Archive: May, 2020

127

sparkline
                    5th                     10th                     15th                     20th                     25th                     30th     
12am
4am    
8am                                    
12pm                    
4pm                                                              
8pm          

Sunday, May 31st, 2020

Playing The Castle Jig by Sean Ryan on mandolin:

https://thesession.org/tunes/273

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7duxgTQ2hmA

The Castle Jig on mandolin

Saturday, May 30th, 2020

Playing The Monaghan Twig (reel) on mandolin with @WordRidden on fiddle:

https://thesession.org/tunes/1070

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zfLrfxu0Ts

The Monaghan Twig (reel) on mandolin and fiddle

Programming CSS to perform Sass colour functions

I wrote recently about moving away from Sass to using native CSS features. I had this to say on the topic of mixins in Sass:

These can be very useful, but now there’s a lot that you can do just in CSS with calc(). The built-in darken() and lighten() mixins are handy though when it comes to colours.

I know we will be getting these in the future but we’re not there yet with CSS.

Anyway, I had all this in the back of my mind when I was reading Lea’s excellent feature in this month’s Increment: A user’s guide to CSS variables. She’s written about a really clever technique of combining custom properites with hsl() colour values for creating colour palettes. (See also: Una’s post on dynamic colour theming with pure CSS.)

As so often happens when I’m reading something written by Lea—or seeing her give a talk—light bulbs started popping over my head (my usual response to Lea’s knowledge bombs is either “I didn’t know you could do that!” or “I never thought of doing that!”).

I immediately set about implementing this technique over on The Session. The trick here is to use separate custom properties for the hue, saturation, and lightness parts of hsl() colour values. Then, when you want to lighten or darken the colour—say, on hover—you can update the lightness part.

I’ve made a Codepen to show what I’m doing.

Let’s say I’m styling a button element. I make custom propertes for hsl() values:

button {
  --button-colour-hue: 19;
  --button-colour-saturation: 82%;
  --button-colour-lightness: 38%;
  background-color: hsl(
    var(--button-colour-hue),
    var(--button-colour-saturation),
    var(--button-colour-lightness)
  );
}

For my buttons, I want the borders to be slightly darker than the background colour. When I was using Sass, I used the darken() function to this. Now I use calc(). Here’s how I make the borders 10% darker:

border-color: hsl(
  var(--button-colour-hue),
  var(--button-colour-saturation),
  calc(var(--button-colour-lightness) - 10%)
);

That calc() function is substracting a percentage from a percentage: 38% minus 10% in this case. The borders will have a lightness of 28%.

I make the bottom border even darker and the top border lighter to give a feeling of depth.

On The Session there’s a “cancel” button style that’s deep red.

Here’s how I set its colour:

.cancel {
  --button-colour-hue: 0;
  --button-colour-saturation: 100%;
  --button-colour-lightness: 40%;
}

That’s it. The existing button declarations take care of assigning the right shades for the border colours.

Here’s another example. Site admins see buttons for some actions only available to them. I want those buttons to have their own colour:

.admin {
  --button-colour-hue: 45;
  --button-colour-saturation: 100%;
  --button-colour-lightness: 40%;
}

You get the idea. It doesn’t matter how many differently-coloured buttons I create, the effect of darkening or lightening their borders is all taken care of.

So it turns out that the lighten() and darken() functions from Sass are available to us in CSS by using a combination of custom properties, hsl(), and calc().

I’m also using this combination to lighten or darken background and border colours on :hover. You can poke around the Codepen if you want to see that in action.

I love seeing the combinatorial power of these different bits of CSS coming together. It really is a remarkably powerful programming language.

Global CSS options with custom properties | @mdo

This is clever—using custom properties to enable if/else logic in CSS.

Friday, May 29th, 2020

Replying to a tweet from @csswizardry

This is how I described this situation recently: https://adactio.com/links/16817

Type Specimens

This is a lovely new project from Mark that gets very meta, cataloging specimens of type specimens:

This project will dig into specimens from these three perspectives: as artefacts made by and for font designers to evolve type culture; as tools for font users to make decisions about choosing and using type; and as effective marketing tools.

Reading in the dark

I keep coming back to this remarkable piece of writing by Cassie. Honest, resonant, and open, centred around a perfect analogy.

CUBE CSS - Piccalilli

I really, really like Andy’s approach here:

The focus of the methodology is utilising the power of CSS and the web platform as a whole, with some added controls and structures that help to keep things a bit more maintainable and predictable. The end-goal is shipping as little CSS as possible—leaning heavily into progressive enhancement and modern techniques.

If you use the cascade for everything, you’re going to run into trouble. But equally, micro-managing styles on every element will also get you into trouble. I think Andy’s found a really great sweet spot here that gets the balance just right.

CUBE CSS in essence, is a progressive enhancement approach, vs a fight against the grain of CSS or a pixel-pushing your project to within an inch of its life approach.

Yes! It feels very “webby” to me.

Increment: Frontend

This month’s issue of Increment is all about front-end development. There are feaures from Lea Verou, Chris Coyier, Chris Lilley, Safia Abdalla, and more.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Evaluating page experience for a better web

This is excellent news for sites that were strong-armed into creating AMP pages just to get into the Top Stories carousel:

As part of this update, we’ll also incorporate the page experience metrics into our ranking criteria for the Top Stories feature in Search on mobile, and remove the AMP requirement from Top Stories eligibility.

This update doesn’t arrive until next year, but the message is clear: fast websites will be rewarded in search. I’ll be glad to see an end to AMP’s blackmail tactics.

A Guide to the Responsive Images Syntax in HTML | CSS-Tricks

Chris has put together one of his indispensable deep dives, this time into responsive images. I can see myself referring back to this when I need to be reminded of the syntax of srcset and sizes.

Thursday, May 28th, 2020

Replying to a tweet from @tashmahal

I want to go to there.

Wednesday, May 27th, 2020

Playing Merrily Kissed The Quaker (slide) on mandolin:

https://thesession.org/tunes/70

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ5QH0uzSz4

Merrily Kissed The Quaker (slide) on mandolin

This was the second most exciting livestream of the day (we can’t really compete with crewed rocket launches):

https://twitter.com/clearleft/status/1265592025409368064

Tuesday, May 26th, 2020

Playing The Fisherman’s Island (reel) by Ed Reavey on mandolin:

https://thesession.org/tunes/181

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD6Nr_X5Jso

The Fisherman’s Island (reel) on mandolin

as days pass by — Browsers are not rendering engines

You see, diversity of rendering engines isn’t actually in itself the point. What’s really important is diversity of influence: who has the ability to make decisions which shape the web in particular ways, and do they make those decisions for good reasons or not so good?

Stuart responds to a post from Brian that was riffing off a post of mine from a while back. I like this kind of social network.

S01E04: Cassie Evans - Behind the Source

This is a lovely little interview with Cassie—it really is an honour and a privilege to work with her!

This Website Will Self-destruct

You can send me messages using the form below. If I go 24 hours without receiving a message, I’ll permanently self-destruct, and everything will be wiped from my database.

Reading Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener.

Buy this book

Replying to a tweet from @m_ott

Ich kenne die Regeln nicht, also ich weiß nicht ob ich das richtig mache, aber hier sind sechs Bücher die ich (ziemlich) neulich gelesen hab’ (die nicht auf mein Kindle oder aus der Bibliothek sind). https://adactio.com/notes/reading

Ich kenne die Regeln nicht, also ich weiß nicht ob ich das richtig mache, aber hier sind sechs Bücher die ich (ziemlich) neulich gelesen hab’ (die nicht auf mein Kindle oder aus der Bibliothek sind).

https://adactio.com/notes/reading

Today’s Javascript, from an outsider’s perspective | Lea Verou

This is a damning and all-too typical example of what it’s like for someone to trying to get to grips with the current state of the JavaScript ecosystem:

Note that John is a computer scientist that knows a fair bit about the Web: He had Node & npm installed, he knew what MIME types are, he could start a localhost when needed. What hope do actual novices have?

I think it’s even worse than that. Not only are potential new devs being put off ever getting started, I know plenty of devs with experience who have pushed out by the overwhelming and needless complexity of the modern web’s toolchain. It’s like a constant gaslighting where any expression of unease is summarily dismissed as being the whinings of “the old guard” who just won’t get with the programme.

John gives up. Concludes never to touch Node, npm, or ES6 modules with a barge pole.

The End.

(Just watch as Lea’s post gets written off as an edge case.)

What’s Happening? Or: How to name a disaster - Elvia Wilk - Bookforum Magazine

It went unnamed by Doris Lessing and Cormac McCarthy. William Gibson called it The Jackpot:

On the one hand, naming the crisis allows one to apprehend it, grasp it, fight back against it. On the other hand, no word can fully encompass it, and any term is necessarily a reduction—the essence of “it” or “change” is not any singular instance but rather their constancy.

Memoirs Of A Survivor, The Peripheral, Parable Of The Sower, New York 2140, The Road, Children Of Men, Station Eleven, Severance, The Rapture, Ridley Walker:

Fiction can portray ecologies, timescales, catastrophes, and forms of violence that may be otherwise invisible, or more to the point, unnameable. We will never grasp the pandemic in its entirety, just like we will never see the microbe responsible for it with the naked eye. But we can try to articulate how it has changed us—is changing us.

Responsive web design turns ten. — Ethan Marcotte

2010 was quite a year:

And exactly three weeks after Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers was first published, “Responsive Web Design” went live in A List Apart.

Nothing’s been quite the same since.

I remember being at that An Event Apart in Seattle where Ethan first unveiled the phrase and marvelling at how well everything just clicked into place, perfectly capturing the zeitgeist. I was in. 100%.

Monday, May 25th, 2020

Playing The Butterfly (slip jig) by Tommy Potts on bouzouki:

https://thesession.org/tunes/10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9f_FnQwqcs

The Butterfly (slig jig) on bouzouki

Sunday, May 24th, 2020

Playing The Floating Crowbar (reel) by Brendan McGlinchey on mandolin:

https://thesession.org/tunes/457

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOh_jjGLZUo

The Floating Crowbar (reel) on mandolin

Replying to a tweet from @sil

Oh yeah, good point—fixed!

Saturday, May 23rd, 2020

Playing The Mouse In The Mug (jig) by Tom McElvogue on mandolin:

https://thesession.org/tunes/362

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mSETsqVgc8

The Mouse In The Mug (jig) on mandolin

Strangest of All: Anthology of Astrobiological Science Fiction [PDF]

Eight sci-fi stories gathered together by the European Astrobiology Institute. This free book is also available as .mobi and .epub.

Integration

Back when I started staying at home under lockdown, Robin Sloan wrote a blog post called An integration loop. In it, he tells the story of The Disintegration Loops by William Basinski:

Monitoring a radio station in New York City, the composer William Basinski hears the melody, records it. He intends to use a fragment as a loop in an avant-garde music project. The tape goes into a box. It is the 1980s.

It is decades later: the summer of 2001. Digitizing a room full of forgotten material, Basinski finds this loop again. But the tape is old; as it moves through the player, it starts to come apart, the magnetic medium peeling off its plastic backing, more and more with each repetition. Enthralled, Basinski keeps recording as the melody disintegrates before his eyes, his ears.

Standing on his rooftop in Brooklyn, Basinski watches the World Trade Center collapse. It is September 11, 2001. Suddenly, the summer’s recordings have a meaning, a purpose. He titles them The Disintegration Loops and offers them as an elegy for the dead.

I hadn’t heard this before. Listening to it, I found it incredibly moving, haunting, and strangely cathartic.

Robin included a clip in his blog post of an ensemble of computer-generated sequences made from Basinki’s source material. He called it an integration loop, pt. 1.

He also published the sheet music for the looping musical phrase:

Sheet Music3

Anyone reading the blog post was encouraged to record that phrase on any instrument (or voice) and send it to Robin. I recorded the phrase on mandolin. Jessica recorded it on a muted fiddle.

Robin then assembled all the submissions into a seven minute piece called an integration loop, pt. 2. You can hear Jessica at 3:33. I’m at 4:33.

All the submissions and the final piece are released under a public domain license.

I very much relate to Robin’s interpration of this creation:

In my imagination, each contribution is a rung in a ladder out of the pit of confusion and loss, all of us both (a) carrying the melody forward and (b) being carried by it, up towards something new, something whole.

Why I hate the log graph, and you should too - Geek in Sydney

I must admit I’ve been wincing a little every time I see a graph with a logarithmic scale in a news article about COVID-19. It takes quite a bit of cognitive work to translate to a linear scale and get the real story.

Lightning-Fast Web Performance: an online lecture series from Scott Jehl

Scott is brilliant, therefore by the transitive property, his course on web performance must also be brilliant.

Friday, May 22nd, 2020

Replying to a tweet from @brad_frost

Anything by The Smiths.

Playing Jenny’s Welcome To Charlie (reel) on mandolin:

https://thesession.org/tunes/370

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In2uZkWcOZ4

Jenny’s Welcome To Charlie (reel) on mandolin

An Event Apart Human-Centered Design - Web Design & UX Conference

I’ll be speaking at this online version of An Event Apart on July 20th, giving a brand new talk called Design Principles For The Web—’twould be lovely to see you then!

Designing and developing on the web can feel like a never-ending crusade against the unknown. Design principles are one way of unifying your team to better fight this battle. But as well as the design principles specific to your product or service, there are core principles underpinning the very fabric of the World Wide Web itself. Together, we’ll dive into applying these design principles to build websites that are resilient, performant, accessible, and beautiful.

Thursday, May 21st, 2020

Replying to a tweet from @overflowhidden

Are you sure you’re making the browser window wider than 1200 pixels? (That’s when it kicks in on The Session and in your Codepen.) It’s working for me in Firefox 76.0.1.

Replying to a tweet from @overflowhidden

No, the CSS from by blog entry is applied to the :root element (and then everything cascades from there). In your example, the max-width: 70ch ensures that only the minimum size (100%) will ever be used.

Playing O’Sullivan’s March (jig) on mandolin:

https://thesession.org/tunes/2204

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Umv3eE8WzFA

O’Sullivan’s March (jig) on mandolin

Replying to a tweet from @overflowhidden

I keep meaning to file a Webkit bug report about this. Do you know if there’s a ticket already open?

Wednesday, May 20th, 2020

Replying to a tweet from @n8dunn

Replying to a tweet from @tkadlec

Such a great book!

Replying to a tweet from @AltinSelimi

Because I want to own my own content.

I allow Twitter, Medium, and Flickr to have copies but I want the orginals to be under a domain I control.

All of those other sites will disappear.

Playing The Dance Of The Honeybees (hornpipe) by Charlie Lennon on mandolin for #WorldBeeDay:

https://thesession.org/tunes/130

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfCyWSD0sH8

Dance Of The Honeybees (hornpipe) on mandolin

Replying to a tweet from @AltinSelimi

It’s the other way around, Altin. I’m posting on my website. What you read on Twitter is a copy (with a link back to the original).

Replying to a tweet from @dburka

After more than twenty years in the business, I have finally settled on the ideal font size.

It is this:

My current age, divided by two.

(It works at all stages of life.)

Tuesday, May 19th, 2020

Playing The Drunken Gauger (set dance) on mandolin:

https://thesession.org/tunes/2180

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOJK8Oa6srI

The Drunken Gauger (set dance) on mandolin

Five Key Milestones in the Life of a Design System - daverupert.com

Five moments in the lifecycle of a design system. They grow up so fast!

  1. Formation of the Design System Team
  2. First Page Shipped
  3. Consumable Outside the Main Product
  4. First Non-System Team Consumer
  5. First Breaking Change

Dave makes the observation that design systems are less like open source software and more like enterprise software—software you didn’t choose to use:

Often, in my experience, for an internal Design System to have widespread adoption it requires a literal executive mandate from the top floor of the building.

Also: apparently design systems have achieved personhood now and we’re capitalising them as proper names. First name Design, last name System.

“Please, call me Design. Mr. System was my father.”

Measuring Performance behind consent popups – Simon Hearne

  • Opted out experiences are ~35% faster
  • Opting in downloads 2.5MB of additional JavaScript
  • Opted in repeat views are twice as slow as opted out

Replying to a tweet from @JoshWComeau

It is supported in Safari (although I think I may have uncovered a bug in Safari with my particular use case).

Monday, May 18th, 2020

Playing Autumn Child (reel) by Brendan O’Regan on bouzouki:

https://thesession.org/tunes/1336

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-loGcaVP964

Autumn Child (reel) on bouzouki

Hard to break

I keep thinking about some feedback that Cassie received recently.

She had delivered the front-end code for a project at Clearleft, and—this being Cassie we’re talking about—the code was rock solid. The client’s Quality Assurance team came back with the verdict that it was “hard to break.”

Hard to break. I love that. That might be the best summation I’ve heard for describing resilience on the web.

If there’s a corollary to resilient web design, it would be brittle web design. In a piece completely unrelated to web development, Jamais Cascio describes brittle systems:

When something is brittle, it’s susceptible to sudden and catastrophic failure.

That sounds like an inarguably bad thing. So why would anyone end up building something in a brittle way? Jamais Cascio continues:

Things that are brittle look strong, may even be strong, until they hit a breaking point, then everything falls apart.

Ah, there’s the rub! It’s not that brittle sites don’t work. They work just fine …until they don’t.

Brittle systems are solid until they’re not. Brittleness is illusory strength. Things that are brittle are non-resilient, sometimes even anti-resilient — they can make resilience more difficult.

Kilian Valkhof makes the same point when it comes to front-end development. For many, accessibility is an unknown unknown:

When you start out it’s you, notepad and a browser against the world. You open up that notepad, and you type

<div onclick="alert('hello world');">Click me!</div>

You fire up your browser, you click your div and …it works! It just works! Awesome. You open up the devtools. No errors. Well done! Clearly you did a good job. On to the next thing.

At the surface level, there’s no discernable difference between a resilient solution and a brittle one:

For all sorts of reasons, both legitimate and, as always, weird browser legacy reasons, a clickable div will mostly work. Well enough to fool someone starting out anyway.

If everything works, how would they know it kinda doesn’t?

Killian goes on to suggest ways to try to make this kind of hidden brittleness more visible.

Furthermore we could envision a browser that is much stricter when developing.

This something I touched on when I was talking about web performance with Gerry on his podcast:

There’s a disconnect in the process we go through when we’re making something, and then how that thing is experienced when it’s actually on the web, which is dependent on network speeds and processing speeds and stuff.

I spend a lot of time wondering why so many websites are badly built. Sure, there’s a lot can be explained by misaligned priorities. And it could just be an expression of Sturgeon’s Law—90% of websites are crap because 90% of everything is crap. But I’ve also come to realise that even though resilience is the antithesis to brittleness, they both share something in common: they’re invisible.

We have a natural bias towards what’s visible. Being committed to making sure something is beautiful to behold is, in some ways, the easy path to travel. But being committed to making sure something is also hard to break? That takes real dedication.

Sunday, May 17th, 2020

Replying to a tweet from @flynnflynner

Thanks!

(It’s not a patch on The Housekeepers though—great album!)

Photograph

Do you have a favourite non-personal photograph?

By non-personal, I mean one that isn’t directly related to your life; photographs of family members, friends, travel (remember travel?).

Even discounting those photographs, there’s still a vast pool of candidates. There are all the amazing pictures taken by photojournalists like Lee Miller. There’s all the awe-inspiring wildlife photography out there. Then there are the kind of posters that end up on bedroom walls, like Robert Doisneau’s The Kiss.

One of my favourite photographs of all time has music as its subject matter. No, not Johnny Cash flipping the bird, although I believe this picture to be just as rock’n’roll.

In the foreground, Séamus Ennis sits with his pipes. In the background, Jean Ritchie is leaning intently over her recording equipment.

This is a photograph of Séamus Ennis and Jean Ritchie. It was probably taken around 1952 or 1953 by Ritchie’s husband, George Pickow, when Jean Ritchie and Alan Lomax were in Ireland to do field recordings.

I love everything about it.

Séamus Ennis looks genuinely larger than life (which, by all accounts, he was). And just look at the length of those fingers! Meanwhile Jean Ritchie is equally indominatable, just as much as part of the story as the musician she’s there to record.

Both of them have expressions that convey how intent they are on their machines—Ennis’s uilleann pipes and Ritchie’s tape recorder. It’s positively steampunk!

What a perfect snapshot of tradition and technology meeting slap bang in the middle of the twentieth century.

Maybe that’s why I love it so much. One single photograph is filled with so much that’s dear to me—traditional Irish music meets long-term archival preservation.

Why is this interesting? - The Transmission Edition

Looking at COVID-19 through the lens of pace layers.

…a citizen could actually play a part that was as important as a vaccine, but instead of preventing transmission of the virus into another cell at the ACE receptor level, it’s preventing transmission of the virus at the social network level. So we’re actually adopting a kind of behavioral vaccine policy, by voluntarily or otherwise self-isolating.

Write Libraries, Not Frameworks by Brandon Smith

This is a very clear description of the differences between libraries and frameworks, along with the strengths and weaknesses of both.

A library is a set of building blocks that may share a common theme or work well together, but are largely independent.

A framework is a context in which someone writes their own code.

I very much agree with the conclusion:

If your framework can be a library without losing much, it probably should be.

Saturday, May 16th, 2020

Picture 1 Picture 2

Steak night. 🥩

Friday, May 15th, 2020

Replying to a tweet from @stephenhay

Replying to a tweet from @jina

Ooh, the lace one looks great!

New PDF Preview, Better Web Publishing, Improved Editing - iA Writer: The Focused Writing App

I think this one single feature is going to get me to switch to iA Writer:

For starters, we added Micropub support. This means you can publish to Micro.blog and other IndieWeb tools.

Thursday, May 14th, 2020

Replying to a tweet from @ancoar

De nada!

Playing The Longford Collector (reel) on mandolin:

https://thesession.org/tunes/563

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqeDJzh3O6g

The Longford Collector (reel) on mandolin
Picture 1 Picture 2

Having a meeting with my @Clearleft colleagues, Pippa the goat, and Bianca the chicken (taking notes).

Replying to a tweet from @tomcoates

Wednesday, May 13th, 2020

Replying to a tweet from @simplebits

You’re doing it in puppet form, right?

I could really do with a few more communications from companies to help me figure out if these times are:

  1. certain, and
  2. precedented.

Still not sure.

Modern CSS Solutions

…for old CSS problems.

Very handy!

Why we at $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY

Ultimately, however, our decision to switch was driven by our difficulty in hiring new talent for $UNREMARKABLE_LANGUAGE, despite it being taught in dozens of universities across the United States. Our blog posts on $PRACTICAL_OPEN_SOURCE_FRAMEWORK seemed to get fewer upvotes when posted on Reddit as well, cementing our conviction that our technology stack was now legacy code.

This is all just mwah—chef’s kiss!—perfect:

Every metric that matters to us has increased substantially from the rewrite, and we even identified some that were no longer relevant to us, such as number of bugs, user frustration, and maintenance cost.

Why does writing matter in remote work? — Tim Casasola

Some good writing advice in here:

  • Spell out your acronyms.
  • Use active voice, not passive voice.
  • Fewer commas. More periods.

Reef

This micro libarary does DOM diffing in native JavaScript:

Reef is an anti-framework.

It does a lot less than the big guys like React and Vue. It doesn’t have a Virtual DOM. It doesn’t require you to learn a custom templating syntax. It doesn’t provide a bunch of custom methods.

Reef does just one thing: render UI.

Sass and clamp

CSS got some pretty nifty features recently. There’s the min() and max() functions. If you use them for, say, width you can use one rule where previously you would’ve needed to use two (a width declaration followed by either min-width or max-width). But they can also be applied to font-size! That’s very nifty—we’ve never had min-font-size or max-font-size properties.

There’s also the clamp() function. That allows you to set a minimum size, a default size, and a maximum size. Again, it can be used for lengths, like width, or for font-size.

Over on thesession.org, I’ve had some media queries in place for a while now that would increase the font-size for larger screens. It’s nothing crucial, just a nice-to-have so that on wide screens, the font is bumped up accordingly. I realised I could replace all those media queries with one clamp() statement, thanks to the vw (viewport width) unit:

font-size: clamp(1rem, 1.333vw, 1.5rem);

By default, the font-size is 1.333vw (1.333% of the viewport width), but it will never get smaller than 1rem and it will never get larger than 1.5rem.

That works, but there’s a bit of an issue with using raw vw units like that. If someone is on a wide screen and they try to adjust the font size, nothing will happen. The viewport width doesn’t change when you bump the font size up or down.

The solution is to mix in some kind of unit that does respond to the font size being bumped up or down (like, say, the rem unit). Handily, clamp() allows you to combine units, just like calc(). So I can do this:

font-size: clamp(1rem, 0.5rem + 0.666vw, 1.5rem);

The result is much the same as my previous rule, but now—thanks to the presence of that 0.5rem value—the font size responds to being adjusted by the user.

You could use a full 1rem in that default value:

font-size: clamp(1rem, 1rem + 0.333vw, 1.5rem);

…but if you do that, the minimum size (1rem) will never be reached—the default value will always be larger. So in effect it’s no different than saying:

font-size: min(1.rem + 0.333vw, 1.5rem);

I mentioned this to Chris just the other day.

Anyway, I got the result I wanted. I wanted the font size to stay at the browser default size (usually 16 pixels) until the screen was larger than around 1200 pixels. From there, the font size gets gradually bigger, until it hits one and a half times the browser default (which would be 24 pixels if the default size started at 16). I decided to apply it to the :root element (which is html) using percentages:

:root {
  font-size: clamp(100%, 50% + 0.666vw, 150%);
}

(My thinking goes like this: if we take a screen width of 1200 pixels, then 1vw would be 12 pixels: 1200 divided by 100. So for a font size of 16 pixels, that would be 1.333vw. But because I’m combining it with half of the default font size—50% of 16 pixels = 8 pixels—I need to cut the vw value in half as well: 50% of 1.333vw = 0.666vw.)

So I’ve got the CSS rule I want. I dropped it in to the top of my file and…

I got an error.

There was nothing wrong with my CSS. The problem was that I was dropping it into a Sass file (.scss).

Perhaps I am showing my age. Do people even use Sass any more? I hear that post-processors usurped Sass’s dominance (although no-one’s ever been able to explain to me why they’re different to pre-processers like Sass; they both process something you’ve written into something else). Or maybe everyone’s just writing their CSS in JS now. I hear that’s a thing.

The Session is a looooong-term project so I’m very hesitant to use any technology that won’t stand the test of time. When I added Sass into the mix, back in—I think—2012 or so, I wasn’t sure whether it was the right thing to do, from a long-term perspective. But it did offer some useful functionality so I went ahead and used it.

Now, eight years later, it was having a hard time dealing with the new clamp() function. Specifically, it didn’t like the values being calculated through the addition of multiple units. I think it was clashing with Sass’s in-built ability to add units together.

I started to ask myself whether I should still be using Sass. I looked at which features I was using…

Variables. Well, now we’ve got CSS custom properties, which are even more powerful than Sass variables because they can be updated in real time. Sass variables are like const. CSS custom properties are like let.

Mixins. These can be very useful, but now there’s a lot that you can do just in CSS with calc(). The built-in darken() and lighten() mixins are handy though when it comes to colours.

Nesting. I’ve never been a fan. I know it can make the source files look tidier but I find it can sometimes obfuscate what you’re final selectors are going to look like. So this wasn’t something I was using much any way.

Multiple files. Ah! This is the thing I would miss most. Having separate .scss files for separate interface elements is very handy!

But globbing a bunch of separate .scss files into one .css file isn’t really a Sass task. That’s what build tools are for. In fact, that’s what I was already doing with my JavaScript files; I write them as individual .js files that then get concatenated into one .js file using Grunt.

(Yes, this project uses Grunt. I told you I was showing my age. But, you know what? It works. Though seeing as I’m mostly using it for concatenation, I could probably replace it with a makefile. If I’m going to use old technology, I might as well go all the way.)

I swapped out Sass variables for CSS custom properties, mixins for calc(), and removed what little nesting I was doing. Then I stripped the Sass parts out of my Grunt file and replaced them with some concatenation and minification tasks. All of this makes no difference to the actual website, but it means I’ve got one less dependency …and I can use clamp()!

Remember a little while back when I was making a dark mode for my site? I made this observation:

Let’s just take a moment here to pause and reflect on the fact that we can now use CSS to create all sorts of effects that previously required a graphic design tool like Photoshop.

It feels like something similar has happened with tools like Sass. Sass was the hare. CSS is the tortoise. Sass blazed the trail, but now native CSS can achieve much the same result.

It’s like when we used to need something like jQuery to do DOM Scripting succinctly using CSS selectors. Then we got things like querySelector() in JavaScript so we no longer needed the trailblazer.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the goal of any good library should be to get so successful as to make itself redundant. That is, the ideas and functionality provided by the tool are so useful and widely adopted that the native technologies—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—take their cue from those tools.

You could argue that this is what happened with Flash. It certainly happened with jQuery and Sass. I’m pretty sure we’ll see the same cycle play out with frameworks like React.

Replying to a tweet from @andybudd

Roles. “Who’s had to make roles redundant recently.”

People are never redundant.

Tuesday, May 12th, 2020

as days pass by — Hammer and nails

We don’t give people a website any more: something that already works, just HTML and CSS and JavaScript ready to show them what they want. Instead, we give them the bits from which a website is made and then have them compile it.

Spot-on description of “modern” web development. When did this become tolerable, much less normal?

Web developers: maybe stop insisting that your users compile your apps for you? Or admit that you’ll put them through an experience that you certainly don’t tolerate on your own desktops, where you expect to download an app, not to be forced to compile it every time you run it?

The History of the Future

It me:

Although some communities have listed journalists as “essential workers,” no one claims that status for the keynote speaker. The “work” of being a keynote speaker feels even more ridiculous than usual these days.

Robin Rendle ・ Notes about product design

Some good thought morsels from Robin on product design:

Bad product design is when folks talk more about the UI than what the UI is built on top of.

There’s a lot of talk about how great design is invisible—mostly boring conversations with little substance—but! I think that’s true when it comes to product design.

Bad product design is when your interface looks like your org chart.

Playing The Killarney Boys Of Pleasure (reel) on bouzouki:

https://thesession.org/tunes/733

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMDK9q9wbHE

The Killarney Boys Of Pleasure (reel) on bouzouki

Monday, May 11th, 2020

Creating an Accessible Range Slider with CSS | a11y with Lindsey

If you want an accessible slider component, the trick isn’t to use a whole load of JavaScript. The trick is to use the native input type="range" and then figure out the CSS you need (which, alas, involves lots of vendor prefixes).

Second-guessing the modern web - macwright.org

I’m at the point where you look at where the field is and what the alternatives are – taking a second look at unloved, unpopular, uncool things like Django, Rails, Laravel – and think what the heck is happening. We’re layering optimizations upon optimizations in order to get the SPA-like pattern to fit every use case, and I’m not sure that it is, well, worth it.

Spot-on analysis of what React is and isn’t good for. And lest you think this is blasphemy, Dan Abramov agrees.

Scunthorpe Sans 🗯🚫 profanity-blocking font

Using ligatures to create a s*** font that f***ing censors bad language automatically.

Sunday, May 10th, 2020

Playing The Golden Keyboard (reel) by Martin Mulhaire on mandolin:

https://thesession.org/tunes/36

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXbhVcrvmaU

The Golden Keyboard (reel) on mandolin

Getting Started with the DOM

Here’s a short clear introduction to DOM scripting.

Replying to a tweet from @tomcoates

Which one is @LeahCulver’s house?

Saturday, May 9th, 2020

Picture 1 Picture 2 Picture 3 Picture 4

Very grateful to have a nice little back garden where I can eat lunch, especially in lovely weather like this.

I shaved off my beard, thereby officially marking the beginning of Summer.

Friday, May 8th, 2020

Replying to a tweet from @simplebits

Thanks for that, Dan—it was fun!

Needs more banjo though. 😉

Designing for Progressive Disclosure by Steven Hoober

Progressive disclosure interface patterns categorised and evaluated:

  • popups,
  • drawers,
  • mouseover popups (just say no!),
  • accordions,
  • tabs,
  • new pages,
  • scrolling,
  • scrolling sideways.

I really like the hypertext history invoked in this article.

The piece finishes with a great note on the MacNamara fallacy:

Everyone thinks metrics let us measure results. But, actually, they don’t. They measure only what they are measuring. Engagement, for example, is not something that can be measured, so we use an analogue for it. Time on page. Or clicks.

We often end up measuring what is quick, cheap, and easy to measure. Therefore, few organizations regularly conduct usability testing or customer-satisfaction surveys, but lots use analytics.

Even today, organizations often use clicks as a measure of engagement. So, all too often, they design user interfaces to generate clicks, so the system can measure them.

Employee-surveillance software is not welcome to integrate with Basecamp - Signal v. Noise

Look, employers are always free to – and should! – evaluate the work product produced by employees. But they don’t have to surveil someone’s every move or screenshot their computer every five minutes to do so. That’s monitoring the inputs. Monitor the outputs instead, and you’ll have a much healthier, saner relationship.

If you hire smart, capable people and trust them to do good work – surprise-surprise – people will return the sentiment deliver just that! The irony of setting up these invasive surveillance regimes is that they end up causing the motivation to goof off to beat the very systems that were setup to catch such behavior.

The Fonts in Popular Things Identified Vol. 1 · Typewolf

I’d watch this game show:

Welcome to the first installment of a new series on Typewolf, where I’ll be identifying the fonts used in popular things. The focus here is on anything you might encounter in contemporary visual culture—movie posters, TV shows, book covers, etc.

SofaConf 2020 - a technical write-up | Trys Mudford

Trys describes the backend architecture of the excellent Sofa Conf website. In short, it’s a Jamstack dream: all of the convenience and familiarity of using a database-driven CMS (Craft), combined with all the speed and resilience of using a static site generator (Eleventy).

I love the fact that anyone on the Clearleft events team can push to production with a Slack message.

I also love that the site is Lighthousetastically fast.

Home | SofaConf 2020

You don’t want to miss this! A five-day online conference with a different theme each day:

  1. Monday: Product Strategy
  2. Tuesday: Research
  3. Wednesday: Service Design
  4. Thursday: Content Strategy
  5. Friday: Interaction Design

Speakers include Amy Hupe, Kelly Goto, Kristina Halvorson, Lou Downe, Leisa Reichelt and many more still to be announce, all for ludicrously cheap ticket prices.

I know it sounds like I’m blowing my own trumpet because this is a Clearleft event, but I had nothing to do with it. The trumpets of my talented co-workers should be blasting in harmonious chorus.

(It’s a truly lovely website too!)

Solar System and Beyond Poster Set | NASA Solar System Exploration

Beautiful high resolution posters of our planetary neighbourhood.

Thursday, May 7th, 2020

Wednesday, May 6th, 2020

My internet connection has been up and down like colourful simile.

Playing No Matter The Wreckage (hornpipe) by @RowanFolk on mandolin:

https://thesession.org/tunes/16793

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MxuYJsancE

No Matter The Wreckage (hornpipe) on mandolin

Replying to a tweet from @sarah_edo

❤️

Tuesday, May 5th, 2020

Times New Arial

Ever wanted to set some text in 70% Times New Roman and 30% Arial? Me neither. But now, thanks to variable fonts, you can!

Replying to a tweet from @chriscoyier

Oh, wow! Just today I was trying to figure out a way to do something like this—I never thought of styling a br though!

Playing The Rambling Pitchfork (jig) on mandolin:

https://thesession.org/tunes/89

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGjrWM8_97U

The Rambling Pitchfork (jig) on mandolin

Is it time for a Web Performance rebrand? – Simon Hearne

I think Simon is onto something here. While the word “performance” means something amongst devs, it’s too vague to be useful when communicating with other disciplines. I like the idea of using the more descriptive “page speed” or “site speed” in those situations.

Web Performance and Web Performance Optimization are still valid and descriptive terms for our industry, but we might benefit from a change to our language when working with others. The language we use could be critical to the success of making the web a faster and more accessible place.

Monday, May 4th, 2020

A decade apart

Today marks ten years since the publication of HTML5 For Web Designers, the very first book from A Book Apart.

I’m so proud of that book, and so honoured that I was the first author published by the web’s finest purveyors of brief books. I mean, just look at the calibre of their output since my stumbling start!

Here’s what I wrote ten years ago.

Here’s what Jason wrote ten years ago.

Here’s what Mandy wrote ten years ago.

Here’s what Jeffrey wrote ten years ago.

They started something magnificent. Ten years on, with Katel at the helm, it’s going from strength to strength.

Happy birthday, little book! And happy birthday, A Book Apart! Here’s to another decade!

A Book Apart authors, 1-6

Playing Lady Anne Montgomery (reel) on mandolin:

https://thesession.org/tunes/59

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrmWiG6TGgc

Lady Anne Montgomery (reel) on mandolin

window.location Cheatsheet - DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻

Everything you ever wanted to know about window.location in JavaScript, clearly explained.

CSS Tips for New Devs | Amber’s Website

Never mind Kevin Kelly’s 68 bits of advice, here’s Amber’s 24 nuggets of CSS lessons for people new to web development.

FEMME TYPE – Celebrating Women in the Type Industry

A treasure trove of case studies and interviews.

It’s OK.

This is for everyone at Clearleft, but I’m sharing it here for you too.

ongoing by Tim Bray · Bye, Amazon

May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.

Fair play, Tim Bray!

The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people; here are some of their names: Courtney Bowden, Gerald Bryson, Maren Costa, Emily Cunningham, Bashir Mohammed, and Chris Smalls.

I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?

Replying to a tweet from @SoSplush

  1. HTML
  2. CSS
  3. JavaScript
Hanging out with my @Clearleft comrades on a Monday morning.

Hanging out with my @Clearleft comrades on a Monday morning.

Sunday, May 3rd, 2020

Playing Hardiman The Fiddler (slip jig) on bouzouki:

https://thesession.org/tunes/48

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9cBPqn5xtA

Hardiman The Fiddler (slip jig) on bouzouki

Television

What a time, as they say, to be alive. The Situation is awful in so many ways, and yet…

In this crisis, there is also opportunity—the opportunity to sit on the sofa, binge-watch television and feel good about it! I mean just think about it: when in the history of our culture has there been a time when the choice between running a marathon or going to the gym or staying at home watching TV can be resolved with such certitude? Stay at home and watch TV, of course! It’s the only morally correct choice. Protect the NHS! Save lives! Gorge on box sets!

What you end up watching doesn’t really matter. If you want to binge on Love Island or Tiger King, go for it. At this moment in time, it’s all good.

I had an ancient Apple TV device that served me well for years. At the beginning of The Situation, I decided to finally upgrade to a more modern model so I could get to more streaming services. Once I figured out how to turn off the unbelievably annoying sounds and animations, I got it set up with some subscription services. Should it be of any interest, here’s what I’ve been watching in order to save lives and protect the NHS…

Watchmen, Now TV

Superb! I suspect you’ll want to have read Alan Moore’s classic book to fully enjoy this series set in the parallel present extrapolated from that book’s ‘80s setting. Like that book, what appears to be a story about masked vigilantes is packing much, much deeper themes. I have a hunch that if Moore himself were forced to watch it, he might even offer some grudging approval.

Devs, BBC iPlayer

Ex Machina meets The Social Network in Alex Garland’s first TV show. I was reading David Deutsch while I was watching this, which felt like getting an extra bit of world-building. I think this might have worked better in the snappier context of a film, but it makes for an enjoyable saunter as a series. Style outweighs substance, but the style is strong enough to carry it.

Breeders, Now TV

Genuinely hilarious. Watch the first episode and see how many times you laugh guiltily. It gets a bit more sentimental later on, but there’s a wonderfully mean streak throughout that keeps the laughter flowing. If you are a parent of small children though, this may feel like being in a rock band watching Spinal Tap—all too real.

The Mandalorian, Disney Plus

I cannot objectively evaluate this. I absolutely love it, but that’s no surprise. It’s like it was made for me. The execution of each episode is, in my biased opinion, terrific. Read what Nat wrote about it. I agree with everything they said.

Westworld, Now TV

The third series is wrapping up soon. I’m enjoying this series immensely. It’s got a real cyberpunk sensibility; not in a stupid Altered Carbon kind of way, but in a real Gibsonian bit of noirish fun. Like Devs, it’s not as clever as it thinks it is, but it’s throroughly entertaining all the same.

Tales From The Loop, Amazon Prime

The languid pacing means this isn’t exactly a series of cliffhangers, but it will reward you for staying with it. It avoids the negativity of Black Mirror and instead maintains a more neutral viewpoint on the unexpected effects of technology. At its best, it feels like an updated take on Ray Bradbury’s stories of smalltown America (like the episode directed by Jodie Foster featuring a cameo by Shane Carruth—the time traveller’s time traveller).

Years and Years, BBC iPlayer

A near-future family and political drama by Russell T Davies. Subtlety has never been his strong point and the polemic aspects of this are far too on-the-nose to take seriously. Characters will monologue for minutes while practically waving a finger at you out of the television set. But it’s worth watching for Emma Thompson’s performance as an all-too believable populist politician. Apart from a feelgood final episode, it’s not light viewing so maybe not the best quarantine fodder.

For All Mankind, Apple TV+

An ahistorical space race that’s a lot like Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut books. The initial premise—that Alexei Leonov beats Neil Armstrong to a moon landing—is interesting enough, but it really picks up from episode three. Alas, the baton isn’t really kept up for the whole series; it reverts to a more standard kind of drama from about halfway through. Still worth seeing though. It’s probably the best show on Apple TV+, but that says more about the paucity of the selection on there than it does about the quality of this series.

Avenue Five, Now TV

When it’s good, this space-based comedy is chucklesome but it kind of feels like Armando Iannucci lite.

Picard, Amazon Prime

It’s fine. Michael Chabon takes the world of Star Trek in some interesting directions, but it never feels like it’s allowed to veer too far away from the established order.

The Outsider, Now TV

A tense and creepy Stephen King adaption. I enjoyed the mystery of the first few episodes more than the later ones. Once the supernatural rules are established, it’s not quite as interesting. There are some good performances here, but the series gives off a vibe of believing it’s more important than it really is.

Better Call Saul, Netflix

The latest series (four? I’ve lost count) just wrapped up. It’s all good stuff, even knowing how some of the pieces need to slot into place for Breaking Bad.

Normal People, BBC iPlayer

I heard this was good so I went to the BBC iPlayer app and hit play. “Pretty good stuff”, I thought after watching that episode. Then I noticed that it said Episode Twelve. I had watched the final episode first. Doh! But, y’know, watching from the start, the foreknowledge of how things turn out isn’t detracting from the pleasure at all. In fact, I think you could probably watch the whole series completely out of order. It’s more of a tone poem than a plot-driven series. The characters themselves matter more than what happens to them.

Hunters, Amazon Prime

A silly 70s-set jewsploitation series with Al Pacino. The enjoyment comes from the wish fulfillment of killing nazis, which would be fine except for the way that the holocaust is used for character development. The comic-book tone of the show clashes very uncomfortably with that subject matter. The Shoah is not a plot device. This series feels like what we would get if Tarentino made television (and not in a good way).

The Coronavirus and Our Future | The New Yorker

Science-fiction writers don’t know anything more about the future than anyone else. Human history is too unpredictable; from this moment, we could descend into a mass-extinction event or rise into an age of general prosperity. Still, if you read science fiction, you may be a little less surprised by whatever does happen. Often, science fiction traces the ramifications of a single postulated change; readers co-create, judging the writers’ plausibility and ingenuity, interrogating their theories of history. Doing this repeatedly is a kind of training. It can help you feel more oriented in the history we’re making now.

Kim Stanley Robinson knows the score:

Margaret Thatcher said that “there is no such thing as society,” and Ronald Reagan said that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” These stupid slogans marked the turn away from the postwar period of reconstruction and underpin much of the bullshit of the past forty years.

Fictional Band Trivia | Rob Weychert

Okay, so I didn’t get many of the answers, but nonetheless these are excellent questions!

(Ah, how I long for the day when we can once more engage in quizzo and picklebacks at National Mechanics.)

Saturday, May 2nd, 2020

Playing Doctor Gilbert’s (reel) on mandolin:

https://thesession.org/tunes/129

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXGM4rm5Kh0

Doctor Gilbert’s (reel) on mandolin

Friday, May 1st, 2020

Replying to a tweet from @agringaus

Thank you so much, Alla!

The beauty of progressive enhancement - Manuel Matuzović

Progressive Enhancement allows us to use the latest and greatest features HTML, CSS and JavaScript offer us, by providing a basic, but robust foundation for all.

Some great practical examples of progressive enhancement on one website:

  • using grid layout in CSS,
  • using type="module" to enhance a form with JavaScript,
  • using the picture element to provide webp images in HTML.

All of those enhancements work great in modern browsers, but the underlying functionality is still available to a browser like Opera Mini on a feature phone.

Front-end Bookmarks

A collection of articles and talks about HTML, CSS, and JS, grouped by elements, attributes, properties, selectors, methods, and expressions.

Mando | Luke Dorny

  1. Which jig will be next?
  2. What instrument?
  3. What shirt will he wear next?
  4. Will a shirt make a repeat appearance?
  5. Will he shave his wiseman beard?
  6. Possibly a haircut or trim?