Matt E. Patterson writing for A List Apart:

The dual approach of marrying a Single Page App with an API service has left many dev teams mired in endless JSON wrangling and state discrepancy bugs across two layers. This costs dev time, slows release cycles, and saps the bandwidth for innovation.

What’s old is new again (with a twist):

a new WebSockets-driven approach is catching web developers’ attention. One that reaffirms the promises of classic server-rendered frameworks: fast prototyping, server-side state management, solid rendering performance, rapid feature development, and straightforward SEO. One that enables multi-user collaboration and reactive, responsive designs without building two separate apps. The end result is a single-repo application that feels to users just as responsive as a client-side all-JavaScript affair, but with straightforward templating and far fewer loading spinners, and no state misalignments, since state only lives in one place.

I won’t spoil the ending where Matt places his bet on the best toolkit to accomplish this, but let’s just say you’ve probably heard of it. Whoops!

This pretty much sums up the point Jeremy is trying to get across with this post on A List Apart and the future parts to this story of “Responsible JavaScript.”

I’m not here to kill JavaScript — Make no mistake, I have no ill will toward JavaScript. It’s given me a career and—if I’m being honest with myself—a source of enjoyment for over a decade. Like any long-term relationship, I learn more about it the more time I spend with it. It’s a mature, feature-rich language that only gets more capable and elegant with every passing year.

Yet, there are times when I feel like JavaScript and I are at odds. I am critical of JavaScript. Or maybe more accurately, I’m critical of how we’ve developed a tendency to view it as a first resort to building for the web…

Over 1 million Webmentions will have been sent across the internet since the specification was made a full Recommendation by the W3C—the standards body that guides the direction of the web—in early January 2017.

That’s amazing, because I’ve never even heard of a Webmention, let alone seen one sent. What are Webmentions and why should we care?

Webmention is a (now) standardized protocol that enables one website address (URL) to notify another website address that the former contains a reference to the latter. It also allows the latter to verify the authenticity of the reference and include its own corresponding reference in a reciprocal way.

So it’s basically pingbacks, only with @ symbols?

A Webmention is simply an @mention that works from one website to another!

So it’s basically pingbacks, only with @ symbols… Still, I believe taking platform-specific features and making them broadly available across the web is a Good Thing, so I’m all for Webmentions and efforts like it.

Click through to learn more about use cases, how to implement them on your site, and which platforms have them baked in.

Jeremy Keith in an excerpt from his new book Going Offline on A List Apart:

The internet is a network of networks, all of them agreeing to use the same protocols to shuttle packets of data around. Those packets are transmitted down fiber-optic cables across the ocean floor, bounced around with Wi-Fi or radio signals, or beamed from satellites in freakin’ space.

As long as these networks are working, the web is working. But sometimes networks go bad…

When the network fails, the web fails. That’s just the way it is, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Until now.

I’m really excited to see Jeremy Keith write a whole book on service workers. I’ve dabbled a bit here and there, but now that support for them continues to grow, I’m excited to dive in.