Journal tags: responses

I’ve already had some thoughtful responses to yesterday’s post about trust. I wrapped up my thoughts with a request:

I would love it if someone could explain why they avoid native browser features but use third-party code.

Chris obliged:

I can’t speak for the industry, but I have a guess. Third-party code (like the referenced Bootstrap and React) have a history of smoothing over significant cross-browser issues and providing better-than-browser ergonomic APIs. jQuery was created to smooth over cross-browser JavaScript problems. That’s trust.

Very true! jQuery is the canonical example of a library smoothing over the bumpy landscape of browser compatibilities. But jQuery is also the canonical example of a library we no longer need because the browsers have caught up …and those browsers support standards directly influenced by jQuery. That’s a library success story!

Charles Harries takes on my question in his post Libraries over browser features:

I think this perspective of trust has been hammered into developers over the past maybe like 5 years of JavaScript development based almost exclusively on inequality of browser feature support. Things are looking good in 2022; but as recently as 2019, 4 of the 5 top web developer needs had to do with browser compatibility.

Browser compatibility is one of the underlying promises that libraries—especially the big ones that Jeremy references, like React and Bootstrap—make to developers.

So again, it’s browser incompatibilities that made libraries attractive.

Jim Nielsen responds with the same message in his post Trusting Browsers:

We distrust the browser because we’ve been trained to. Years of fighting browser deficiencies where libraries filled the gaps. Browser enemy; library friend.

For example: jQuery did wonders to normalize working across browsers. Write code once, run it in any browser — confidently.

Three for three. My question has been answered: people gravitated towards libraries because browsers had inconsistent implementations.

I’m deliberately using the past tense there. I think Jim is onto something when he says that we’ve been trained not to trust browsers to have parity when it comes to supporting standards. But that has changed.

Charles again:

This approach isn’t a sustainable practice, and I’m trying to do as little of it as I can. Jeremy is right to be suspicious of third-party code. Cross-browser compatibility has gotten a lot better, and campaigns like Interop 2022 are doing a lot to reduce the burden. It’s getting better, but the exasperated I-just-want-it-to-work mindset is tough to uninstall.

I agree. Inertia is a powerful force. No matter how good cross-browser compatibility gets, it’s going to take a long time for developers to shed their suspicion.

Jim is glass-half-full kind of guy:

I’m optimistic that trust in browser-native features and APIs is being restored.

He also points to a very sensible mindset when it comes to third-party libraries and frameworks:

In this sense, third-party code and abstractions can be wonderful polyfills for the web platform. The idea being that the default posture should be: leverage as much of the web platform as possible, then where there are gaps to creating great user experiences, fill them in with exploratory library or framework features (features which, conceivably, could one day become native in browsers).

Yes! A kind of progressive enhancement approach to using third-party code makes a lot of sense. I’ve always maintained that you should treat libraries and frameworks like cattle, not pets. Don’t get too attached. If the library is solving a genuine need, it will be replaced by stable web standards in browsers (again, see jQuery).

I think that third-party libraries and frameworks work best as polyfills. But the whole point of polyfills is that you only use them when the browsers don’t supply features natively (and you also go back and remove the polyfill later when browsers do support the feature). But that’s not how people are using libraries and frameworks today. Developers are reaching for them by default instead of treating them as a last resort.

I like Jim’s proposed design princple:

Where available, default to browser-native features over third party code, abstractions, or idioms.

(P.S. It’s kind of lovely to see this kind of thoughtful blog-to-blog conversation happening. Right at a time when Twitter is about to go down the tubes, this is a demonstration of an actual public square with more nuanced discussion. Make your own website and join the conversation!)

Earlier this year, at Indie Web Camp Düsseldorf, I got replies working on my own site. That is to say, I can host a reply on my site to something on another site.

The classic example is Twitter. In fact, if you look at all my replies, most of them are responding to tweets (I also syndicate these replies to Twitter so they show up there just like regular tweet replies).

I’m really, really glad I got replies working. I’ve been using this functionality quite a bit, and it feels really good to own my content this way.

At the time, I wrote:

So I’m owning my replies now. At the moment, they show up in my home page feed just like any other notes I post. I’m not sure if I’ll keep it that way. They don’t make much sense out of context.

I decided not to include them on my home page feed after all. You’ll still see them if you go to the notes section of my site, but I decided that they were overwhelming my home page a bit. They also don’t show up in my RSS feed.

I’m really happy that I’m hosting my replies, and that I’ve got URLs for all of them, but I don’t think I want to give them the same priority as blog posts, links, and regular notes.

Last week was a bit of an event whirlwind. In the space of seven days I was at Indie Web Camp, Beyond Tellerrand, and Accessibility Club in Düsseldorf, followed by a train ride to Utrecht for Frontend United. Phew!

Indie Web Camp Düsseldorf was—as always—excellent. Once again, Sipgate generously gave us the use of their lovely, lovely space for the weekend. We had one day of really thought-provoking discussions, followed by a day of heads-down hacking and making.

I decided it was time for me to finally own my replies. For a while now, I’ve been posting notes on my own site and syndicating to Twitter. But whenever I replied to someone else’s tweet, I did from Twitter. I wanted to change that.

From a coding point of view, it wasn’t all that tricky. The real challenges were to do with the interface. I needed to add another field for the URL I’m replying to …but I didn’t want my nice and minimal posting interface to get too cluttered. I ended up putting the new form field inside a details element with a summary of “Reply to” so that the form field would be hidden by default, and toggled open by hitting that “Reply to” text:

<details>
    <summary>
        <label for="replyto">Reply to</label>
    </summary>
    <input type="url" id="replyto" name="replyto">
</details>

I sent my first test reply to a post on Aaron’s website. Aaron was sitting next to me at the time.

Once that was all working, I sent my first reply to a tweet. It was a response to a tweet from Tantek. Tantek was also sitting next to me at the time.

I spent most of the day getting that Twitter syndication to work. I had something to demo, but I foolishly decided to risk it all by attempting to create a bookmarklet so that I could post directly from a tweet page (instead of hopping back to my own site in a different tab). By canabalising the existing bookmarklet I use for posting links, I just about managed to get it working in time for the end of day demos.

So I’m owning my replies now. At the moment, they show up in my home page feed just like any other notes I post. I’m not sure if I’ll keep it that way. They don’t make much sense out of context.

Then again, I kind of like how wonderfully random and out-of-context they look. You can browse through all my replies so far.

I’m glad I got this set up. Now when Andy posts stuff on Twitter, I’m custodian of my responses:

@AndyBudd: Who are your current “Design Heroes”?

adactio.com: I would say Falcor from Neverending Story, the big flying dog.