Links

Who has the fastest website in F1? - JakeArchibald.com

I think I physically winced on more than one occassion as I read through Jake’s report here.

He makes an interesting observation at the end:

However, none of the teams used any of the big modern frameworks. They’re mostly Wordpress & Drupal, with a lot of jQuery. It makes me feel like I’ve been in a bubble in terms of the technologies that make up the bulk of the web.

Yes! This! Contrary to what you might think reading through the latest and greatest tips and tricks from the front-end community, the vast majority of sites out there on the web are not being built with React, Vue, webpack or any other “modern” tools.

NASA’s Visual Universe

An interesting way of navigating through a massive amount of archival imagery from NASA.

Gutenberg and the Internet

Steven Pemberton’s presentation on the printing press, the internet, Moore’s Law, and exponential growth.

All you need to know about hyphenation in CSS | Clagnut by Richard Rutter

Everything you need to know about hyphenation on the web today, from Rich’s galaxy brain.

Hyphenation is a perfect example of progressive enhancement, so you can start applying the above now if you think your readers will benefit from it – support among browsers will only increase.

Benjamin Parry Offline Homebrewing

Two of my favourite things: indie web and service workers.

This makes me so happy. I remember saying when my book came out, that the best feedback I could possibly get would be readers making their websites work offline. The same can be said for the talk of the book.

I Used The Web For A Day On Internet Explorer 8 — Smashing Magazine

A fascinating look at the web today with IE8. And it’s worth remembering who might be experiencing the web like this:

Whoever they are, you can bet they’re not using an old browser just to annoy you. Nobody deliberately chooses a worse browsing experience.

The article also outlines two possible coping strategies:

1. Polyfilling Strive for feature parity for all by filling in the missing browser functionality.
2. Progressive Enhancement Start from a core experience, then use feature detection to layer on functionality.

Take a wild guess as to which strategy I support.

There’s a bigger point made at the end of all this:

IE8 is today’s scapegoat. Tomorrow it’ll be IE9, next year it’ll be Safari, a year later it might be Chrome. You can swap IE8 out for ‘old browser of choice’. The point is, there will always be some divide between what browsers developers build for, and what browsers people are using. We should stop scoffing at that and start investing in robust, inclusive engineering solutions. The side effects of these strategies tend to pay dividends in terms of accessibility, performance and network resilience, so there’s a bigger picture at play here.

Competing by mimicking - Andy Bell

In my mind, the only way to “compete” with native apps is to do better than native apps—and with the web platform consistently improving and enabling us to produce app-like experiences, with Service Workers, ES6+ JavaScript, modern CSS and Web Components: we are very much on the path to do better than native apps.

Apollo Presskit Directory

Ah, what a wonderful treasure trove this is! PDF scans of Apollo era press kits from a range of American companies.

Categories include:

• Official NASA
• Earth
• Launch
• Lunar Module
• Moon
• Astronauts
• Reveal

There’s something so fascinating about the mundane details of Isolation/Quarantine Foods for Apollo 11 Astronauts from Stouffer’s.

Very Dictionary. Because ‘very’ makes your writing stale.

Improve your word power:

Using ‘very’ + adjective makes your writing stale. This dictionary finds you a less dull, alternative word. It’ll help make your writing more convincing and engaging.

switching.social – Ethical alternatives to popular sites and apps

For full hipster points, make sure you’re using these services, and then casually drop them into conversation by saying “Yeah, it’s a pretty obscure service; you probably haven’t heard of it…”

Killed by Google - The Google Graveyard & Cemetery

147 dead properties and counting.

Firefox Send

This’ll be handy the next time I want to send someone a file: drop it in here, and then paste the link into a DM/chat.

The Lean Web video from Boston CSS | Go Make Things

A good talk from from Chris Ferdinandi, who says:

One of the central themes of my talk on The Lean Web is that we as developers repeatedly take all of the great things the web and browsers give us out-of-the-box, break them, and then re-implement them poorly with JavaScript.

Brendan Dawes - The Art of Cybersecurity

Some lovely data visualisation by Brendan:

The work features three main components — the threats, represented by black obelisk style objects, the system which detects and deals with these threats, represented by an organic mesh like structure, and finally the creativity that is allowed to flow because the threats have been neutralised.

Hello, Goodbye - Browser Extension

A handy browser extension for Chrome and Firefox:

“Hello, Goodbye” blocks every chat or helpdesk pop up in your browser.

HTML periodical table (built with CSS grid)

This is a nifty visualisation by Hui Jing. It’s really handy to have elements categorised like this:

• Root elements
• Scripting
• Interactive elements
• Document metadata
• Edits
• Tabular data
• Grouping content
• Embedded content
• Forms
• Sections
• Text-level semantics

BEM: 4 Hang-Ups & How It Will Help Your CSS Organization

A few common gotchas when using BEM, and how to deal with them.

Making Sense of Chrome Lite Pages - TimKadlec.com

Tim takes a closer look at this Google Lite thing.

How the Internet Travels Across Oceans - The New York Times

CABLES!

if statements and for loops in CSS - QuirksBlog

Personally, I find ppk’s comparison here to be spot on. I think that CSS can be explained in terms of programming concepts like if statements and for loops, if you squint at it just right.

This is something I’ve written about before.