Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Some weeks my notebook of links to share fills up, other weeks seem slower–like this one, though I could have sworn I read as much or more than usual.

So just a handful of links this week, but all high value.

Conditional CSS with :has and :nth-last-child

Ahmad Shaheed is one of our favourite CSS communicators. We’ve had him speak in person and on our online conferences (find all these on Conffab), and his book on debugging CSS, articles and tutorials are absolutely first rate.

Ahmad gets us thinking conceptually about CSS and its applications, and in this recent article explores how we can use recent innovations in selectors to create conditional CSS.

All Ahmad’s work is highly recommended.

Speaking of fabulous CSS communicators…

Stephanie Eckles is another of our favourite CSS focussed authors. Oh look here she is speaking at Hover, our online CSS focussed conference! She’s recently published a new book “Unleashing the Power of CSS” for sitepoint and there are several free chapters available, including one on the :has selector (trust me it warrants at least a chapter) and a great introduction to container queries (which is what she spoke on at Hover.)

A Calmer Web?

Older folk like me remember a time before social media, when people, rather than algorithms recommended what we should read or watch (though this is a time largely if not entirely before online video), and the constant tracking and surveillance by most of the sites we visited.

Heck I remember the very first spam newsgroup post, and very first display ad on the web (ironically its success at the time seemed to promise a viable way to grow the web–unintended consequences are very often difficult to foresee.

A few years back Anil Dash (I just looked it up, it’s 11 years ago now, honestly I would have said it was 5) published ‘the Web we lost‘ a lament for this web, lost even then.

Karolina Szczur recently wrote “The Calm Web: A Solution to Our Scary and Divisive Online World”

The Calm Web is a reimagining of the online world that envisions an Internet that is better for everyone. It’s a place that welcomes visitors, respects them, and does its utmost to delight them. It does away with bloated third parties designed to track and manipulate and instead focuses on delivering a lightning-fast experience with truly helpful content.

The Calm Web: A Solution to Our Scary and Divisive Online World

She outlines a web that

that welcomes visitors, respects them, and does its utmost to delight them. It does away with bloated third parties designed to track and manipulate and instead focuses on delivering a lightning-fast experience with truly helpful content.

And strategies for achieving that.

Well worth considering, for the things we build and the things we choose to engage with.

Oh, and a few years back Karolina presented Disruptive or defective? Towards ethical tech innovation at our Code leaders conference.

The Rise of Frameworks & the Fall of UX Architecture

Frameworks like React get a lot of focus from developers. We focus on their developer experience, and impact on performance, but rarely about their impact outside our domain.

Jason Cranford Teague is addressing this, with a new 5 part series on the role development frameworks are playing in user experience design. I’m not sure why this rarely if ever gets considered (it’s adjacent to the design systems and creativity conversation) but something interesting to think about.

More next week

As we head toward Code, now 3 weeks away in Melbourne, and AI our re-animated conference in Sydney in July, there’s plenty more where this came from next week and beyond.

Thanks for reading, make sure you check out Conffab, and see you next week.

John