Posted on
by Lee Moody.
Tagged with Newsletter
TL;DR: This issue features new introduction to Origami sessions, an o-tracking major, and a proposal to drop Bower support.
Some of the bigger Origami news from the last month:
It’s been a while and we’ve had a few requests, so we’ve arranged new Introduction To Origami sessions for November ✨
We’re doing things a little differently this time. There are two sessions. The first presentation is useful for anyone who works in Product and Technology – we cover things at a high level rather than diving into too many technical details, including:
The second session is a workshop which looks at components in more detail. We’ll briefly cover how components are built and move on to learn how to include them in projects. Including a practical element where you’ll have the opportunity to put together an FT page with Origami components.
We’ll be running the sessions Tuesday, 3rd November from 10:00am (London time). If you would like to be added to the invite please let us know in the #origami-support Slack channel or with an email to origami.support@ft.com. 😊
You may know from our previous issues that the Origami team had taken on stewardship of o-tracking
(there is a technology proposal to find new owners). Well, we’ve just released a new major version (v3) with some big improvements:
See the o-tracking migration guide for more details.
We have a new proposal this month to drop the Bower package manager from Origami components, for both developing and using components, in favour of the npm package manager.
Why now? Bower allows us to maintain a flat dependency tree for front-end Origami components. What that means is Bower ensures we are only ever including one version of a component. That is important as multiple versions of the same component, say two versions of a button, could conflict with each other causing unpredictable visuals or errors; it would also mean forcing a users web browser to download and render multiple versions, slowing down our websites. But npm version 7, released this month, supports the automatic install of peer dependencies. It will finally allow us to maintain a flat Origami dependency tree without interfering with back-end dependencies which don’t have the same requirement.
By switching we will align with the broader tech ecosystem. It will be easier to setup new projects since developer tools tend to support npm dependencies without extra work; there will be less Bower specific tooling for us to maintain; and most importantly there will be a reduced learning curve for working on Origami components, and a reduced learning curve for setting up new FT projects with Origami components.
There is a lot more detail in the proposal. Please read and let us know what you think. 😊
The special thanks this week goes to no one! At least, no one at the Financial Times. Origami projects are open source and this month we’ve had some excellent external contributions to the Polyfill Service. So thanks, open source contributors 😁
A digest of other things that have happened this month:
imageset.json
specification for image sets was accepted.imagesset.json
manifest file; adds a link to Origami proposals in the footer; and other documentation improvements.pending
label to next
, if we add this to your issue it means we are planning to discuss it in our next planning session.Intl
polyfill updates; an updated smooth scroll polyfill; a new String.prototype.replaceAll
polyfill; and a new DOMTokenList.prototype.replace
polyfill.oEditorialLayoutBodyWithoutTypography
to layout body copy in relation to headers and other article content without outputting typographic styles such as font size, family, etc.brand-ft-pink
colour. For almost every digital usecase pink
should be used. However brand-ft-pink
may be useful in limited situations such as adding a fallback colour as the FT logo loads.