Webdesign

Robin Rendle
But really the baseline of web design is so low because there’s a lack of tenderness, care, and empathy. It’s because we don’t see the making of a website as a worthy profession. It’s because we hope to squeeze the last bit of juice from the orange by mulching people in between modals and pop ups and cookie banners.
Harsh but fair. I don’t think this will improve as people expect automation to handle web design in the near future. Web development is a human process.
The Verge
“I trust users are doing what they want to do,” he said, noting friction frustrates people trying to grab data or read an article. He wants those users to return — and tell their friends. He views UX as “growing a relationship,” providing something of value rather than squeezing the most out of a single session.
That's it, I'm pressing the independent thought alarm.
Plausible
"Google has been pushing sites to use AMP for years and continues to recommend it as “the majority of the AMP pages achieve great page experiences”. But for websites that are optimized for speed, their AMP pages are often slower than the regular pages."
Very happy to see this.
YouTube
Nice explanation of why CSS is different from other types of programming. It's a positive feature of the Web that we don't have the same control as the printed page. (I keep telling myself.)
The Markup
“We will prioritize pages with great page experience, whether implemented using AMP or any other web technology, as we rank the results,” Google said in a blog post.
This is amazing. The AMP experience in Safari on an iPhone is terrible. AMP doesn’t even do well the thing it set out to do. Add in the way Google HOSTS those pages causing domain confusion and you get a total mess that has only been adopted because Google has monopoly power. Making efficient pages is a good goal but AMP in its current form can’t die soon enough.

Native Lazy Loading

Hey, did you know that many web browsers have native lazy loading for images now? You can use it by adding an attribute to your image tags:

loading="lazy"

That's it! Instead of loading every image when the page loads the browser will wait until it's needed. Efficient!

Today I added it here and if you scroll very quickly through a page like this with lots of photos, you'll catch them loading as needed.
siipo.la
"Since most of the time WebP is used alongside JPEG fallback, by using WebP you will essentially double your storage costs with little benefit."
ah-HA! Unless all of your images < 500px you don't get a big benefit moving to WebP when you can use MozJPEG for encoding.
Eric Bailey Eric Bailey
The current state of accessibility in web design is not good even though awareness is up and related development tools are becoming more available. Eric Baily does a nice job here of summarizing a recent WebAIM analysis of the top million home pages and putting it in context. One thing I learned is that Firefox added a new accessibility pane for developers: Accessibility Inspector. It's very handy to be able to get color contrast info with a click and I hope the ease of use and ubiquity of tools like this will help developers make more accessible choices.

Saturday Links

Bleak edition.
Puerto Rico
Facebook
Twitter
NFL
Web Design
Multifarious
And after all that you'll probably need to recoup with some Ronnie James Dio singing as a psychedelic frog: