2024.05.20 - Manifesto for a Humane Web

Title: 2024.05.20 – Manifesto for a Humane Web

Deno Standard Library & Centering GPT‑4o & Open source & 大道就是太简单了所以没有人相信 & 小满

This Week’s Highlights

Manifesto for a Humane Web https://humanewebmanifesto.com/
The web is becoming hostile to humans. Users are tracked and their privacy is routinely violated. Search results are filled with ads. We are constantly spammed by bots. Generative AI threatens to turn previously useful public forums into soulless marketing soup, while sacrificing the livelihoods of the creators who unwittingly power them. Power‑hungry data centres demand the burning of fossil fuels, divert water and energy from communities, and emit tonnes of carbon to power this digital junkyard. Users abandon hostile sites that load too slowly on low‑powered devices, or are forced to upgrade, as the pile of electronic waste grows. We need a web built by and for humans. Related: IndieWeb principles.

10 updates from Google I/O 2024: Unlocking the power of AI for every web developer https://developer.chrome.com/blog/web-at-io24?hl=zh-cn https://web.dev/blog/web-platform-dashboard?hl=en https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-io-2024-100-announcements/
The web turns 35 years old this August. Generations of developers have shaped this incredible technology and brought countless innovations to our lives. Now, it’s the dawn of a new generation, with AI. Here are 10 exciting features unveiled in our Developer Keynote and I/O sessions that will guide your path to better development—through a more powerful web made easier. Related:

• OverflowAI is now Generally Available! A new era of community‑driven AI
• Research: Quantifying GitHub Copilot’s impact in the enterprise with Accenture
• Hello GPT‑4o
• Lobe Chat: An open‑source, modern‑design ChatGPT/LLMs UI/Framework
• Gemini Flash
• Llama 3 implemented in pure NumPy
• OpenAI and Google are launching supercharged AI assistants. Here’s how you can try them out.
• A Front‑End Engineer’s Take on LLMs

The Deno Standard Library is now available on JSR https://deno.com/blog/std-on-jsr
We are excited to announce a significant evolution in the Deno ecosystem: the Deno Standard Library, a robust collection of high‑quality TypeScript packages, has officially moved to JSR, the new JavaScript package registry. Related: How to document your JavaScript package, How we built a secure, performant, multi‑tenant cloud platform to run untrusted code.

Hardest Problem in Computer Science: Centering Things https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/
What I’m saying is: everybody knows how to center things. It’s trivial. And if you are lost, the knowledge is right there. Yet, when we look at actual applications, we see that these methods are not used.

In‑Depth Reading

Why React Query https://ui.dev/why-react-query
This is the story of my favorite example of a piece of technology solving “The 5 O’Clock Rule.” A story of how a single developer in a small town in Utah—on his spare time—created a library that is used in one out of every six React applications. For context, that means it gets downloaded 3.3 million times a week and has been downloaded 323 times since you started reading this.

Rethinking Text Resizing on Web https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/rethinking-text-resizing-on-web-1047b12d2881
In this blog post we explore our investigation into the importance of this guideline, how we analyzed our site issues, the technical benefits of using rem units, how we decided on an approach, the cross‑browser support challenges we encountered, and the benefits we saw in reducing the number of reported issues for “Resize Text.”

The Worst Website in the Entire World https://matduggan.com/the-worst-website-in-the-entire-world/
I’ve used lots of bad websites in my life. Hell, I’ve built a lot of bad websites too. But never before have I seen a site that so completely expresses pure user hatred like this one. Everything is designed to be as terrible as possible, with hostile UX at every corner.

Behind the scenes of Threads for web https://engineering.fb.com/2024/05/14/web/threads-for-web-behind-the-scenes/
Ally and Kevin share how their team moved swiftly by leveraging Meta’s shared infrastructure and the nimble engineering practices of their colleagues who built Threads for iOS and Android. They also discuss how they balanced the need to ship new features with the desire to craft exciting experiences for people on Threads.

Open source is neither a community nor a democracy https://world.hey.com/dhh/open-source-is-neither-a-community-nor-a-democracy-606abdab
I frequently argue that open source is best seen as a gift exchange, since that puts the emphasis on how to react as a receiver of gifts. But if you’re going to use another word as an alternative to “community,” I suggest you look at “ecosystem.” Ecosystems aren’t egalitarian. There are big fish and little fish. Sometimes the relationships are symbiotic, but they can also be parasitic.

Promptframes: Evolving the Wireframe for the Age of AI https://www.nngroup.com/articles/promptframes/
Promptframes complement traditional wireframes by integrating prompt writing and generative AI to increase content fidelity and accelerate the path to user testing. Never use lorem ipsum again.

Redefining Productivity https://medium.com/microsoft-design/redefining-productivity-06681d7d1dd0
Our design journey to redefine Outlook for Windows through craftsmanship, intelligence, and personalization.

Fresh Finds

• The Results of State of HTML 2023
• Introducing ReacType v21: Lowering the barrier to entry and raising the bar in React development
• Ink 5.0: React for interactive command‑line apps
• React Google Maps: About React components and hooks for the Google Maps JavaScript API
• Dynamic GitHub profile with Bun and TypeScript
• D3 in Depth
• Gio UI: Cross‑Platform GUI for Go

Products & Others

老道长的肺腑之言：大道就是太简单了，所以没有人相信！ [https://mp.weixin.qq.c

(content truncated)

---

Originally written by Ping Xia (平侠) and published in Chinese on Web技术周刊 (Web Tech Weekly). Translated and adapted for DriftSeas with permission.