A really nice piece by Paul Ford on the history of databases and the dream of the Semantic Web.
Sometimes I get a little wistful. The vision of a world of connected facts, one big, living library, remains beautiful, and unfulfilled.
One thing though: the scrolling on this page is sooooo janky that I had to switch off JavaScript just to read these words comfortably.
The new style guide and pattern library for Buzzfeed.
It all looks pretty reasonable on the surface but if you poke around in the CSS, you’ll find 1157 uses of !important. Yikes!
The whole point of having an agreed-upon codebase in a pattern library is so that developers need never reach for nuclear options like !important, so I’m afraid, for me, this is a demonstration of what not to do (in terms of CSS—the output of the HTML in the styleguide looks perfectly fine).
Solid uses immutable, atomic CSS classes…
CSS is “mutable”. By design. I don’t think we should be working against that.