Tim recently gave an excellent talk at FFConf. He mentioned this variation of Markdown, specifically for writing coding tutorials that update as you scroll. You can see it in action on his Generative Artistry site.
Kind of reminds of some of Bret Viktor’s work.
I had to read through this twice, but I think I get it now (I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer). Very useful if you’re doing theming in CSS.
A fascinating look at standards in the real world. In this case, it’s the kilogram, which is shedding its French Revolutionary roots in favour of the Planck constant.
Our messy human measurements have transcended their messy humanness; they have been melded with an eternal truth.
Mention of The Master Of The Kilogram reminded me of The Keeper Of Time.
Jigsaw puzzle companies tend to use the same cut patterns for multiple puzzles. This makes the pieces interchangeable, and I sometimes find that I can combine portions from two or more puzzles to make a surreal picture that the publisher never imagined. I take great pleasure in “discovering” such bizarre images lying latent, sometimes for decades, within the pieces of ordinary mass-produced puzzles.
Taking the idea of the Clock of the Long Now and applying it to a twitterbot:
Software may not be as well suited as a finely engineered clock to operate on these sorts of geological scales, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try to put some of the 10,000 year clock’s design principles to work.
The bot will almost certainly fall foul of Twitter’s API changes long before the next tweet-chime is due, but it’s still fascinating to see the clock’s principles applied to software: longevity, maintainability, transparency, evolvability, and scalability.
Software tends to stay in operation longer than we think it will when we first wrote it, and the wearing effects of entropy within it and its ecosystem often take their toll more quickly and more destructively than we could imagine. You don’t need to be thinking on a scale of 10,000 years to make applying these principles a good idea.
Remember when I said that if we want to see CSS exclusions implemented in browsers, we need to make some noise?
Well, Rachel is taking names, so if you’ve got a use-case, let her know.
This just blew my mind! A fiendishly clever pattern that allows you to inline resources (like critical CSS) and cache that same content for later retrieval by a service worker.
Crazy clever!
A handy in-browser image compression tool. Drag, drop, tweak, and export.
I guess this domain name is why our local developmemnt environments stopped working.
Anyway, it’s a web interface onto Lighthouse (note that it has the same bugs as the version of Lighthouse in Chrome). Kind of like webhint.io.
Rachel does some research to find out why people use CSS frameworks like Bootstrap—it can’t just be about grids, right?
It turns out there are plenty of reasons that people give for using frameworks—whether it’s CSS or JavaScript—but Rachel shares some of my misgivings on this:
In our race to get our site built quickly, our desire to make things as good as possible for ourselves as the designers and developers of the site, do we forget who we are doing this for? Do the decisions made by the framework developer match up with the needs of the users of the site you are building?
Not for the first time, I’m reminded of Rachel’s excellent post from a few years ago: Stop solving problems you don’t yet have.
Some advice from Andy on creating a dark theme for your website. It’s not just about the colours—there are typography implications too.
Harry takes a look at the performance implications of loading CSS. To be clear, this is not about the performance of CSS selectors or ordering (which really doesn’t make any difference at this point), but rather it’s about the different ways of getting rid of as much render-blocking CSS as possible.
…a good rule of thumb to remember is that your page will only render as quickly as your slowest stylesheet.
A great selection of links about design systems, collected and categorised.
I remember a couple of years back when Jen came to visit Clearleft to chat to us about CSS grid, this use-case that Rob describes here came up almost immediately.
But despair not—Rachel points to a potential solution. I saw potential solution, because if we want to see this implemented in browsers, we need to make some noise.
If you buy this bundle of books, you get Going Offline in some very, very good company.
Ethan ponders what the web might be like if the kind of legal sticks that exist for accessibility in some countries also existed for performance.
‘Sfunny, this exact use-case (styling a profile component) came up on a project recently and I figured that CSS grid would be the right tool for the job.
Publishing on the web really is quite marvellous:
…an endless thrill, a sort of everlasting, punk-rock feeling and I hope it will never really go away.
This is very, very good news. Following on from the recent announcement that a huge swathe of Flickr photos would soon be deleted, there’s now an update: any photos that are Creative Commons licensed won’t be deleted after all. Phew!
I wonder if I can get a refund for that pro account I just bought last week to keep my Creative Commons licensed Flickr pictures online.
As well as graciously hosting Indie Web Camp Berlin on the weekend at Mozilla’s offices, Yulia has also drawn this super-cute comic.