Links

On the work the GOV.UK Design System team do:

it’s the invisible systems work that has a bigger impact. Reviewing. Advising. Organising. Co-ordinating. Triaging. Educating. Supporting. Allowing the innovation happening at the edges of the ecosystem to feed back into the centre, to be consolidated and standardised for the benefit of everyone.

(From: How far we’ve come: What it would mean to lose the GOV.‌UK Design System)

In Design 11Patterns that Encourage Junk Data, Michelle talks about the environmental cost of creating and storing so much of our data in the ‘cloud’:

the need for limitless digital storage bumps up against the very real physical limits of our planet.

(From: CSS { In Real Life } | Design 11Patterns that Encourage Junk Data)

She explains it's not only a huge amount of data, a lot of it is probably unnecessary:

It’s estimated that up to 88% of the data stored in the cloud is ROT (Redundant, Obsolete or Trivial) data, or “dark data”: data collected by companies in the course of their regular business activities, but which is not used for any other purpose. It all amounts to a lot of junk data that has no purpose, that will never be needed or looked at again.

Yup, I definitely store a lot of photos and emails that I will never need to look at again. I should set aside some time for cleanup.

I agree with Michelle. Design could help consumers decrease their storage. I want my software to encourage deletion, not (or not just) addition, bring it on!

Brian Merchant explains in Let's not do this again, please that OpenAI's new image generating thingy is mostly a “promotial narrative” to try and seek more investment money (OpenAI's server spend, the article says, is over 1 million USD per day).

The tech stitches together imagery, rather than create new imagery, Brian says:

It’s not that Sora is generating new and amazing scenes based on the words you’re typing — it’s automating the act of stitching together renderings of extant video and images.

TIL that UK monarchs choose their own Royal Cypher, a “symbol to represent their personal authority”.

In September 2022, the College of Arms announced His Majesty King Charles III’s Royal Cypher, which features the monarch’s chosen crown. This Cypher features the Tudor Crown, rather than the St Edward’s Crown chosen by Queen Elizabeth II following her Accession in 1952. Her Royal Cypher was itself a change from her father King George VI.

On each accession, the monarch will choose a Royal Cypher, or symbol to represent their personal authority. You can see the Royal Cypher in many places, for example post boxes, on police and military uniforms or on the side of official buildings.

(From: Updating GOV.UK’s crown - Inside GOV.UK)

With a government wide design system, the digital version of that can be rolled out much more efficiently. Yay design systems!

paying people to work on open source is good, full stop, no exceptions. We need to stop criticizing maintainers getting paid, and start celebrating. Yes, all of the mechanisms are flawed in some way, but that’s because the world is flawed, and it’s not the fault of the people taking money.

(From: Paying people to work on open source is good actually - Jacob Kaplan-Moss)

Isaac Lyman (Stack Overflow) looks at whether software gets worse. He notices software, unlike sandwiches and movie tickets, is hard to sell:

There are only two demographics that are willing to pay for good software: corporations and video gamers. We’ve somehow blundered our way into a world where everyone else expects software to be free.

(From: Is software getting worse? - Stack Overflow)

Developers have leverage, the post concludes, they have the power to insist on quality, but aren't really using it. This seems unlikely to change overnight, says Isaac.

Wouter Groeneveld ran a Webmentions server then decided to stop running it, because it costs him too much time:

I’d rather spend my Sunday doing something else.

(From: Why I Retired My Webmention Server | Brain Baking)

He questions if it's worth having mentions at all if most are likes and most are sent from Bridgy, a centralised service.

Food for thought. I think I like even the mentions that are just likes… not as some vanity metric, but because it adds a layer of humanity and, community, at least in my bubble. But it is at the expense of privacy. And simplicity (shoutout to Mu-An and Robb's OpenHeart, which is indeed “much, much, much simpler”). And efficiency, especially if you recheck for deletion of replies, as Robb concludes you probably should (not the same Robb).

In Django accessibility in 2023 and beyond, the accessibility team of Python framework Django reflects on their work in the year 2023 and looks to the future. This makes me happy to see, as I'm a bit of a CMS/built-in accessibility nerd (see this intro to CMS accessibility with ATAG and Your CMS is an accessibility assistant). CMS and framework accessibility projects have the potential to increase a lot of accessibility at once: better defaults, better guidance and better output can all lead to a ripple effect. Better admin interfaces can increase how many people can make content for the web, which, again, is great.

Django updated forms in their core, improved the admin UI in lots of ways, updated guidance and automated tooling (including CI/CD). On top, they improved their website and did a bunch of outreach. Great to see it, may more CMSes follow suit (shoutout to WordPress Accessibility Day and Drupal's Accessibility Project).

In Don’t Disable Form Controls, Adrian Roselli explains that, while it sometimes can be ok to disable buttons, it's never ok to disable submit buttons (or any form fields):

Telling authors not to disable submit buttons is too narrow. Authors should not disable any form fields.

Every day, I get to work with people who do good work, who care about things like privacy, ethics and accessibility. We exist. We just are drowning, drowning in algorithmically-guarded walled gardens that are nothing more than quagmires of enshittification, of AI-generated content, of snake-oil solutions.

(From: Have we forgotten how to build ethical things for the web? - Nic Chan)

This piece from Nic resonated. There's a lot of good people in the web industry, doing good things. But there's also a lot of very bad practices that have an impact way beyond their initial uses. From content optimised for search engines (and thus not for humans) to extreme tracking (very far from just figuring out how many people visit which pages).

To avoid bad practices and build more ethically as an industry, I think what Nic shares would actually be the most effective way: to actively question practices and orders we receive as individuals in teams. In What kind of ethics do front-end developers need? I listed a bunch of other things that individuals in teams can make a fuss about.