Adactio: Links—Tagged with apis

Pivoting From React to Native DOM APIs: A Real World Example - The New Stack

One dev team made the shift from React’s “overwhelming VDOM” to modern DOM APIs. They immediately saw speed and interaction improvements.

Yay! But:

…finding developers who know vanilla JavaScript and not just the frameworks was an “unexpected difficulty.”

Boo!

Also, if you have a similar story to tell about going cold turkey on React, you should share it with Richard:

If you or your company has also transitioned away from React and into a more web-native, HTML-first approach, please tag me on Mastodon or Threads. We’d love to share further case studies of these modern, dare I say post-React, approaches.

Simplify sharing with built-in APIs and progressive enhancement - Set Studio

Andy walks us through using the Web Share API as a progressive enhancement …but wouldn’t it be nice if we could just write button type="share"?

🧞‍♀️✨ The Real Godwin’s Law

Once a privately owned, centralized platform closes its public APIs, the platform will invariably lose any usablity except for people who publicly or privately admire Hitler.

Building a Frontend Framework; Reactivity and Composability With Zero Dependencies

The thinking behind the minimal JavaScript framework, Strawberry:

Even without specialized syntax, you can do a lot of what the usual frontend framework does—with similar conciseness—just by using Proxy and WebComponents.

AI isn’t the app, it’s the UI - Stack Overflow Blog

In some ways, the fervor around AI is reminiscent of blockchain hype, which has steadily cooled since its 2021 peak. In almost all cases, blockchain technology serves no purpose but to make software slower, more difficult to fix, and a bigger target for scammers. AI isn’t nearly as frivolous—it has several novel use cases—but many are rightly wary of the resemblance. And there are concerns to be had; AI bears the deceptive appearance of a free lunch and, predictably, has non-obvious downsides that some founders and VCs will insist on learning the hard way.

This is a good level-headed overview of how generative language model tools work.

If something can be reduced to patterns, however elaborate they may be, AI can probably mimic it. That’s what AI does. That’s the whole story.

There’s very practical advice on deciding where and when these tools make sense:

The sweet spot for AI is a context where its choices are limited, transparent, and safe. We should be giving it an API, not an output box.

Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought - Bitestring’s Blog

How browser fingerprinting works and what you can do about it (if you use Firefox).

Audio Session API Explainer

Jen pointed me to this proposal, which should help smooth over some of the inconsistencies I documented in iOS when it comes to the Web Audio API.

I’ve preemptively add this bit of feature detection to The Session:

if ('audioSession' in navigator) { navigator.audioSession.type = "playback"; }

The Web Platform Is Back

So much ink spilled supposedly explaining what “the web platform” is …when the truth is you can just swap in the “the web” every time that phrase is used here or anywhere else.

Anyway, the gist of this piece is: the web is good, actually.

12 Days of Web

All twelve are out, and all twelve are excellent deep dives into exciting web technologies landing in browsers now.

The cost of opinion – Dimitri Glazkov

This is a terrific analysis of why frameworks exist, with nods to David Hume’s is-ought problem: the native features are what is, and the framework features are what somebody thinks ought to be.

I’ve been saying at conferences for years now that if you choose to use a framework, you need to understand that you are also taking on the philosophy and worldview of the creators of that framework. This post does a great job of explaining that.

Still Hoping for Better Native Page Transitions | CSS-Tricks

It would be nice to be able to animate the transition between pages if we want to on the web without resorting to hacks or full-blown architecture choices to achieve it.

Amen, Chris, amen!

The danger here is that you might pick a single-page app just for this ability, which is what I mean by having to buy into a site architecture just to achieve this.

Should The Web Expose Hardware Capabilities? — Smashing Magazine

This is a very thoughtful and measured response to Alex’s post Platform Adjacency Theory.

Unlike Alex, the author doesn’t fire off cheap shots.

Also, I’m really intrigued by the idea of certificate authorities for hardware APIs.

Conditional JavaScript - JavaScript - Dev Tips

This is a good round-up of APIs you can use to decide if and how much JavaScript to load. I might look into using storage.estimate() in service workers to figure out how much gets pre-cached.

Web Platform Design Principles

Principles behind the design of web APIs:

Put user needs first (Priority of Constituencies)

It should be safe to visit a web page

Trusted user interface should be trustworthy

Ask users for meaningful consent when appropriate

Support the full range of devices and platforms (Media Independence)

I should add these to my collection.

The land before modern APIs – Increment: APIs

This is a wonderful tale of spelunking into standards from Darius Kazemi—I had no idea that HTTP status codes have their origin in a hastily made decision in the days of ARPANET.

20 people got together at MIT in 1972 for a weekend workshop. On the second day, a handful of people in a breakout session decided it would be a good idea to standardize error messages between two services for transferring data, even though those two services had not necessarily planned to speak to one another. One thing led to another, and now 404 is synonymous with “I can’t find the thing.”

This story is exactly the kind of layering of technologies that I was getting at in the first chapter of Resilient Web Design.

HTTP status codes are largely an accident of history. The people who came up with them didn’t plan on defining a numerical namespace that would last half a century or work its way into popular culture. You see this pattern over and over in the history of technology.

Revisiting Adaptive Design, a lost design movement (Interconnected)

This sounds like seamful design:

How to enable not users but adaptors? How can people move from using a product, to understanding how it hangs together and making their own changes? How do you design products with, metaphorically, screws not nails?

the Web at a crossroads - Web Directions

John weighs in on the clashing priorities of browser vendors.

Imagine if the web never got CSS. Never got a way to style content in sophisticated ways. It’s hard to imagine its rise to prominence in the early 2000s. I’d not be alone in arguing a similar lack of access to the sort of features inherent to the mobile experience that WebKit and the folks at Mozilla have expressed concern about would (not might) largely consign the Web to an increasingly marginal role.