Link archive: March 17th, 2017

A Little Surprise Is Waiting For You Here — Meet The Next Smashing Magazine

An open beta of Smashing Magazine’s redesign, which looks like it could be a real poster child for progressive enhancement:

We do our best to ensure that content is accessible and enhanced progressively, with performance in mind. If JavaScript isn’t available or if the network is slow, then we deliver content via static fallbacks (for example, by linking directly to Google search), as well as a service worker that persistently stores CSS, JavaScripts, SVGs, font files and other assets in its cache.

Amber Wilson: Markup-Masterclass

Yesterday was a good day with Amber. She’s been marking up her CV and it was the perfect opportunity to take a deep dive into HTML.

The Ray Cat Solution

A website dedicated to one of the most, um, interesting solutions to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage problem:

  1. Engineer cats that change colour in response to radiation.
  2. Create the culture/legend/history that if your cat changes colour, you should move some place else.

There are T-shirts!

Should you learn [insert shiny new tool]? | Zell Liew

This ties in nicely with the new talk I’m doing on evaluating technology. Zell proposes a five-step process:

  1. Figure out what [insert tool] does.
  2. Figure out what sucks right now
  3. Determine if it’s worth the investment
  4. Learn it (if it’s worth it)
  5. Differentiate opinions from facts

Most of the examples he gives are tools used before deployment—I have a feeling that different criteria should apply when weighing up technologies written directly in user-facing code (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript).