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Generative AI: What You Need To Know

Generative AI: What You Need To Know is a free resource that will help you develop an AI-bullshit detector.

You can read all the cards on one page, print them out, or print to PDF.

Audio Session API Explainer

Jen pointed me to this proposal, which should help smooth over some of the inconsistencies I documented in iOS when it comes to the Web Audio API.

I’ve preemptively add this bit of feature detection to The Session:

if ('audioSession' in navigator) { navigator.audioSession.type = "playback"; }

Why the super rich are inevitable

The interactive widgets embedded in this article are excellent teaching tools!

HTML Emails: A Rant - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

The day we started to allow email clients to be full-blown web browsers (but without the protections of browsers) was the day we lost — time, security, privacy, and effectiveness. Now we spend all our time fighting with the materials of an email (i.e. color and layout) rather than refining its substance (i.e. story and language).

Understanding Layout Algorithms

Josh is great at explaining tricky concepts and here he’s really set himself a challenge: explaining layout modes in CSS.

Write plain text files | Derek Sivers

If you rely on Word, Evernote or Notion, for example, then you can’t work unless you have Word, Evernote, or Notion. You are helpless without them. You are dependent.

But if you only use plain text, you can use any program on any device, forever. It gives great flexibility and peace of mind.

A visual introduction to machine learning

I like the split-screen animated format for explaining this topic.

The Future of CSS: Cascade Layers (CSS @layer) – Bram.us

This is a really in-depth explanation from Bramus of the upcoming @layer rules in CSS, from the brilliant minds of Miriam, fantasai and Tab.

Basically, you’ll be able to scope styles, and you get to define the context for that scoping. So all those CSS-in-JS folks who don’t appreciate the cascade will have a mechanism to get encapsulated styles.

I can see this being very handy for big complex codebases with lots of people on the team.

Designing Beautiful Shadows in CSS

This is a great tutorial—I just love the interactive parts that really help make things click.

Scope Proposal & Explainer

This detailed proposal from Miriam for scoping CSS is well worth reading—it makes a lot of sense to me.

Content Design Basics by Giles Turnbull - YouTube

This is a great series of short videos all about content design. The one on writing for humans is particularly good.

share-button-type/explainer.md

If you’ve been following my recent blog posts about a declarative option for the Web Share API, you might be interested in this explainer document I’ve put together. It outlines the use case for button type="share".

About Feeds | Getting Started guide to web feeds/RSS

Matt made this website to explain RSS to people who are as-ye unfamilar with it.

MSEdgeExplainers/explainer.md at main · MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers

This is great! Ideas for allowing more styling of form controls. I agree with the goals 100% and I like the look of the proposed solutions too.

The team behind this are looking for feedback so be sure to share your thoughts (I’ll probably formulate mine into a blog post).

CSS Vocabulary

This is a nifty visual interactive explainer for the language of CSS—could be very handy for Codebar students.

Complexity Explained

Emergence and complex systems, explained with interactive diagrams.

Adding Response Metadata to Cache API Explainer by Aaron Gustafson and Jungkee Song

This is a great proposal that would make the Cache API even more powerful by adding metadata to cached items, like when it was cached, how big it is, and how many times it’s been retrieved.

“Never-Slow Mode” (a.k.a. “Slightly-Fast Mode”) Explained

I would very much like this to become a reality.

Never-Slow Mode (“NSM”) is a mode that sites can opt-into via HTTP header. For these sites, the browser imposes per-interaction resource limits, giving users a better user experience, potentially at the cost of extra developer work. We believe users are happier and more engaged on fast sites, and NSM attempts to make it easier for sites to guarantee speed to users. In addition to user experience benefits, sites might want to opt in because browsers could providing UI to users to indicate they are in “fast mode” (a TLS lock icon but for speed).

Plain Text vs. HTML Emails: Which Is Better? [New Data]

Spoiler: it’s plain text. Every time.

Nothing boosts opens and clicks as well as an old school, plain-text email.

I feel vindicated.

People say they prefer HTML emails ..but they actually prefer plain-text.

This seems like a plausable explanation:

Think about how you email colleagues and friends: Do you usually add images or use well-designed templates? Probably not, and neither does your audience. They’re used to using email to communicate in a personal way, so emails from companies that look more personal will resonate more.

Now get off my lawn, you pesky HTML-email lovin’ kids.

Badging API Explainer

Here’s an intriguing proposal that would allow web apps to indicate activity in an icon (like an unread count) in the same way that native apps can.

This is an interesting one because, in this case, it’s not just browsers that would have to implement it, but operating systems as well.