This week there has been an AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) conference with a lot of new announcements.
As a result of these announcements there has been a lot of articles that have covered the new positioning and direction of AMP.
The announcements include - Google Stories with AMP pages
- AMP pages for email (or at least Gmail)
Whenever there is an announcement made there are always going to be a couple of different sides. Some people will love the changes, some will hate them, and others will be indifferent (and a variety of folks in between each).
This week in the newsletter I've featured a number of articles that are looking at the negative aspects of Google's AMP project. This newsletter is designed to bring you the latest articles, tutorials, tools and resources that will help you to become better at building websites. While I will always strive to provide you with the full story and complete oversight of the options that are out there, I will occasionally have a particular opinion which will slant the content.
AMP is one of those topics.
I have concerns, but I have trouble articulating in any other way then "It's not right for the web". Fortunately there are folks out there, whose articles I've linked to this week, that can articulate my feelings into words (thanks Tim, Ethan, Jeremy). But, this week I've also re-included links to the AMP site and encourage you to check it out for yourself and make your own informed decisions.
We all want fast performant websites that don't drain our batteries and provide the content we need without using our monthly data plan in a few pages, let's focus on the goal and not get tied to any proprietary tools.
Let's get linking! | | Headlines If you're running a website and not using HTTPS the time to do something about it is NOW. Google is, as of July 2018, going to mark non-https sites as "Not Secure". This provides a big doubt in your users minds that you are a trustworthy service and will have a significant impact upon your site traffic and ability to covert. I see this as BIGGER than the RWD deadline that was imposed back in 2015.
A wonderful essay from Frank Chimero based on a recent talk he gave around the current state of the web. As always, Frank gets to the heart of an issue and covers it in an informative, captive, and witty way.
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2 for 1 Special: Join us in SF on April 12th & learn from some of the industry's leading experts as they discuss user & industry trends that span machine learning, web performance, & how VR/AR will impact your organization. Promo code 2FOR1 expires February 23rd. | | Articles Tim looks at the two sides of AMP. Is it a tool for the open web, or is it a tool for Google Search? My favourite part is "If AMP makes performance better, that's fantastic! Let's incentivize good performance in the rankings. Let's incentivize the goal, not the tool."
Ethan covers the latest updates from Google with relation to AMP and the new direction. While not as scathing as Tims article, I think Ethan is on the money when he says "As of this moment, the power dynamics are skewed pretty severely in favor of Google's proprietary AMP standard..."
Google has increased the capabilities of their proprietary AMP webpage format and are now competing with Facebook, Instagram, and SnapChat for the creation of stories.
Google is now extending AMP into emails to provide more interaction with the Gmail client. I think it's awesome that I might have the opportunity to provide a more engaging experience for you inside gmail (if you use it), but it seems to push AMP further towards the areas that I'm most concerned about.
Why AMP has such great instant loading performance.
Understand how one company is putting together stories for the new Google Stories feature with AMP.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is an open source initiative that embodies the vision that publishers can create mobile optimized content once and have it load instantly everywhere.
If you're at a crossroads with whether to proceed with a native app or if you can build a PWA then Aaron Gustafson has a few scenarios for you.
In my day job the first thing that copywriters ask me about a sitemap is how many words they need to write for the page. My answer is most often — enough words so that the reader fully understands what they need to know. Don't add words to make up a number, don't remove them either.
Firefox continue to improve their dev tools with the shape outside viewer/debugger.
Tutorials A nice overview of introducing media queries into your email and the support chart for all the different clients out there.
Got 15 minutes and want to learn Git? Git allows groups of people to work on the same documents (often code) at the same time, and without stepping on each other's toes. It's a distributed version control system.
Dave Rupert uses some CSS Variables and 6 lines of javascript to deliver us some pretty nifty header parallax action. The great thing about this approach is you can easily disable the feature within media queries like @media (prefers-reduced-motion) or on smaller viewports.
use CSS Grid to build your next web app UI.
If you've been using jQuery to manipulate content on the page based on the users input you might want to consider switching it out for Vue.js. In this article the master of Vue, Sarah Drasner, takes you through some examples (with codepens) to see the benefits.
Tools & Resources Online web tools to get your work done faster. There are tools for HTML, CSS, JS, and even images (and more). Not just links to download tools either, literally tools you can use in your browser.
Cloudflare is great, I've been using it on the RWD Weekly and RWD.is site for many years and it's saved me a boatload of traffic and protected me against countless attacks, and as a result, I don't mind paying for the privilege. I'm lucky because the sponsorship on this newsletter helps offset that cost, but not everyone is in that position. They do offer free pro plans for some open source projects, so if you're interested submit your project and see if it meets the grade.
Detectron is Facebook AI Research's software system that implements state-of-the-art object detection algorithms, including Mask R-CNN. It is written in Python and powered by the Caffe2 deep learning
A simple color palette generator which matches two colours together. It gives you control over the pigment and lighting, and provides a variety of lighter and darker shades of the combinations. You can export to SVG, AI, get Hex colours... you can even search for images on Unsplash and have the colour combinations pulled back to form your pallette.
Customizable SVG patterns and background designs for websites and blogs
Eric Portis has dumped a bunch of things in here, for now. Some of these will be pulled out and described in other pages that help newcomers get up to speed on where we're at and where we've been.
Better Web Type is an easy-to-follow web typography email course for web designers & web developers. I've been redesigning a text heavy course site recently and this has been a wonderful help in getting the content looking right.
Typing with full-color illustrated letters is now a reality! OpenType-SVG is an exciting new technology, and is already supported by several browsers and design apps like Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator cc2018.
Video Jen Simmons describes the overall big picture of CSS Grid. What all these terms mean. How it's different than float-based frameworks. And how we are going to apply Grid to specific containers on the page — while using other layout methods on other containers of content.
I was lucky enough to catch this talk at Smashing Conf in London last week and it was fantastic. As well as learning all about better web fonts I even picked up a few new tips of rocket science. Bonus!@
Create the set of pocket notebooks you've always wanted or make a serious impression for your next event. These pocket notebooks are supurbly created from the finest paper stock and are made to impress.
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Jobs If you have a position you're looking to fill and want people just like you then get in touch so we can help you find someone through the newsletter.
That's all from me this week. If you've read something interesting, or even better yet if you've written about something you've done please hit reply and share the love/knowledge/link.
See you next week.
Cheers,
Justin. | | | |
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