It me.
Occasionally, I wonder whether I’ve got it all wrong. Is my age, my technical unsophistication, or my fond remembrance of an internet unencumbered by commerce blinding me to the opportunities that crypto offers me? But then I read something terrible and I recant my doubts, meditate for a while and get on with my life.
So when it comes down to the root of the problem, perhaps it isn’t CSS itself but our unwillingness to examine our sexist ideas of what is worthy in web development.
This CSS reset is pleasantly minimalist and a lot of thought has gone into each step. The bit about calculating line height is very intriguing!
Minimal snippets for modern CSS layouts and components.
The whole idea of progressive enhancement is using the power that the web platform gives us for free—specifically, HTML, CSS and JavaScript—to provide a baseline experience for the people who visit our sites and/or apps, and then build on that where appropriate and necessary, depending on the capabilities of the technology that they are using.
A minimal style sheet that applies some simple rules to HTML elements so you can take a regular web page and drop in this CSS to spruce it up a bit.
Technologies are always coming out of networks that require other related ideas to have the next one. The fact that we have simultaneous independent invention as a norm works against the idea of the heroic inventor, that we’re dependent on them for inventions. These things will come when all the other pieces are ready.
I like this idea for a minimum viable note-taking app:
data:text/html,<body contenteditable style="line-height:1.5;font-size:20px;">I have added this to bookmarks and now my zero-weight text editor is one keypress away from me. You might also use it as a temporary clipboard to paste text or even pictures.
See also: a minimum viable code editor.
This is an excellent framing for minimal viable products—what would the black box theatre production be?
Forget about all the production and complexity you could build. What’s the purpose you want to convey at the core?
Back in 1985, Ian wrote to NASA to get some info for a shool project (that’s how it worked before the World Wide Web). NASA sent him a treaure trove in response. Here they are, scanned as PDFs. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, the Space Shuttle, and more.
Progressive Enhancement allows us to use the latest and greatest features HTML, CSS and JavaScript offer us, by providing a basic, but robust foundation for all.
Some great practical examples of progressive enhancement on one website:
type="module" to enhance a form with JavaScript,picture element to provide webp images in HTML.All of those enhancements work great in modern browsers, but the underlying functionality is still available to a browser like Opera Mini on a feature phone.
The parallels between Alex Garland’s Devs and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.
This broke my brain.
The challenge: in the fewest resources possible, render meaningful text.
- How small can a font really go?
- How many bytes of memory would you need (to store it and run it?)
- How much code would it take to express it?
Lets see just how far we can take this!
The Ballad Of Halo Jones is 35 years old this year.
Where did she go? Out.
What did she do? Everything.
If you really, really have to add Google Analytics to a sites, here’s a way to do it in a more performant way, without the odious Google Tag Manager.
From smart dust and spimes, through to online journaling and social media, to machine learning, big data and digital preservation…
Is the archive where information goes to live forever, or where data goes to die?
Browser implementations of Sol LeWitt’s conceptual and minimal art, many of which only exist as instructions like this:
Vertical lines, not straight, not touching, covering the wall evenly.
Okay, I think I’m going to have to get this pack of three notebooks: Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.
The terrific talk from Beyond Tellerrand by Claire L. Evans, author of Broad Band.
As we face issues of privacy, identity, and society in a networked world, we have much to learn from these women, who anticipated the Internet’s greatest problems, faced them, and discovered solutions we can still use today.
The internet does not hate women. The internet doesn’t hate anyone, because the internet, being an inanimate network, lacks the capacity to hold any opinion whatsoever. People hate women, and the internet allows them to do it faster, harder, and with impunity. It’s developed into a form of relaxation after a hard day of being ground on the wheel of late-stage capitalism. Melvin Kranzberg’s statement that “technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral” holds true here: The internet lets us be whoever we were before, more efficiently, with fewer consequences.