cirrus

DavidDarnes, 19 days ago to random

Does anyone have any #WebComponents “gotchas” that they wish they knew when getting into them?

cirrus, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to accessibility

I've got a question for all you #a11y experts:

I know all web pages should have a sensible heading outline and that there should be a single H1, which should be used for the page title.

Now consider this common site layout: Every page has a common header, typically featuring the site/company name (e.g. as a logo in the top left).

Most pages would have the page title in the body below as an H1. E.g. a contact page might have "Contact us" just below the page header.

But what about...

cirrus, 4 months ago to random

Current status:
git commit -m "make CI pipeline work... maybe? hopefully? for real this time, honest guv"
git push
🤞

cirrus, 5 months ago to UX

Begun moving my old Medium blog posts to my personal website and just noticed that all links from a Medium post to other sites have target="_blank" to force them to open in a new tab.

Yuk! Yuk! Yuk!!! :vomit:

That is one of my pet peeves and has been proven time and time again to be bad for #UX and #a11y (see https://www.nngroup.com/articles/new-browser-windows-and-tabs/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/07/should-links-open-in-new-windows/ https://css-tricks.com/use-target_blank/)

Can't wait to get those posts rehomed on my own site where those links will definitely open in the same tab!

zachleat, 13 days ago (edited 13 days ago) to random

google.com search results (on a desktop web browser) have a horizontal scrollbar < 1162px viewport width and don’t use responsive design.

Sometimes the biggest web properties in the world make decisions with a completely different set of priorities, goals, budget (etc.) and those decisions wouldn’t make sense to apply to your project (with your own goals, team, and tech stack).

Their best practices are not your best practices!

cirrus, 4 months ago to Figma

Once again facing that classic #designsystem conundrum: Theme and/or customize a 3rd party component library, or build one from scratch.

Actually, we need two component libs: A #WebComponent one for web products and a #ReactNative one for iOS & Android apps. We already have designs in #Figma and want to have parity in terms of design & naming across Figma, web & RN.

My gut and past experiences make me lean towards building from scratch.

What would you do and why?

cirrus, 10 months ago to random

Deleted my Instagram account earlier today. I was barely using it.

Had been considering deleting my Twitt... X account too. But, decided to just keep it dormant (for now). My profile and pinned tweet basically just link here, so it's essentially just a promo for my Mastodon account 🙂.

Gotta say, I was a bit disappointed to see so many #DesignSystem friends being very active on X, when I briefly logged in to update my profile. I had really hoped most of that community would have migrated here.

cirrus, 7 days ago to random

In other #DesignTokens news, Sketch recently added a direct export to DTCG files: https://www.sketch.com/updates/design-tokens/ ❤️

As one of the spec editors, I really love seeing support for the DTCG file format ( https://tr.designtokens.org/ ) appearing in tools. The dream of seamless interoperability for design tokens edges a step closer each time.

Have you made a tool / lib / thing that supports the format too? Share it with the community here: https://github.com/design-tokens/community-group/issues/211

cirrus, 1 month ago to javascript

Grumble. #Angular is doing my head in. Why do Angular packages create a new package.json in the dist folder and expect you to cd into there before running npm publish?!?!

I have a monorepo with lots of other non-Angular packages. I use Changesets to manage versioning and releases.

Now, because Angular can't just use npm like it's meant to be used, I'm stuck.

#WebDev

cirrus, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago) to random

The setup I think other people have when they present at online conferences, versus mine... 😅

(if that hasn't put you off, maybe see you at https://www.specifyapp.com/connect in 15mins to hear me nerd out about #DesignTokens with Matt and Louis?)

cirrus, 5 months ago to random

Starting a new job as #DesignSystem Engineer at Investec today. 🚀

Sloshed some coffee on my sleeve twice already and haven't even made it to the office yet. Off to a good start then... 😜

cirrus, 2 months ago to random

Current status:

cirrus, 1 year ago to webdev

Curious if there are #ProgressiveEnhancent approaches people are using to recent #CSS features like cascade layers, nesting and proposed ones like scope.

I get that older browsers will just ignore @ rules they don't support and you can probably feature detect some of this via supports.

But, these aren't new properties for adding some optional visual flourish. These fundamentally alter how you organise your CSS code.

I struggle to see how one might use them in a way that there's enough...

cirrus, 11 months ago to random

Nice summary by @donnie of some of the #DesignTokens formats that are currently out there: https://blog.damato.design/posts/spicy-specifications/

FWIW, an analogy the #DTCG editors have used in the past is vector graphics formats:

The #DTCG format aims to be to tokens what SVG is to vector graphics. Standardised, widely supported as an import/export format and (somewhat) human editable.

However, lots of design tools also have their own, proprietary formats - e.g. Illustrator has .ai files. These may have additional...

cirrus, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago) to random

I have a few ideas for blog posts relating to #DesignSystems & #DesignTokens, but my personal website design is extremely crusty and old (still using XHTML!!), so I worry folks might be turned off by that and not read the posts.

Should I...

cirrus, 8 months ago to random

Just shutdown my Twitter/X account.

I had it for almost 15 years. I had a lot of fun there, learned a lot and met some great people. But, after barely using it since Elon took over, I've come to the conclusion that I'll never go back.

I grabbed an archive of all my tweets before closing my account, so perhaps I'll rehost them ony site one day.

cirrus, 2 months ago to random

I know it's been done a million times (incl. a few by my past self), but it still feels like magic when demoing a #DesignToken pipeline.

In our case, the demo was:

• Static HTML, React & Angular web apps are all open in browser windows, displaying some of p
  our #DesignSystem components
• An Android emulator running a React Native app, also using DS components, is open too.
• I open a Figma library, edit the color of a variable
  ...

cirrus, 1 year ago to random

Despite frequently seeing code snippets that evoque a "WTF were they thinking?!" reaction, I quite enjoy refactoring and tidying up "old" code.

cirrus, 11 months ago to random

Oh dear. My phone is "struggles to last to the evening before the battery runs out" years old.

Also, the wireless charging broke yonks ago (I dropped it one too many times) and lately cables keep slipping out the USB-C socket. I tried to clean it, so don't think it's clogged with lint. Maybe something's a bit bent in there?

Was planning to wait for next year's Samsung S-series line-up, but not so sure it'll last until then. 😞

cirrus, 6 days ago to random

Due to all the streaming services, we had barely been using our DVDs and BluRays for a long time. So, to free up shelf space, we packed them away into boxes and put them in the loft.

Literally minutes later our broadband provider had an outage. No Netflix / Prime Video / Disney+ 🤦‍♂️

cirrus, 7 days ago to random

Our #DesignSystem's #DesignToken pipeline has become more of a hydra...

Figma vars & styles
|
+-> DTCG file
|
+-> CSS custom properties
+-> CSS utility classes
+-> Storybook stories for util classes
+-> TS code
+-> TS interface

...and there's more to come: React Native components, docs, etc.

Also, longterm I want to make Figma an output from the DTCG file (or have some kind of 2 way sync), rather than it being the source.

cirrus, 20 days ago to webdev

Started writing a decision log for our #DesignSystem. Documenting why we chose to build plain ol' #HTML and #CSS where we can and #WebComponents where client-side #JS is needed is turning into a bit of a manifesto. Essentially we're using (and encouraging others to use) #ProgressiveEnhancement 😉

cirrus, 26 days ago to random

Spent this afternoon wrangling NPM dependencies in our #DesignSystem's monorepo. Managed to nuke a few and also eliminate all the vulnerable package versions being reported by npm audit.

I am so ready for the weekend!