria. This could be a viewport that is at least a certain width or at most a certain height. You can also check for portrait or landscape orientation of the screen or if the document is a printout.
CSS Media Queries also have a JavaScript equal in matchMedia. This allows you to load content on demand. One Media Queries problem is that browsers load images in blocks regardless of the match.

Generated content

Using the ::before and ::after pseudo selectors in CSS allows you to create content that is purely visual. This is a great way to make sure that things that are for cosmetic reasons don’t need an own, empty DIV, SPAN, B or I element. It is a way to keep everything visual maintained in the style sheet instead of scripts or the HTML document. You can pair this with drop shadows, gradients and other CSS features that create visuals.. An impressive showcase of that is “A Single DIV“. This web site shows dozens of visuals created from a single DIV element.

Animations and transitions

Animations and transitions in CSS were the big breakthrough when the iPhone came out. Transitions allow you to create a smooth change from one state to another. You don’t need to know what changes should happen. All you tell the browser is how long to transition and what easing function to use. Animations give you more granular control. You define keyframes and what should animate how. Both Animations and transitions fire events before, during and after. This allows you to interact with JavaScript in a predictable manner. The benefit of using CSS for this is that the browser ensures the performance of the animation. This happens by running them on the GPU and throttling the frame rate should the need occur. This is an important step to ensuring a good battery life of your users’ phones. If you animate in JavaScript, this can easily go wrong.

Viewport Units

Media Queries make sense when you want to define experiences in detail. Instead, you can also use viewport units to size elements according to the available space. Viewport Width (vw) is a percentage of the full viewport width. So on a 480px wide screen 10vw is 10% or 48px. This differs from the % unit, which is the percentage of the parent element and not the viewport. Nested percentages will get smaller, vw will not. Viewport Height (vh) is a percentage of the full viewport height. You can also make yourself independent of orientation my using vmin and vmax. These either take the smaller or the larger of vw and vh. The only niggle in support of viewport units is that to date Edge doesn’t support vmin and vmax.

CSS Tricks has a great article on how powerful viewport units can be. From resolution independent embeds to viewport dependent typography you can use viewport units to create highly flexible interfaces.

Flexbox

Flexbox is a way to create layout of elements in CSS. In essence is it everything people who claimed layout tables were easier missed in CSS - and much more. You can align child elements of an element to be on the right, left, top or bottom. You can define them to fill up the available space, with each using either the same amount or more than the others. You can also define them to use the available space between each other or around each of them. It is as flexible as it says on the tin. If you want to have a visual editor to see what that means, Build With React has a great flexbox editor to play with.

There is also a game called Flexbox Froggy. It teaches the concepts in an enjoyable and accessible manner and is great for kids to start with CSS.

A great talk about Flexbox is the one Zoe Gillenwater gave at various events. What I like most about the talk is how Zoe shows how they used Flexbox in production. The examples are from booking.com and show fallbacks for browsers that don’t support it.

CSS Grid

If Flexbox is the answer to layout elements in a row or a column, CSS Grid is taking it to the next level. Using it you can lay out elements in a defined grid in two dimensions, both rows and columns. Grid has been cooking for a while and now is finally supported across the board.

Grid can be daunting to look at as its flexibility means there are a lot of options to choose from. By far the simplest way to get started is Rachel Andrew’s “Grid by Example” resource. This one has copy+paste examples of grid layouts. Many of them come with fallbacks for unsupported browsers. Training videos explaining the ins and outs of them make it an amazing resource.

If you learn better with challenges, you can grasp CSS Grid by playing the CSS Grid Garden.

There are some “must see” talks about CSS grids online. The first one is “CSS Grid Layout“, again by Rachel Andrew.

Jen Simmons is taking a different approach. In her “Real Art Direction on the Web” talk she shows how Grid’s versatility can help us to break out of our “box layout” thinking.

There is no problem with mixing and matching Grid and Flexbox. It can and should use Flexbox in its cells. Together, these tools allow you to create flexible layouts. Layouts that allow for variable content and change to fit the available space. Web layouts.

CSS Custom properties (variables)

One of the most demanded features of CSS that preprocessors like Sass and Less had for a long time is variables. Now we have CSS Custom Properties which are the thing that gets me most excited about CSS. You can define re-usable settings once in your document and apply them throughout. The most common use case for that is custom colours and sizes. But you can go further and define fonts and other typography. You can also use them to nest calculations in CSS. This wasn’t possible before. An amazing feature is that Custom Properties can also be set dynamically with JavaScript.

If you want to learn all about the amazing power of CSS Custom Properties there is a talk you shouldn’t miss. Lea Verou’s “CSS Variables: var(—subtitle)” is a treasure trove of information.

CSS Feature Queries

Another very welcome addition to CSS was Feature Queries. These work much like Media Queries. By using @supports you check if the current user agent supports a certain feature. You then define a block of CSS that only gets applied when there is feature support. This might feel odd as the fault tolerant nature of CSS should already take care of that. What it does though is give you much more granular control. It also allows you to define a fallback when there is no support for a certain feature using the “not” keyword.

CSS and JavaScript?

CSS and JavaScript working together is powerful and the right thing to do. As far as CSS has come, it still can’t do everything. There are scenarios where the very nature of CSS stands in contrast with what we want to achieve.

As Cristiano Rastelli explains in his “Let there be peace on CSS” talk, the cherished feature of “Separation of Concerns” doesn’t apply in a module world.

When CSS became a thing we moved all the look and feel and behaviour out of HTML into CSS and JavaScript. We define either on a document or even project wide level. We celebrate the fact that CSS does inherit from parent elements. When we build components that can be consistenly re-used we don’t want that. We want them to carry their look, feel and behaviour without bleeding out either to adjacent ones or inherit from their parents.

CSS and JavaScript working together in a non-component world

When building document-based solutions there is no excuse not to dig into the power of CSS. You can and should use JavaScript to bring information CSS can’t read into CSS. It is prudent though to do so in the least intrusive way possible.

The hierarchy of making CSS and JS work with another in this scenario the following:

• Use CSS when you can – using the things you saw here
• If you need to communicate with CSS, consider changing Custom Properties
• If that’s not an option apply classes to parent elements using classList.
• As a very last resort, you can alter the style directly

Whenever you change styles dynamically, remember that you are working against the browser. Every style change has consequences in reflow, rendering and painting. Paul Lewis and Das Surma maintain a handy guide called CSSTriggers. This one describes in detail which CSS changes result in what punishment to the browser.

In Summary

CSS is much more reliable than it used to be and there is not much left that should be different to what it is. The main thing to remember is that CSS isn’t meant to do the same things JavaScript does. Even layout languages don’t work the way CSS does and cover the same need. It has a pretty tough job to do and it does it well. When you use CSS, the browser helps you meet the needs of your end users regardless of their setup. This is a core principle of the web and defined in the W3C HTML Design Principles:

Users over authors over implementors over specifiers over theoretical purity

Our users deserve interfaces that are smooth, reliable and don’t kill their batteries. So, consider CSS a bit more. You can be lazy and build on the work of the community.

Inspiring and active CSS people to follow

When researching this talk I kept going back to resources written and maintained by fabulous people on the web. Here is a short list in no particular order of people you should follow if you want to be up to scratch with your CSS knowledge. I have to thank each of them. They’re making the web easier for all of us.

• Ire Aderinokun (@ireaderinokun) writes a lot of easy to grasp and to the point CSS information bits on her blog, bitsofco.de.
• Ana Tudor (@anatudor) is a developer who creates ridiculously complex and beautiful animations in CSS. Her Codepen is one of the most frequented ones and what she does to the CSS engines is a great help for browser makers to test their performance
• Jen Simmons (@jensimmons) is a CSS layout and design expert working for Mozilla
• Rachel Andrew (@rachelandrew) to me is the #1 CSS grids expert
• Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) is the founder of the amazing CSS resource CSS Tricks and the interactive development playground Codepen
• Sarah Drasner (@sarah_edo) is an animation and design expert focused on building maintainable products
• Zoe M. Gillenwater (@zomigi) is a lead developer using bleeding edge CSS in production
• Brad Frost (@brad_frost) is the author of Atomic Design, a scalable way to use and re-use CSS in large projects
• Rachel Nabors (@rachelnabors) is a comic artist and animation expert writing about web animations and merits of different technologies
• Una Kravets (@una) is a developer specialising in CSS and its new features. She also is a podcaster and has her finger very much on the pulse of CSS and other visual technologies
• Lea Verou (@leaverou) is the author of the excellent CSS secrets book, a researcher at MIT and invited expert by the CSS working group of the W3C. She is meticulous in her research and ruthless in her delivery of lots of great information in a short amount of time.
• Sara Soueidan (@sarasoueidan) is a developer who is an expert on responsive designs and pragmatic approaches to using newest technologies.

I keep getting inspired by these people (amongs others) daily, and hope you will start to get the same experience.

Also available on Medium.

I am now proud owner of a HoloLens. I am not officially trained up on it yet as a Microsoft Employee. But I wanted to share the first impressions of setting it up and using it.

These are my personal impressions and not an official stance by my company. I’m sharing my first excitement here. I hope can make some people understand what is happening here.

This is also just a user POV as I haven’t started developing for it yet, but this will happen soon – promised.

HoloLens is unique

First of all, it is important to understand that HoloLens is something pretty unique. Every time I mention it people start making comparisons to the Occulus or Vive, but those don’t work.

A high-powered, multi camera mobile on your head

HoloLens is a self-contained computer you wear on your head. You don’t need anything else. It is not a peripheral, there is no other computer or server necessary. This is important when considering the price. Many VR headsets are much cheaper, but they aren’t Mixed Reality and they need a hefty computer to run. It doesn’t even need an internet connection all the time. Just because you wear them on your head doesn’t mean you can compare these products on even ground.

You should plan coding for it like a mobile phone on your head in terms of CPU/GPU power. The specs are high, but the demand of the way it works are, too. If you build for HoloLens be conservative with the resources you need – you’ll make me happy. Waiting isn’t fun, even when it is a floating animation in your room.

Your natural movement is an event

HoloLens is a system that uses natural motion of your head and body to explore an augmented space. This means you don’t lose connection to the real world – you still see it through the device. What you get is a constant analysis of your surroundings and Holograms overlayed on it. You open apps and either use them floating before you or dock them to a wall to use later when you look at said wall. You distribute your work space in your living space – without needing to go to IKEA to buy furniture.

This means the way you move and where you look become events software can interact with. The “gaze” gesture, which is “looking at something” is akin to a hover with a mouse. The “air tap” gesture is a click or submit.

That way the relative small size of you viewport compared to Occulus or Vive is less relevant. You’re not stuck in it as your viewport follows your head movement. You’re not supposed to have a whole takeover. HoloLens is there to augment the world – not replace it.

Your whole body is now an event trigger. Instead of learning keyboard shortcuts, you learn gestures. Or you can use your voice.

Gestures vs. Voice Recognition

You can use your hands to select and interact with things. Or you can say “select” to interact and “next” to move on in menus. Voice recognition is always on and Cortana is just one “Hey Cortana” away. You can use it to open apps, search the web, research, all kind of things. It still feels odd to me to talk to my phone. I am on Android, maybe Siri is a better experience. It feels more natural to talk to a voice in a space of apps I distributed around my house.

Spatial sound

HoloLens has a lot of speakers built in which allows you to hear sounds from all directions. This is pretty amazing when it comes to games like RoboRaid:

And even more so in Fragments:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ULJV4G5XkA

When using the speakers, there is not much privacy though. It is pretty easy to hear what HoloLens says when you are close to someone wearing it.

If you want a keyboard, you can have one

If you enter a lot of text into web sites or something similar, you can also pair a bluetooth keyboard. Or clicker, or whatever. At first it annoyed me to enter my pretty secure passwords in a floating keyboard. But the more I got used to HoloLens interaction, the easier it became.

A whole new way of interaction

I’m not a big fan of VR because I am prone to get nauseous if the frame rate isn’t perfect. I am also getting car sick a lot, so it isn’t something to look forward to. I also feel confined by it – it fills me with dread missing out on things around me whilst being in a virtual space. I don’t like blindfolds and earplugs either.

The only discomfort I felt from HoloLens is having something weighing close to a kilogram on your head. But you get used to it. At the beginning you will also feel your fingers cramp up during air tapping and your shoulders hurt. This means you are doing it wrong. The more natural you move, the easier it is for HoloLens to understand you. An air tap doesn’t need full movement. Consider lifting your finger and pointing at stuff. Just like interrupting a meeting.

An outstanding onboarding experience

What made me go “wow” was the way you set up and start working with the HoloLens. The team did an incredible job there. The same way Apple did a great job getting people used to using a touch device back when the iPhone came out. Setting up a HoloLens is an experience of discovery.

You put on the device and a friendly “hello” appears with Cortana’s voice telling you what to do. You get to set up the device to your needs by calibrating it to your eyes. Cortana tells you step by step how to use the gestures you need to find your way around. Each step is full of friendly “well done” messages. When you get stuck, the system tells you flat out not to worry and come back to it later. It is an enjoyable learning experience.

How I use it

Right now, I have my kitchen cupboards as my work benches. Edge is on one of them and next to it is my task list of the day. I have a few games on the other side of the room. When it comes to Holograms, there is a cat on our dog’s bowl and a Unicorn above the bed to give us nice dreams. Because we can.

Skype is pretty amazing on HoloLens:

Some niggles I have

It is important to remember a few things about the HoloLens:

• It isn’t a consumer device but for now a B2B tool. On the one side there is the high price. And there is a focus on working with it rather than playing games.
• It is not an outside device. HoloLens scans your environment and turns it into meshes. After it created the meshes it stores them in “spaces” avoiding the need to keep scanning. Outside this means a constant re-evaluating of the space. This is expensive and not worth-while. So there is no danger of a re-emergence of the annoying Google Glass people in the street. It stilll is disconcerning to look at someone not knowing if they film you or not.
• I agree with a lot of other people that there should be a way to have several user accounts with stored calibration info on a single HoloLens. Whilst you can share experiences with other HoloLens users, it would be great to hand it over without recalibration and giving someone else access to my Windows account.
• There should be a way to wipe all the Holograms in a space with a single command. When you let other people play with your device you end up with lots of tigers, spacemen and all kind of other things in your space that you need to delete by hand.
• Whilst it is easy to shoot video and take pictures of your experience, the sharing experience is very basic. You can store it to OneDrive or Facebook. No option to mail it or to add Twitter. That said, Skype helps with that.

This is truly some next level experience

I am sure that there are great things to come in the VR/AR/MR space. Many experiences might be much more detailed and Hi-Fi. Yet, I am blown away by the usefulness of this device. I see partners and companies already use it to plan architectural projects. I see how people repair devices in the field with Skype instructions from the office. I get flashbacks to Star Trek’s Holodeck – something I loved as a teen.

It is pretty damn compelling to be able to use your physical space as a digital canvas. You don’t have to leave your flat. And you don’t run the danger of bumping into things while you are off into cyberspace. It is augmentation as it should be. In a few years I will probably chuckle at this post when my cyber contacts and ear piece do the same thing for me. But for now, I am happy I had the chance to try this out.

This is a longer version of this year’s keynote at Beyond Tellerrand conference. I posted earlier about the presentation with the video and slides. Here you get the longer transcript and explanation. If you prefer Medium to read, here’s the same post there

It is amazing to work on the web. We have a huge gift in the form of a decentralized network of devices. A network that helps people around the world to communicate and learn. And a huge resource of entertainment on demand. A gift we can tweak to our needs and interests rather than unwrap and consume. Some of us even know the technologies involved in creating interfaces of the web. Interfaces that empower others to consume content and become creators.

And yet there is a common feeling of failure. The web seems to be never good enough. Despite all our efforts the web doesn’t feel like a professional software platform. Our efforts to standardise the web to allow becoming a “web developer” easier seem not to work out. We keep re-defining what that even is.

Lately a lot of conferences have talks about mental health. Talks about us working too much and not going anywhere. Talks about how fragmented, insecure and unprofessional our tech stack is.

There’s been a meme going around for a while that summarises this feeling quite well. It is about the game Tetris:

“If Tetris has taught me anything, it’s that errors pile up and accomplishments disappear”

There is some truth to that. We worked for almost two decades on the web and the current state of it isn’t too encouraging. The average web site is too big to consume on mobile devices and too annoying to do so on laptops. We limit things too much on mobile. We cram a proverbial kitchen sink of features, code and intrusive advertising into our desktop solutions.

Let’s see what’s going on there and how we can shift ourselves away from this Tetris mindset. I’ll start by zooming out and talk a bit about the way we communicate about technologies.

Back when this was all fields…

When I started using computers my setup was basic by current standards. And yet I didn’t use the computer to play. I wanted to use it to communicate. That’s why I reached out to other creators and makers and we shared the things we wrote. We shared tools that made our life easier. We got to know each other writing long notes and explanations. We communicated by mail, sending floppy disks to each other. Once we got to know each other better, we shared photos and visited each other in person. It was a human way to create. Communication came at a high price and you had to put a lot of effort into it. Which is why we ensured that it was high quality, cordial communication. You had to wait weeks for an answer. You made sure that you said everything you wanted to say before you created the package and mailed it.

Speed cheapens communication

Fast forward to now. Communication is a dime a dozen. We’re connected all the time. Instead of spending time and effort to get to know others and explain and lead, we shout. We aim to be the most prolific communicator out there. Or to prove someone wrong who is loud and prolific. Or make fun of everything others spent a lot of effort on.

The immediacy and the ubiquity of communication is cheapening the way we act. We don’t feel like putting up much effort upfront. A stream of information gives you the impression that it is easy to undo a mistake right after you made it. But the constant barrage of information makes others in the conversation tune out. They only prick up their ears when something seems to be out of the ordinary. And this is where polarisation comes in. A drive to impress the audience in a positive way leads to unhealthy competitiveness. Giving out strong negative messages leads to witch hunts and Twitter drama. The systems we use have competition built in. They drive us having to win and release the most amazing things all the time. Gamification is what social networks are about. You get likes and views and retweets and favorites. Writing more and interacting more gets you to a higher level of access and features. You’re encouraged to communicate using in-built features like emoji, GIFs and memes. It is not about accumulating sensible content and finding solutions. It is about keeping the conversations and arguments going. All to get more clicks, views and interactions to show us more ads – the simple way to monetise on the web.

What this model brings is drama and dogma. The more outrageous your views, the more interaction you cause. The more dogmatic your approach, the more ammunition you have proving others wrong. It is not about finding consensus, it is about winning. Winning meaningless internet points and burning quite a few bridges whilst you do it. And it is addictive. The more you do it, the higher the rush to win. And the more devastating the feeling of non-accomplishment when you don’t win.

The scattered landscape of today

Let’s zoom in again into what we do as web developers. Web development is a spectrum of approaches. I’ll try to explain this using Tetronimos (that’s the official name of Tetris blocks).

On the one end we have a conservative group that doesn’t trust any browser or device and keeps it all on the server. On the other we have people who want to run everything on the client and replace web standards with their own abstractions. Conservatives allow the user to customise their device and environment to their needs. The other extreme is OK to block users who don’t fulfil certain criteria.

The following are not quotes by me. I encountered them over the years, anonymised and edited them for brevity. Let’s start.

The right, conservative block…

This is a group of people that most likely have been around the web for a long time. They’ve had a lot of promises and seen new technology proving too flaky to use over and over again. People that remember a web where we had to support terrible environments. A web where browsers were dumb renderers without any developer tools.

Here’s some of the quotes I keep hearing:

You can’t trust the client, but you can trust your server.

Web standards are good, but let’s not get overboard with fancy things.

bq/It is great that there are evergreen browsers, but that doesn’t apply to our customers…

This approach results in bullet-proof, working interfaces. Interfaces that are likely to bore end users. It seems clumsy these days to have to re-load a page on every interaction. And it is downright frustrating on a mobile connection. Mobile devices offer a lof of web browsing features using client-side technologies. What’s even worse is that this approach doesn’t reward end users who keep their environment up to date.

The right, conservative piece…

These people are more excited about the opportunities client-side functionality give you. But they tread carefully. They don’t want to break the web or lock out end users based on their abilities or technical setup.

Some quotes may be:

Progressive enhancement is the way to build working solutions. You build on static HTML generated from a backend and you will never break the user experience.

You have no right to block any user. The web is independent of device and ability. It is our job to make sure people can use our products. We do that by relying on standards.

Web products do not have to look and work the same in every environment.
Working, great looking interfaces that vary with the environment.

This is the best of both worlds. But it also means that you need to test and understand limits of older environments. Browser makers learned a lot from this group. It wanted to make the web work and get more control over what browsers do. That helps standard bodies a lot.

The Square

This is the group most concerned about the HTML we create. They are the people advocating for semantic HTML and sensible structures.

Some common phrases you’d hear from them are:

No matter what you do, HTML is always the thing the browser gets. HTML is fault tolerant and will work wherever and forever.

Using semantic HTML gives you a lot of things for free. Accessibility, caching, fast rendering. You can’t lose.

HTML is the final truth, that’s 100% correct. But we dropped the ball when HTML5 leap-frogged innovation. Advanced form interactions aren’t as reliable as we want them to be. Adding ARIA attributes to HTML elements isn’t a silver bullet to make them accessible. Browser makers should have spent more time fixing this. But instead, we competed with each other trying to be the most innovative browser. When it comes to basic HTML support, there was hardly any demand from developers to improve. HTML is boring to most developers and browsers are forgiving. This is why we drown in DIVs and SPANs. We keep having to remind people of the benefits of using real buttons, anchors and headings.

The straight and narrow…

This is a group advocating for a web that allows developers to achieve more by writing less code. They don’t want to have to worry about browser differences. They use libraries, polyfills and frameworks. These give us functionality not yet supported in browsers today.

Some famous ways of saying this are:

Browser differences are annoying and shouldn’t be in the way of the developer. That’s why we need abstraction libraries to fix these issues.

Understanding standards while they are in the making is nothing we have time for.

$library is so much easier – why don’t we add it to browsers?

There is no doubt that jQuery, Modernizr and polyfills are to thank for the web we have today. The issue is that far too many things depend on stop-gap solutions that never went away. Developers became dependent on them and never looked at the problems they solve. Problems that don’t exist in current browsers and yet we keep their fixes alive. That said, browser makers and standard creators learned a lot from these abstractions. We have quite a few convenience methods in JavaScript now because jQuery paved the way.

The T-Block

In Tetris, this is the most versatile block. It helps you to remove lines or build a solid foundation for fixing a situation that seems hopeless. On the web, this is JavaScript. It is the only language that spans the whole experience. You can use it on the server and on the client. In an environment that supports JavaScript, you can create CSS and HTML with it.

This leads to a lot of enthusiastic quotes about it:

I can do everything in JavaScript. Every developer on the web should know it.

Using JavaScript, I can test if something I wanted to happen happened. There is no hoping that the browser did it right – we know.

JavaScript was the necessary part to make the web we have now happen. It can make things more accessible and much more responsive. You can even find out what’s possible in a certain environment and cater a fitting solution to it. It is a fickle friend though, many things can go wrong until the script loads and executes. And it is unforgiving. One error and nothing happens.

The innovation piece…

This group considers JavaScript support a given. They want to have development tool chains. Tooling as rich as that of other programming environments.

This leads to quotes like these:

It is OK to rely on JavaScript to be available. The benefits of computational values without reloads are too many to miss out on.

I don’t want to have to think about older browsers and broken environments. Frameworks and build processes can take care of that.

The concept of starting with a text editor and static files doesn’t exist any more. We have so much more benefits from using a proper toolchain. If that’s too hard for you, then you’re not a web developer.

Web standards like CSS, JavaScript and HTML are conversion targets. Sass, CoffeeScript, Elm, Markdown and Jade gives us more reliable control right now. We should not wait until browsers catch up.

It is a waste of time to know about browser differences and broken implementations. It is much more efficient to start with an abstraction.

Developer convenience trumps end users experience here. This can result in bloated solutions. We know about that bloat and we create a lot of technologies to fix that issue. Browser makers can’t help much here. Except creating developer tools that connect the abstraction with the final output (sourcemaps).

The innovative blocker…

These are the bleeding edge developers. They want to re-invent what browsers and standards do as they’re not fast enough.

Common quotes coming from this end of the spectrum are:

Browsers and web standards are too slow and don’t give us enough control. We want to know what’s going on and control every part of the interface.

CSS is broken. The DOM is broken. We have the technologies in our evergreen browsers to fix all that reliably as we have insight into what’s happening and can optimise it.

This approach yields high fidelity, beautiful and responsive interfaces. Interfaces that lock out a large group of users as they demand a lot from the device they run on. We assume that everybody has access to a high end environment and we don’t cater to others. Any environment with a high level of control also comes with high responsibility. If you replace web technologies with your own, you are responsible for everything – including maintenance. Browser makers can take these new ideas and standardise them. The danger is that they will never get used once we have them.

Every single group in this spectrum have their place on the web. In their frame of reference, each result in better experiences for our users. The difference is responsibility and support.

If we create interfaces dependent on JavaScript we’re responsible to make them accessible. If we rely on preprocessors it is up to us to explain these to the maintainers of our products. We also demand more of the devices and connectivity of our end users. This can block out quite a large chunk of people.

The less we rely on browsers and devices, the more we allow end users to customise the interface to their needs. Our products run everywhere. But are they also delivering an enjoyable experience? If I have a high-end device with an up-to-date, evergreen browser I don’t want a interface that was hot in 1998.

Who defines what and who is in charge?

Who defines who is allowed to use our products?

Who has the final say how an interface looks and what it is used for?

The W3C has covered this problem quite a long time ago. In its design principles you can find this gem:

Users over authors over implementors over specifiers over theoretical purity…

If our users are the end goal, findings and best practices should go both ways. Advocates of a sturdy web can learn from innovators and vice versa. We’re not quite doing that. Instead we build silos. Each of the approaches has dedicated conferences, blogs, slack channels and communities. Often our argumentation why one or the other is better means discrediting the other one. This is not helpful in the long run.

This is in part based on the developer mindset. We seem to be hard-wired to fix problems, as fast as possible, and with a technological approach. Often this means that we fix some smaller issue and cause a much larger problem.

How great is the web for developers these days?

It is time to understand that we work in a creative, fast moving space that is in constant flux. It is a mess, but mess can be fun and working in a creative space needs a certain attitude.

Creatives in the film industry know this. In the beautiful documentary about the making of Disney’s Zootopia the creative director explains this in no minced terms:

As a storyboard artist in Disney you know that most of your work will be thrown away. The idea is to fail fast and fail often and create and try out a lot of ideas. Using this process you find two or three great ideas that make the movie a great story. (paraphrased)

Instead of trying to fix all the small niggles, let’s celebrate how far we’ve come with the standards and technologies we use. We have solid foundations.

• JavaScript: JavaScript is eating the world. We use it from creating everything on the web up to creating APIs and Web Servers. We write lots of tools in it to build our solutions. JavaScript engines are Open Source and embeddable. NodeJS and NPM allow us to build packages and re-use them on demand. In ES6 we got much more solid DOM access and traversal methods. Inspired by jQuery, we have querySelector() and classList() and many more convenience methods. We even replaced the unwieldy XMLHttpRequest with fetch(). And the concept or Promises and Async/Await allow us to build much more responsive systems.
• CSS: CSS evolved beyond choosing fonts and setting colours. We have transitions to get from one unknown state to another in a smooth fashion. We have animations to aid our users along an information flow. Both of these fire events to interact with JavaScript. We have Flexbox and Grids to lay out elements and pages. And we have Custom Properties, which are variables in CSS but so much more. Custom Properties are a great way to have CSS and JavaScript interact. You change the property value instead of having to add and remove classes on parent elements. Or – even worse – having to manipulate inline styles.
• Progressive Web Apps: The concept of Progressive Web Apps is an amazing opportunity. By creating a manifest file we can define that what we built is an app and not a site. That way User Agents and Search Engines can offer install interfaces. And browsers can allow for access to device and Operating System functionality. Service Workers offer offline functionality and work around the problem of unreliable connectivity. They also allow us to convert content on the fly before loading and showing the document. Notifications can make our content stickier without even having to show the apps.
• Tooling: Our developers tools have also gone leaps and bounds. Every browser is also a debugging environment. We haveh ackable editors written in web technologies. Toolchains allow us to produce what we need when it makes sense. No more sending code to environments that don’t even know how to execute it.
• Information availability: Staying up up-to-date is also simple these days. Browser makers are available for feedback and information. We have collaboration tools by the truckload. We have more events than we can count and almost all publish videos of their talks.

It is time for us to fill the gaps. It is time we realise that not everything we do has to last forever and needs to add up to a perfect solution. It is OK for our accomplishments to vanish. It is not OK for them to become landfill of the web.

Our job right now is to create interfaces that are simple, human and fun to use. There is no such thing as a perfect user – we need to think inclusive. It isn’t about allowing access but about avoiding barriers.

We have come a long way. We made the world much smaller and more connected. Let’s stop fussing over minor details, and show more love to the web, love to the craft and much more respect for another. Things are looking up, and I can’t wait to see what we – together – will come up with next.

You don’t owe the world perfection, but you have a voice that should be heard and your input matters. Get creative – no creativity is a waste.

Yesterday morning I was lucky enough to give the opening keynote at the excellent Beyond Tellerrand conference in Dusseldorf, Germany. I wrote a talk for the occasion that covered a strange disconnect that we’re experiencing at the moment.
Whilst web technology advanced leaps and bounds we still seem to be discontent all the time. I called this the Tetris mind set: all our mistakes are perceived as piling up whilst our accomplishments vanish.

Eva-Lotta Lamm created some excellent sketchnotes on my talk.

The video of the talk is already available on Vimeo:

Breaking out of the Tetris mind set from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo.

You can get the slides on SlideShare:

I will follow this up with a more in-depth article on the subject in due course, but for today I am very happy how well received the keynote was and I want to remind people that it is OK to build things that don’t last and that you don’t owe the world perfection. Creativity is a messy process and we should feel at ease about learning from mistakes.

Yesterday I was proud to be an invited speaker at the HackingUI masterclass where I presented about what Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence means for us as developers and designers. I will be giving a similar talk tomorrow in Poland in my Code Europe talk.

The Masterclass is using Crowdcast to allow for discussions between the moderators and the presenter, for the presenter to show his slides/demos and for people to chat and submit questions. You can see the whole one hour 45 minutes session by signing up to Hacking UI.

Master Class #4: The Soul in The Machine – Developing for Humans

It was exciting to give this presentation and the questions of the audience were interesting which meant that in addition to the topics covered in the talk I also managed to discuss the ethics of learning machines, how having more diverse teams can battle the issue of job loss because of automation and how AI can help combat bullying and antisocial behaviour online.

The materials I covered in the talk:

• Chinese factory raising production by 250% and lowering defects by 80% through automation
• JP Morgan automating the job of lawyers
• BBC’s Will a robot take your job? and the paper it is based on
• AI software learns to write AI software
• Microsoft DeepCoder and the paper that describes DeepCoder
• Bookmark’s AIDA to create automatic designs
• Wix ADI for automatic page creation
• Microsoft’s Inclusive Design guidelines
• Facebook’s image alternative text explained
• Cognitive Services in Microsoft Office
• Pinterest’s Lens, a Shazam for real life objects
• AiPoly and a demo video of it in action
• Automatic text in Google Allo
• Microsoft’s Video Breakdown
• Google’s DeepMind Lip reading example and the scientific paper on lip reading
• The Enhance Trope in TV
• Pixel Recursive Super Resolution – a paper explaining how the “zoom to enhance” can work.
• NVIDIA’s Super Resolution tools
• Netflix’s deep learning driving adaptive video encoding
• Google Autodraw – a tool to create icons from your doodles
• Google QuickDraw – the game that fed Autodraw’s dataset
• Cracking Google’s Recaptcha using Google’s Speech-to-Text API
• ImageNet database and Open Images alternative
• Image Captioning in Google TensorFlow
• Microsoft’s CaptionBot
• Microsoft’s Cognitive Services
• CRIS - enhancing with context

All in all there is a lot for us to be excited about and I hope I managed to make some people understand that the machine revolution is already happening and our job is it to make it benefit humankind, not work against it.