#179 – The Lean Web

Hello everyone!

Welcome to issue #179, I hope you’ve all had a good few weeks.

A week or so ago I read The Lean Web, a short eBook from Chris Ferdinandi and found myself nodding in agreement with everything Chris writes.

The book explores a new set of best practices—Lean Web Principles—that we can use to build a simpler, faster world-wide web.

To be honest, I’ve been advocating this shift for a while now. The web has become “a bloated, over-engineered mess”, as Chris rightly puts it. And, from what I’m reading and talking about with others, it seems like I’m not the only one attempting to get back to basics.

Often ‘leaner’ means easier, cheaper and greener (broadly speaking, a leaner website equates to less page weight, which results in fewer CO2 emissions).

As we continue to learn more about the impact the web has on the planet, it seems this shift is happening just at the right time, and that lean web principles might well be the answer to the mess we’ve created.

With that, let’s kick things off with a quote from Chris.

Quotes worth thinking about #

“Old techniques don’t become invalid just because new ones come out. Often, the older approaches are simpler and more reliable than the new ones.” Chris Ferdinandi in The Lean Web.

“The great irony in identifying your focus is (in my experience) only achieved by widening it first.” Jack butcher in The Leveraged Creator.

“No one can compete with you by being yourself. If there’s a way to take pieces of you and put that into your product, service or marketing, then that’s going to add value that cannot be replicated anywhere.” James Traf in Building Without Permission.

HTML & CSS #

Let’s talk about Native HTML Tabs. Dave Rupert gives an update on where the Open UI group is at with their native HTML tabs proposal.

It’s time to take The State of CSS Survey so we can all figure out what’s been going on in the world of CSS and work out where it’s heading.

Improving CSS Architecture with Cascade Layers, Container Queries, Scope. Miriam Suzanne reveals some of the upcoming features of CSS.

Website sustainability #

COP26.org: A quick sustainability check. Ahead of the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference, Fershad Irani audits the homepage of the conference website to find out how much CO2e it currently produces, and what can be done to reduce it’s impact.

Web Performance #

Web Performance Metrics Cheatsheet. Ire Aderinokun has put together a fantastic cheatsheet which gathers all the metrics used to measure performance, including what a good score is to aim for, and whether they can be measure in the lab or field.

My Challenge to the Web Performance Community. Philip Walton explains why you should favour Real user monitoring (RUM) over relying solely on synthetic or lab-based tools like Lighthouse or WebPageTest for genuine and precise assessments of a site’s actual, real-world performance.

Automating email newsletters #

Save yourself a bunch of time and effort and learn how to Automate your newsletter with RSS and some basic IndieWeb principles. A look at the workflow I use for this very newsletter.

Sci-fi typography #

MD Nichrome: on Spacing and Sci-Fi. Rutherford Craze discusses his influences and gives a really interesting account of the process of designing MD Nichrome.

Thanks for reading #

As always thanks for tuning in for my monthly newsletter.

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It would be great to have you onboard.

Until the next one!


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