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Collection of common CSS mistakes, and how to fix them.
I like the way this is organised: it’s like “code smells” for CSS. Some of them will probably be familiar, in which case, you can dive in and find out what’s going on.
Beautifully restored high-resolution photographs of the Earth taken by Apollo astronauts.
The 1960s idea of “appropriate technology” feels like an early version of the principle of least power.
Lysenko vs. Vavilov feels like the 20th century version of Edison vs. Tesla.
Cosigned.
Cryptocurrency is one of the worst inventions of the 21st century. I am ashamed to share an industry with this exploitative grift. It has failed to be a useful currency, invented a new class of internet abuse, further enriched the rich, wasted staggering amounts of electricity, hastened climate change, ruined hundreds of otherwise promising projects, provided a climate for hundreds of scams to flourish, created shortages and price hikes for consumer hardware, and injected perverse incentives into technology everywhere. Fuck cryptocurrency.
A round-up of alternatives to Google Analytics.
It would be nice to be able to animate the transition between pages if we want to on the web without resorting to hacks or full-blown architecture choices to achieve it.
Amen, Chris, amen!
The danger here is that you might pick a single-page app just for this ability, which is what I mean by having to buy into a site architecture just to achieve this.
Professional web designer on a closed course. Do not attempt.
Adversarial chatbots engaged in an endless back-and-forth:
This piece simulates scheduling hell by generating infinite & unique combinations of meeting conflicts between two friends.
A personal website ain’t got no wrong words.
I’ve lately been trying an exercise where, when reading anything by or about tech companies, I replace uses of the word “infrastructure” with “means of production.”
Brilliant!
This video is a charming trip down to memory lane to the early days of the public internet:
It wasn’t quite the World Wide Web yet, but everybody started hearing about this thing called “the Internet” in 1993. It was being called the Information Superhighway then.
Katie shared this (very good) piece about service design on Slack at work today, and when I got to the bit about different levels, my brain immediately went “pace layers!”
- The Service
- The Infrastructure
- The Organisation
- The Intent
- The Culture
Want to work with me? If so, come and be a design engineer at Clearleft!
What’s a design engineer? A front-end developer at the front of the front end who values accessibility, performance, and progressive enhancement.
We’re looking for a design-friendly front-end developer with demonstrable skills in pattern-based prototyping and production to join our friendly and supportive team in the heart of Brighton.
Even if this isn’t for you, please spread the word …especially to potential candidates who aren’t mediocre middle-aged white dudes (I’ve already got that demographic covered).
An experimental image font made using the University of Plymouth’s unique letterpress workshop.
Grungy!
The font is intended for display purposes only, and not is suitable for body text.
The format of a Wikipedia page is used as the chilling delivery mechanism for this piece of speculative fiction. The distancing effect heightens the horror.
I hadn’t come across this before—run Lighthouse tests on your pages from six different locations around the world at once.
A curated list of awesome framework-agnostic standalone web components.
This is a great HTML boilerplate, with an explanation of every line.
I really like the idea of a shared convention for styling web components with custom properties—feels like BEM meets microformats.
New technologies don’t have power; for that they’d need a community, documentation, and a thriving ecosystem of ancillary technology. What they have is potential, which resonates with the potential within the startup and the early adopter; perhaps they can all, over time, grow together.
This means startups don’t adopt new technologies despite their immaturity, they adopt them because of that immaturity. This drives a constant churn of novelty and obsolescence, which amplifies the importance of a technologist’s skillset, which drives startups to adopt new technologies.
This flywheel has been spinning for a long time, and won’t stop simply because I’ve pointed out that we’re conflating novelty with technological advancement. Hopefully we can slow it down, though, because I believe it’s causing real harm.
The level of authority and professionalism in a design system helps sell it so teams use it. But increases the perception things are fixed. Done. And not open to change.
The idea that your job should be the primary source of meaning in your life is an elaborately made trap, propped up across industries, designed to make you a loyal worker who uses the bulk of their intellectual and creative capacity to further their own career.
Here’s the video of the talk I gave at the Web Stories conference back in February.
I played a lot Lords of Midnight (and Doomdark’s Revenge) on my Amstrad 464 when I was a kid. Turns out there’s a dedicated labour of love to port the games to modern platforms. I just downloaded the OS X port, so there goes my weekend.
I click the link. The page loads fast. I navigate the surprisingly sparse yet clear form inputs. And complete the whole thing in less than thirty seconds.
Oh, how I wish this experience weren’t remarkable!
Simple forms with clear labels. Little to no branding being shoved down my throat. No array of colors, big logos, or overly-customized UI components.
Accidental colour palettes captured in the wild.
Our slippy map works without JavaScript, yet we also have a service worker.
Getting a tattoo. brb
I can very much relate to what Craig is saying here.
It’s heavy on computer science, but this is a fascinating endeavour. It’s a work-in-progress book that not only describes how browsers work, but invites you to code along too. At the end, you get a minimum viable web browser (and more knowledge than you ever wanted about how browsers work).
As a black box, the browser is either magical or frustrating (depending on whether it is working correctly or not!). But that also make a browser a pretty unusual piece of software, with unique challenges, interesting algorithms, and clever optimizations. Browsers are worth studying for the pure pleasure of it.
See how the sausage is made and make your own sausage!
This book explains, building a basic but complete web browser, from networking to JavaScript, in a thousand lines of Python.
I remember discussing this with Tantek years ago:
There are a few elements who need to be placed inside of another specific element in order to function properly.
If I recall, he was considering writing “HTML: The Good Parts”.
Anyway, I can relate to what Eric is saying here about web components. My take is that web components give developers a power that previous only browser makers had. That’s very liberating, but it should come with a commensurate weight of responsibility. I fear that we will see this power wielded without sufficient responsibility.
This old article from Chris is evergreen. There’s been some recent discussion of calling these words “downplayers”, which I kind of like. Whatever they are, try not to use them in documentation.
A genuinely interesting (and droll) deep dive into derp learning …for typography!
Receive one email a day for 30 days, each featuring at least one HTML element.
Right up my alley!
This is how you write up a technique! Cassie takes an SVG pattern she used on the Clearleft “services” page and explains it in step-by-step detail, complete with explanatory animated diagrams.
Following on from the piece they ran called Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea, the EFF now have the details of the origin trial and it’s even worse than what was originally planned.
I strongly encourage you to use a privacy-preserving browser like Firefox or Safari.
This responds to your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, which was received by this office on 5 February 2016 for “A digital/electronic copy of the NSA old security posters from the 1950s and 1960s.”
The graphic design is …um, mixed.
Always refreshing to see some long-term thinking applied to the web.
A very comprehensive directory of accessibility resources.
An excellent explainer from Trys and James of their supersmart Utopia approach:
Utopia encourages the curation of a system small enough to be held in short-term memory, rather than one so sprawling it must be constantly referred to.