Plus Equals #4, December 2021
In which Rob takes a deep dive into isometric projection and then gets generative with it.
Link tags: mag
336
Plus Equals #3, September 2021
Want to take a deep dive into tiling images? Like, a really deep dive. Rob has you covered.
The Flickr Foundation
A non-profit foundation dedicated to long-term digital preservation.
Imagine if we could place ourselves 100 years into the future and still have access to the billions of photos shared by millions of people on Flickr, one of the best documented, broadest photographic archives on the planet.
The Flickr Foundation represents our commitment to stewarding this digital, cultural treasure to ensure its existence for future generations.
Its first act is the renewal of the Flickr Commons.
11ty/api-indieweb-avatar: Return an optimized avatar image from a domain name input.
Here’s a nifty little service from Zach: pass in a URL and it returns an image of the site’s icon.
Think of it as the indie web alternative to showing Twitter avatars.
Basic Pattern Repository
A nice little collection of very simple—and very lightweight—SVGs to use as background patterns.
HTTP/3 From A To Z: Core Concepts (Part 1) — Smashing Magazine
I spend most of my time in the application layers—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—so I fascinating to dive below the surface and learn about the upcoming HTTP/3. Sounds like it’s really more of a change to how things have always worked with the TCP protocol, still chugging away since it was created by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf.
How To Build Resilient JavaScript UIs — Smashing Magazine
The opening paragraphs of this article should be a mantra recited by every web developer before they begin their working day:
Things on the web can break — the odds are stacked against us. Lots can go wrong: a network request fails, a third-party library breaks, a JavaScript feature is unsupported (assuming JavaScript is even available), a CDN goes down, a user behaves unexpectedly (they double-click a submit button), the list goes on.
Fortunately, we as engineers can avoid, or at least mitigate the impact of breakages in the web apps we build. This however requires a conscious effort and mindset shift towards thinking about unhappy scenarios just as much as happy ones.
I love, love, love the emphasis on reducing assumptions:
Taking a more defensive approach when writing code helps reduce programmer errors arising from making assumptions. Pessimism over optimism favours resilience.
Hell, yeah!
Accepting the fragility of the web is a necessary step towards building resilient systems. A more reliable user experience is synonymous with happy customers. Being equipped for the worst (proactive) is better than putting out fires (reactive) from a business, customer, and developer standpoint (less bugs!).
Earth Restored — Toby Ord
Beautifully restored high-resolution photographs of the Earth taken by Apollo astronauts.
Swipey image grids.
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.
Guarding Against Disposable Design — Smashing Magazine
Always refreshing to see some long-term thinking applied to the web.
Meet Utopia: Designing And Building With Fluid Type And Space Scales — Smashing Magazine
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.
THE INTERNET — Opte
Visualising the growth of the internet.
A Complete Guide To Accessible Front-End Components — Smashing Magazine
Vitaly has rounded up a whole load of accessibility posts. I think I’ve linked to most of them at some point, but it’s great to have them all gathered together in one place.
Good, Better, Best: Untangling The Complex World Of Accessible Patterns — Smashing Magazine
I really like the approach that Carie takes here. Instead of pointing to specific patterns to use, she provides a framework for evaluating technology. Solutions come and go but this kind of critical thinking is a long-lasting skill.
archives.design
All of these graphic design books, magazines, and type specimens are available for perusal on the Internet Archive.
Should The Web Expose Hardware Capabilities? — Smashing Magazine
This is a very thoughtful and measured response to Alex’s post Platform Adjacency Theory.
Unlike Alex, the author doesn’t fire off cheap shots.
Also, I’m really intrigued by the idea of certificate authorities for hardware APIs.
Quantum to Cosmos
Well, this is rather wonderful! It’s like an interactive version of the Eames’s Powers Of Ten.
Creating websites with prefers-reduced-data | Polypane Browser for Developers
There’s no browser support yet but that doesn’t mean we can’t start adding prefers-reduced-data to our media queries today. I like the idea of switching between web fonts and system fonts.
Standardizing `select` And Beyond: The Past, Present And Future Of Native HTML Form Controls — Smashing Magazine
While a handful of form controls can be easily styled by CSS, like the button element, most form controls fall into a bucket of either requiring hacky CSS or are still unable to be styled at all by CSS.
Despite form controls no longer taking a style or technical dependency on the operating system and using modern rendering technology from the browser, developers are still unable to style some of the most used form control elements such as
select. The root of this problem lies in the way the specification was originally written for form controls back in 1995.
Stephanie goes back in time to tell the history of form controls on the web, and how that history has led to our current frustrations:
The current state of working with controls on the modern web is that countless developer hours are being lost to rewriting controls from scratch, as custom elements due to a lack of flexibility in customizability and extensibility of native form controls. This is a massive gap in the web platform and has been for years. Finally, something is being done about it.
Amen!
Blockchain, the amazing solution for almost nothing - The Correspondent
A devastating deep dive into the hype of blockchain, written by Jesse Frederik and translated by Hannah Kousbroek:
I’ve never seen so much incomprehensible jargon to describe so little. I’ve never seen so much bloated bombast fall so flat on closer inspection. And I’ve never seen so many people searching so hard for a problem to go with their solution.