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Linkbait 41

Friends edition. Lots of articles by people I’ve known for ages. Not sure why; probably just a coincidence.

• The Big Z deplores the cult of the complex.

  in a field where young straight white dudes take an overwhelming majority of the jobs (including most of the management jobs) it’s perhaps to be expected that web making has lately become something of a dick measuring competition.

  Before you diss him (and me) as an old fart who isn’t keeping up with the times, please consider the following question: At which time can we start to safely say that people who just cram frameworks into everything they make are too set in their ways and can’t keep up with the latest trends? Two years? Three? Five?
• Brad takes a middle position between those who applaud the shiny new and those who deplore it, by asking (rather testily? or is that just my imagination?) why both sides treat a simple “I don’t understand X” as fodder for their view of web development. (I am guilty as charged, I’m afraid.)
• Jeremy hopes AMP will drive itself to extinction.

  If anything, I’ve noticed publishers using the existence of their AMP pages as a justification for just letting their “regular” pages put on weight.

  and

  I wish that AMP were being marketed more like a temporary polyfill. And as with any polyfill, I look forward to the day when AMP is no longer necesssary.

• Rachel wrote a massive guide to CSS layout. I’ll have to study it closely if I ever write the CSS book for JavaScripters. I did not know about display: flow-root.
• Ethan is a little excited about Safari (or, at least, WebKit) coming to the Apple Watch. So am I. It’ll be interesting to see how they solved the low-memory and small-screen issues. Ethan’s article contains a lot of useful links.
• I’m not excited about yet another meta tag, though — see Erik Runyon’s article for the details. I wish we could have left it at the existing one, but of course web designers didn’t make their old sites fit for 272px, which appears to be the ideal layout viewport width of the smallest watch.
• Tim adds some performance notes:

  The median site sends about 351kb of compressed JavaScript to “mobile” devices according to HTTP Archive. That’s roughly 1.7-2.4MB of uncompressed JavaScript the browser has to parse, compile, and execute. That little S3 processor is going to struggle if we try to serve anything close to the amount of JavaScript that we serve to everything else.

  Use AMP? (Just kidding)
  We can hope that this will drastically drop average JS usage, but it probably won’t.
• The inimitable Lin Clark wrote cartoon introductions to DNS over HTTPS and ES modules.
• A very useful overview of current VR sets, including their browsers and WebVR support.
• Speaking of which, Tesla updated its browser. It’s not a cutting-edge one, judging by the HTML5 Tests screenshots, but I can see why disabling video in a car browser might be a good idea.
• Have a tip for the next Linkbait? Or a comment on this one? Let me know (or here or here).