Links

Security Checklist

Exactly what it sounds like: a checklist of measures you can take to protect yourself.

Most of these require a certain level of tech-savviness, which is a real shame. On the other hand, some of them are entirely about awareness.

Oh Hello Ana - Colours of 2018

I love this idea of comparing human colour choices to those of a computer:

I decided to do two things: the top three most used colours of the photo decided by “a computer” and my hand picked choices. This method ended up revealing a couple of things about me.

I also love that this was the biggest obstacle to finding representative imagery:

I wanted this to be an exciting task but instead I only found repeated photos of my cat.

The World’s Writing Systems

What a lovely timeline of civilisation. This site makes for a nice companion piece to that database of dimensioned drawings—they’re both delightful to explore.

Use the :lang pseudo-class over the lang attribute selector for language-specific styles

This is a great explanation of the difference between the [lang] and :lang CSS selectors. I wouldn’t even have thought’ve the differences so this is really valuable to me.

Signal v Noise exits Medium – Signal v. Noise

Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization.

JournalBook

A small but perfectly formed progressive web app. It’s a private, offline-first personal journal with no log-in and no server-stored data. You can read about the tech stack behind it:

Your notes are only stored on your device — they’re never sent to a server. You don’t even need to sign-in to use it! It works offline, so you can reflect upon your day on the slow train journey home.

djinn and juice : The Best Debugging Story I’ve Ever Heard

Cassie and I were swapping debugging stories. I shared the case of the 500 mile email with her. She shared this with me.

Understanding the Albatross - Snook.ca

Jonathan shares his notes on that great flexbox container queries article from Heydon that I linked to.

Dimensions.Guide | Database of Dimensioned Drawings

There’s something quite lovely about this site, both in its purpose and execution.

Dimensions.Guide is a comprehensive reference database of dimensioned drawings documenting the standard measurements and sizes of the everyday objects and spaces that make up our world. Created as a universal resource to better communicate the basic properties, systems, and logics of our built environment, Dimensions.Guide is a free platform for increasing public and professional knowledge of life and design.

The Flexbox Holy Albatross | HeydonWorks

Er …I think Heydon might’ve cracked it. And by “it”, I mean container queries.

This is some seriously clever thinking involving CSS custom properties, calc, and flexbox. The end result is a component that can respond to its container …and nary a media query in sight!

Teaching a Correct CSS Mental Model

One facet of this whole CSS debate involves one side saying, “Just learn CSS” and the other side responding, “That’s what I’ve been trying to do!”

I think it’s high time we the teachers of CSS start discussing how exactly we can teach a correct mental model. How do we, in specific and practical ways, help developers get past this point of frustration. Because we have not figured out how to properly teach a mental model of CSS.

It’s What You Make, Not How You Make It.

How did I miss this great post from 2016 by one of my favourite people‽ It’s even more more relevant today.

To me it doesn’t matter whether you write your HTML and CSS by hand or use JavaScript to generate it for you. What matters is the output, how it is structured, and how it is served to the client. When we allow our tools to take precedent over the quality of our output the entire web suffers. Sites are likely to be less accessible, less performant, and suffer from poor semantics.

Four Cool URLs - Alex Pounds’ Blog

A fellow URL fetishest!

I love me a well-designed URL scheme—here’s four interesting approaches.

URLs are consumed by machines, but they should be designed for humans. If your URL thinking stops at “uniquely identifies a page” and “good for SEO”, you’re missing out.

Stepping away from Sass

I think Cathy might’ve buried the lede:

The knock on effect of this was removing media queries. As I moved towards some of the more modern features of CSS the need to target specific screen sizes with unique code was removed.

But on the topic of Sass, layout is now taken care of with CSS grid, variables are taken care of with CSS custom properties, and mixins for typography are taken care of with calc().

Personally, I’ve always found the most useful feature of Sass to simply be that you can have lots of separate Sass files that get combined into one CSS file—very handy for component libraries.

The Ethics of Performance - TimKadlec.com

When you stop to consider all the implications of poor performance, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that poor performance is an ethical issue.

CSS doesn’t suck - Andy Bell

It’s getting exhausting spending so much of my time defending one of the three pillars of the web: CSS. It should sit equal with HTML and JavaScript to produce accessible, progressively enhanced websites and web apps that help everyone achieve what they need to achieve.

CSS-only multiple choice quizzing - Matthew Somerville

In which Matthew disects a multiple choice quiz that uses CSS to do some clever logic, using the :checked pseudo-class and counter-increment.

Oh, and this is how he realised it wasn’t using JavaScript:

I have JavaScript disabled on my phone because a) it cuts out most of the ads, b) it cuts out lots of bandwidth and I have a limited data plan, and c) my battery lasts longer because it’s not processing tons of code to show me some text (cough, Medium).

A Simple Note – Miscelanea

A short text file, imbued with meaning and memory.

Angular, Autoprefixer, IE11, and CSS Grid Walk into a Bar… - daverupert.com

Dave on the opaqueness of toolchains:

As toolchains grow and become more complex, unless you are expertly familiar with them, it’s very unclear what transformations are happening in our code. Tracking the differences between the input and output and the processes that code underwent can be overwhelming. When there’s a problem, it’s increasingly difficult to hop into the assembly line and diagnose the issue.

There’s a connection here to one of the biggest issues with what’s currently being labelled “AI”:

In the same way AI needs some design to show its work in how it came to its final answer, I feel that our automated build tools could use some help as well.

I really like this suggestion for making the invisble visible:

I sometimes wonder if Webpack or Gulp or [Insert Your Build Tool Here] could benefit from a Scratch-like interface for buildchains.

HTML+ Discussion Document: Images

Back in 1993, David Raggett wrote up all the proposed extensions to HTML that were being discussed on the www-talk mailing list. It was called HTML+, which would’ve been a great way of describing HTML5.

Twenty five years later, I wish that the proposed IMAGE element had come to pass. Unlike the IMG element, it would’ve had a closing tag, allowing for fallback content between the tags:

The IMAGE element behaves in the same way as IMG but allows you to include descriptive text, which can be shown on text-only displays.

Yeah, I know we have the alt attribute, but that’s always felt like an inelegant bolt-on to me.