[HN Gopher] The Washington Post's open-source design system
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       The Washington Post's open-source design system
        
       Author : gaws
       Score  : 85 points
       Date   : 2022-05-11 18:41 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (build.washingtonpost.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (build.washingtonpost.com)
        
       | robertlagrant wrote:
       | > while maintaining visual consistency at scale
       | 
       | What does at scale mean here?
        
         | _fat_santa wrote:
         | I read it as: "We have a massive website and this design will
         | help us bring consistency to all pages". I've worked as a web
         | dev on some massive sites and almost all suffer from design
         | fragmentation. It's very hard to make every page look
         | consistent unless you're really on the ball with a framework
         | like this.
        
         | jasfi wrote:
         | Lots of sections with lots of pages, I would think. But then
         | that's dynamically generated, of course. Maybe lots of
         | components too?
        
           | capableweb wrote:
           | Also across the organization. While publicly they are famous
           | for running a news site, they surely have more websites, both
           | public and internal. Design system would help them having
           | consistent styling and design across all of those properties.
        
             | mesofile wrote:
             | Also across devices, was my first thought; and across
             | mediums - all media outlets have to publish to Twitter,
             | Facebook, Google and Apple News etc these days
        
         | Frost1x wrote:
         | Looks like loose language to fit some buzzwords in to me, but
         | I'll give them the benefit of doubt.
         | 
         | I'm guessing (hoping) it means either that by consistently
         | using their design system, you'll see consistent results no
         | matter the environment (browser, platform, etc.).
         | 
         | Another interpretation could be that regardless of the aspect
         | ratio viewed, resolution, etc., content will always render in a
         | relatively consistent fashion regardless of if it's a phone or
         | billboard, so everything is vector based with no rasterization
         | or discrete level of details baked into content. And negative
         | space and what not are all sort of relatively baked in to give
         | the same style.
         | 
         | It could also mean that since it's ran client side independent
         | of other clients, you can inherently scale up indefinitely so
         | long as your backend infrastructure can deliver the base
         | content. This of course has been the case in pretty much
         | anything delivered over the internet since its inception
         | though. Of course there was the trend for several years of
         | server side content rendering to enable dynamic content (e.g.
         | the rise of SSI, CGI, PHP, etc.) where scaling was/is more of a
         | consideration but in the current trends of front ends that
         | paradigm seems to be mostly dead and it's just assumed your
         | front-end design will "scale" easily...
         | 
         | It's pretty easy to abuse generalized tech terms that are
         | heavily overloaded and not lie while creating all sorts of
         | implications to the reader should they decide to glance over
         | it.
        
       | punyearthling wrote:
       | I work on design systems and a few things jump out at me:
       | 
       | - Shocked there's no line-length restriction on long-form
       | content, especially for a newspaper
       | 
       | - I like the inclusion of bundle size info (even if it's
       | currently broken) on each component - more design systems should
       | be aware of their impact on bundle size
       | 
       | - I wish their support info were more obvious - it's currently
       | buried under Resources. Also wish their GH were visible.
       | 
       | - It's not immediately apparent how to use their DS from a
       | technical standpoint. I'm assuming it's React?
        
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       (page generated 2022-05-13 23:03 UTC)