Joschi gives the backstory to last week’s excellent Material conference in Iceland that he and Brian organised. I love that this all started with a conversation at Indie Web Camp Brighton back in 2014.
Every newspaper has an obituary of Brian Aldiss today, but this heartfelt reminiscence by Chris feels very special to me:
Jeremy got Brian for the panel alongside Lauren Beukes and Jeff Noon - the result is still probably the single best author event I’ve ever attended.
Everyone’s been talking about font-display: swap as a way of taking the pain out of loading web fonts, but here Chris looks at font-display: optional and font-display: fallback as well.
I like this list:
This is not a checklist. Instead, it is a set of broad guidelines meant to preserve an underlying value. It can be used as a guide for someone working on implementation or as a tool to evaluate an existing project.
I’ve added them to my collection of design principles.
Author = Laura
Guy = Erik Spiekermann
All’s well that ends well in this tale, and it prompted my entry for the subtweeting Olympics.
This is a smart way to queue up POST submissions for later if the user is offline. It’s not as powerful as background sync (because it requires the user to revisit your site) but it’s a good fallback for browsers that support service workers but don’t yet support background sync
- Do not depend on color
- Do not block zoom
- Rediscover the alt attribute
- Add subtitles and captions to your videos
- Semantics = accessibility
- Use the right mark-up
- Use roles when necessary
- On hiding elements
- Follow web accessibility standards
- Audit and review
There’s a free Creative Commons licensed PDF of this vital book available online.
A riveting firsthand account and incisive analysis of modern protest, revealing internet-fueled social movements’ greatest strengths and frequent challenges.
I can’t wait to get my hands on Laura’s book. It will be released on September 26th, but you can preorder it now.
Amber describes Material much better than I could:
There’s an element of magic in the air that you get to grasp and breathe in when you gather in the same place with so many different people – people with stories and paths they could write books about. The passion, the ideas, the stories of difficult journeys (the behind-the-scenes that you never see on social media). All of this makes not a basic recipe for a good time, but one for a delicious, enlightening experience that I’ve not seen replicated in any other environment.
The only thing she neglects to mention is that her talk was very much part of what made the event so special.
Here’s a beautiful use of the web audio API: Enoesque generative music composed right in your browser. Each piece is generated from one of the 14,226 photos in NASA’s Apollo archive. The darker and murkier the picture, the moodier the music.
119 slides from Sarah on a wide range of SVG magic (with code).
Speaking of Koya Bound, here’s the web-based counterpart to the physical book.
The ability of the physical world — a floor, a wall — to act as a screen of near infinite resolution becomes more powerful the more time we spend heads-down in our handheld computers, screens the size of palms. In fact, it’s almost impossible to see the visual patterns — the inherent adjacencies — of a physical book unless you deconstruct it and splay it out on the floor.
Craig gives us a walkthrough—literally—of the process behind the beautiful Koya Bound book.
Deciding to make any book is an act of creative faith (and ego and hubris, but these aren’t all exclusionary). But before Dan and I sold any copies of Koya Bound, we walked atop the pages that would become the book, not really knowing if there existed an audience for the book.
Monica explains how Shadow DOM could be the perfect answer for scoping CSS:
We didn’t have style encapsulation, so we started naming things “the right way” with BEM, so that we didn’t accidentally stomp over each other’s styles. We wanted to be able to author CSS from inside a JavaScript component, so we started using CSS-in-JS. We needed all these tools, because “the platform” (read: the browsers that be) wasn’t there, and building these tools showed that there was a need to move forward. For style encapsulation, Shadow DOM is the platform moving forward.
Although, in a way, Shadow DOM is also another flavour of CSS-in-JS:
Before you complain that using a Shadow DOM and Web Components means that it absolutely requires JavaScript: this is true.
Here’s Zach’s style guide. But the real reason I’m linking to this is his lovely description of having a personal website that grows over time:
As my own little corner of the web unceremoniously turned ten years old this year, it’s really starting to feel more like a garden than a piece of software. I certainly enjoy tending to it. I can plant what I like and with proper care it can grow into something useful.
Cynthia Lee didn’t write the clickbaity headline, but she did write the superb article that follows it, methodically taking the manifestbro apart:
Its quasi-professional tone is a big part of what makes it so beguiling (to some) and also so dangerous. Many defenders seem genuinely baffled that a document that works so hard to appear dispassionate and reasonable could provoke such an emotional response.
This is what I was trying to get at with my post, but here it is explained far more clearly, calmly, and rationally.
In the end, focusing the conversation on the minutiae of the scientific claims in the manifesto is a red herring. Regardless of whether biological differences exist, there is no shortage of glaring evidence, in individual stories and in scientific studies, that women in tech experience bias and a general lack of a welcoming environment, as do underrepresented minorities. Until these problems are resolved, our focus should be on remedying that injustice.
We men face shame and firing if we say the wrong thing. Women face the same plus rape threats, death threats, and all kinds of sustained harassment. So women can’t speak up safely and therefore they would have to watch their male colleagues discuss how a woman’s brain determines her interests. How impossibly maddening that would be.
Normally a McSweeney’s piece elicits a wry chuckle, but this one had me in stitches.
Humans are also far more likely to “literally cannot right now.” I have never met an automaton that literally could not, though I have met some that theoretically would not and hypothetically might want to stop.
