Links

In A Global Design System, Brad Frost makes a case to:

centralize common UI components, reduce so much of this unnecessary duplication, integrate with any web-based tech stack, and create a connected vehicle for delivering front-end best practices to the world’s web experiences.

His proposal explicitly isn't “new HTML features”. We're working on that over at Open UI, and it's fruitful and good, but also hard, because web compatibility is complicated. It's challenging to get accessibility “built-in” in: these web platform features, like a fully customisable select, need to be flexible and styleable enough so that people actually want to use them, but also inflexible enough so that people can't accidentally use them to make something inaccessible. Or maybe “inflexible” isn't the right word… it's a matter of adding “guardrails” to these features: what sort of ARIA relationships and states should apply when? Browsers can't guarantee what developers are trying or going to do.

Anyway, Brad's “global design system“ is not that, it's proposed as a layer on top of HTML, a common library between design systems. That too resonates with me. In fact, it is close to what NL Design System is setting out to do. Different government departments and layers maintain their own design systems, but share a common architecture and reuse themeable components and tests from one another.

Cassidy Williams:

In the earlier internet days, you went to a fun website or read the latest thing because you decided to go do it. Now, all of this content is pushed in your face, designed to be as addicting as possible, so you keep coming back.

This is from her recent post in which she explains why she misses human curation, it ties in nicely with why I got into reading (and, as of recently, ow writing) link blogs.

Cassidy is right about algorithmic curation, I feel the same when scrolling modern social media. The sites found out I liked a couple of things, then bombard me with just more of those things. It's better to optimise for human context and intention than for algorithms, they quickly get boring.

Tom Coates went to a Meta event about Threads and the Fediverse:

Just before Christmas I was lucky enough to be invited to a Data Dialogue event at Meta’s offices in San Francisco. The event was designed to reach out to people in the ‘Fediverse’ community, tell us their plans for their product “Threads” and get a bit of feedback about the policy and privacy implications.

His post has a detailed analysis of the pros and cons: How Threads will integrate with the Fediverse – plasticbag.org

Design systems can be a super effective way to propagate a lot of accessibility at once, across many services. Not just as part of components that have good defaults, but also, maybe especially, in written documentation that helps people understand better what to do.

The GOV.UK Design System was updated to add an accessibility section and specific guidance on meeting WCAG 2.2 across the different component pages.

One of the things that I keep circling back to when reading about ‘AI’ is the kind of problems people are trying to solve with it, so many of which are completely futile.

Chris Person on the ‘rabbit’:

What’s most annoying about all of this is the sheer repeated imposition of this horseshit. I’m sick of being forced to think about generative AI, large language models and large action models. I’m tired of these adult toddlers who need an AI to tie their shoes and make bad Pixar characters for them. Microsoft and Google keep shoving AI features into their software, and I absolutely should not have to worry about this garbage from Firefox of all places.

(from: Why Would I Buy This Useless, Evil Thing? - Aftermath)

Hui Jing had fun inspecting a site:

I just got a scam SMS and thought it’d be fun to inspect how the phishing website works

Hope you recover soon, my friend!

(From: Let's inspect a phishing site)

Design systems aren't a silver bullet to align teams and magically make digital products more consistent. In Through a design system, darkly, Ethan Marcotte describes two issues:

1. Design systems haven’t “solved” inconsistency. Rather, they’ve shifted how and when it manifests.
2. Many design systems have introduced another, deeper issue: a problem of visibility.

Jennifer Moore on what LLMs can and cannot do:

The fundamental task of software development is not writing out the syntax that will execute a program. The task is to build a mental model of that complex system, make sense of it, and manage it over time.

From: Losing the imitation game

In Weird things engineers believe about Web development, Brian Birtles talks about different assumptions of developers of websites and and web browsers:

it’s easy to assume our experience of the Web is representative of Web development in general

Yup, checks out.

I've been using “AI”, with quotes, a bunch on this website. I feel the industry is calling things artificially intelligent way beyond the scope of what that (admittedly hard to define) phrase actually means. That makes criticial analysis harder… that's good for marketeers, not so much for others.

Simon Willison agrees that “spicy autocomplete” is a good analogy for how LLMs work today, but at the same, it's ok to call it artificial intelligence:

We need an agreed term for this class of technology, in order to have conversations about it. I think it’s time to accept that “AI” is good enough, and is already widely understood.