On Principles – technogoggles

A Matter of Principle

This is an oldie from Julie Zhou, but it’s a timeless message about the value of good (i.e. actually useful) design principles.

See also what she said on this podcast episode:

When push comes to shove and you have to make a trade off, how are you, in those moments, as a team or a company going to prioritize? What are you going to care about the most? Good values will be controversial in that respect because it’s something that another company might have made a different decision than you.

mnot’s blog: RFC8890: The Internet is for End Users

RFC 8890 maybe the closest thing we’ve got to a Hippocratic oath right now.

A community that agrees to principles that are informed by shared values can use them to navigate hard decisions.

Also worth noting:

Many discussions influenced this document, both inside and outside of the IETF and IAB. In particular, Edward Snowden’s comments regarding the priority of end users at IETF 93 and the HTML5 Priority of Constituencies were both influential.

Design process for the messy in-between » cog & sprocket

Designing your design process:

1. Know your strengths and focus resources on your weaknesses.
2. Learn to identify the immovable objects.
3. What has to be perfect now and what can be fixed later?

Drupal’s commitment to accessibility | Dries Buytaert

Shots fired!

I’ve come to believe that accessibility is not something you do for a small group of people. Accessibility is about promoting inclusion. When the product you use daily is accessible, it means that we all get to work with a greater number and a greater variety of colleagues. Accessibility benefits everyone.

Relative Requirements – CSS Wizardry

I really like this exercise by Harry. I’ve done similar kinds of grading using dot-voting in the past. It feels like an early step to establishing design principles: “this over that.”

By deciding what we value up-front, we have an agreement that we can look back on in order to help us settle these conflicts and get us back on track again.

Relative Requirements remove the personal aspect of these disagreements and instead focuses on more objective agreements that we made as a team.