Links

Slopes | Tinkersynth

Have fun with this little machine, tweaking the parameters for generating a Joy Division/Jocelyn Bell-Burnell data visualisation.

The interface is quite delightful!

An app can be a home-cooked meal

I am the programming equivalent of a home cook.

The exhortation “learn to code!” has its foundations in market value. “Learn to code” is suggested as a way up, a way out. “Learn to code” offers economic leverage, a squirt of power. “Learn to code” goes on your resume.

But let’s substitute a different phrase: “learn to cook.” People don’t only learn to cook so they can become chefs. Some do! But far more people learn to cook so they can eat better, or more affordably, or in a specific way.

Same HTML, Different CSS

Like a little mini CSS Zen Garden, here’s one compenent styled five very different ways.

Crucially, the order of the markup doesn’t consider the appearance—it’s concerned purely with what makes sense semantically. And now with CSS grid, elements can be rearranged regardless of source order.

CSS is powerful and capable of doing amazingly beautiful things. Let’s embrace that and keep the HTML semantical instead of adapting it to the need of the next design change.

CrUX.RUN

This is so useful! Get instant results from Google’s Chrome User Experience Report without having to wait (or pay) for BigQuery.

Here’s an example of my site’s metrics over the last few months, complete with nice charts.

Link Targets and 3.2.5 | Adrian Roselli

Here are the many, many reasons why you should not open links in a new window (or tab).

Regardless of what accessibility conformance level you target, do not arbitrarily open links in a new window or tab. If you are required to do so anyway, inform users in text.

Standards for Writing Accessibly – A List Apart

• Write Chronologically, Not Spatially
• Write Left to Right, Top to Bottom
• Don’t Use Colors and Icons Alone
• Describe the Action, Not the Behavior

Things I’ve been wrong about, things I’ve been right about | Nolan Lawson

• Wrong: web workers will take over the world
• Wrong: Safari is the new IE
• Right: developer experience is trumping user experience
• Right: I’m better off without a Twitter account
• Right: the cost of small modules
• Mixed: progressive enhancement isn’t dead, but it smells funny

Maybe I should do one of these.

The Map of Mathematics | Quanta Magazine

An absolutely gorgeous piece of hypermedia!

Data visualisations and interactive widgets enliven this maze of mathematics. Dig deep—you may just uncover the secret passages that join these concepts together.

A Complete Guide to Links and Buttons | CSS-Tricks

Chris takes two side-by-side deep dives; one into the a element, the other into the button element.

Even if you think you already know those elements well, I bet there’ll be something new here for you. Like, did you know that the button element can have form over-riding attributes like formaction, formenctype, formmethod, formnovalidate, and formtarget?

Page Speed Benchmarks | SpeedCurve

This is going to be so useful for client work at Clearleft—instant snapshots of performance metrics across industries and regions!

For example, we’ve been working a lot with the travel sector, and now we can call up these benchmarks without having to generate a whole bunch of Web Page Test results ourselves.

See Tammy’s blog post for me details.

ARIA labels | Amber’s Website

A great explanation of aria-label and aria-labelledby!

Variable fonts’ past, present and future, according to Dalton Maag

In this interview, Biance Berning says:

Cassie Evans from Clearleft is an interesting person to follow as she combines web animation with variable font technology, essentially exploring the technology’s practicality and expression.

Hells yeah!

We’re only just scratching the surface of what variable fonts can do within more interactive and immersive spaces. I think we’ll see a lot more progress and experimentation with that as time goes on.

Fluid scale and tokens: a match made in heaven - Andy Bell

Andy takes Utopia for a spin—it very much matches his approach.

Utopia

This is the project that Trys and James have been working on at Clearleft. It’s a way of approaching modular scales in web typography that uses CSS locks and custom properties to fantastic effect.

Utopia is not a product, a plugin, or a framework. It’s a memorable/pretentious word we use to refer to a way of thinking about fluid responsive design.

Complexity Explained

Emergence and complex systems, explained with interactive diagrams.

Open source beyond the market - Signal v. Noise

The transcript of David Heinemeier Hansson keynote from last year’s RailsConf is well worth reading. It’s ostensibily about open source software but it delves into much larger questions.

Custom Styling Form Inputs With Modern CSS Features | CSS-Tricks

It’s now easier than ever to style form controls without sacrificing semantics and accessibility:

The reason is that we can finally style the ::before and ::after pseudo-elements on the <input> tag itself. This means we can keep and style an <input> and won’t need any extra elements. Before, we had to rely on the likes of an extra <div> or <span>, to pull off a custom design.

The demo is really nice. And best of all, you can wrap all of these CSS enhancements in a feaure query:

Hopefully, you’re seeing how nice it is to create custom form styles these days. It requires less markup, thanks to pseudo-elements that are directly on form inputs. It requires less fancy style switching, thanks to custom properties. And it has pretty darn good browser support, thanks to @supports.

Innovation Can’t Keep the Web Fast | CSS-Tricks

I’ve come to accept that our current approach to remedy poor performance largely consists of engineering techniques that stem from the ill effects of our business, product management, and engineering practices. We’re good at applying tourniquets, but not so good at sewing up deep wounds.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that web performance isn’t solely an engineering problem, but a problem of people.

Local First, Undo Redo, JS-Optional, Create Edit Publish - Tantek

Tantek documents the features he wants his posting interface to have.

On design systems and agency | Andrew Travers

Design systems can often ‘read’ as very top down, but need to be bottom up to reflect the needs of different users of different services in different contexts.

I’ve yet to be involved in a design system that hasn’t struggled to some extent for participation and contribution from the whole of its design community.