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Balisage: Metaphors We Code By

My talk, Building, was about the metaphors we use to talk about the work we do on the web. So I’m interested in this analysis of the metaphors used to talk about markup:

Plus Equals #3, September 2021

Want to take a deep dive into tiling images? Like, a really deep dive. Rob has you covered.

Basic Pattern Repository

A nice little collection of very simple—and very lightweight—SVGs to use as background patterns.

canistilluse.com - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

…you would be forgiven if you saw an API where a feature went from green (supported) to red (unsupported) and you thought: is the browser being deprecated?

That’s the idea behind my new shiny domain: canistilluse.com. I made the site as satire after reading Jeremy Keith’s insightful piece where he notes:

the onus is not on web developers to keep track of older features in danger of being deprecated. That’s on the browser makers. I sincerely hope we’re not expected to consult a site called canistilluse.com.

It’s weirdly gratifying to see a hastily-written sarcastic quip tuned into something real.

Stay alert - DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻

It’s not just a story about unloved APIs, it’s a story about power, standards design, and who owns the platform — and it makes me afraid for the future of the web.

A thoughtful, considered post by Rich Harris on the whole ballyhoo with alert and its ilk:

For all its flaws, the web is generally agreed to be a stable platform, where investments made today will stand the test of time. A world in which websites are treated as inherently transient objects, where APIs we commonly rely on today could be cast aside as unwanted baggage by tomorrow’s spec wranglers, is a world in which the web has already lost.

Choice Words about the Upcoming Deprecation of JavaScript Dialogs | CSS-Tricks

Believe it or not, I generally am a fan of Google and think they do a good job of pushing the web forward. I also think it’s appropriate to waggle fingers when I see problems and request they do better. “Better” here means way more developer and user outreach to spell out the situation, way more conversation about the potential implications and transition ideas, and way more openness to bending the course ahead.

Google vs. the web | Go Make Things

With any changes to the platform, but especially breaking ones, communication and feedback on how this will impact people who actually build things with the web is super important, and that was not done here.

Chris has written a thoughtful reflection on last week’s brouhaha around confirm, prompt, and alert being deprecated in Chrome. The way that the “developer relations” folks at Google handled feedback was less than ideal.

I reached out to one of the Google Chrome developer advocates I know to see if I could learn more. It did not go well.

No, Utility Classes Aren’t the Same As Inline Styles | frontstuff

This is supposed to be a defence of utility classes …but it’s actually a great explanation of why classes in general are a great mechanism for styling.

I don’t think anyone has ever seriously suggested using inline styles—the actual disagreement is about how ludicrously rigid and wasteful the class names dictated by something like Tailwind are. When people criticise those classes they aren’t advocating for inline styles—they’re advocating for better class names and making more use of the power of the class selector in CSS, not less.

Anyway, if you removed every instance of the word “utility” from this article, it would still work.

Blackout in the Brain Lab - Issue 98: Mind - Nautilus

Black Mirror meets Henrietta Lacks in this short story by Erik Hoel who I had not heard of until today, when I came across his name here and also in a completely unrelated blog post by Peter Watts about the nature of dreams.

1loc | Favorite JavaScript single line of code

This is very handy indeed! Quick one-line JavaScript helpers categorised by type.

And, no, you don’t need to npm install any of these. Try “vendoring” them instead (that’s copying and pasting to you and me).

Star Trek: The Motion Picture | Typeset In The Future

The latest edition in this wonderful series of science-fictional typography has some truly twisty turbolift tangents.

The modern web is becoming an unusable, user-hostile wasteland

If you add another advertisement to your pages, you generate more revenue. If you track your users better, now you can deliver tailored ads and your conversion rates are higher. If you restrict users from leaving your walled garden ecosystem, now you get all the juice from whatever attention they have.

The question is: At which point do we reach the breaking point?

And I think the answer is: We are very close.

Facebook. Twitter. Medium. All desparate to withhold content they didn’t even create until you cough up your personal details.

TIL (Today I learned) - Manuel Matuzović

At Clearleft, we’re always saying “Everything is a tiny lesson!”, so I love, love, love this bit of Manuel’s website where notes down short code snippets of little things he learns.

Impossible Cookware and Other Triumphs of the Penrose Tile - Issue 69: Patterns - Nautilus

The forbidden symmetry of Penrose tiles and quasicrystals.

Design systems and technological disruption – The Man in Blue

Almost every technological innovation over the last 300 years has had side effects which actually increase the number of opportunities for employment. The general trend is that the easier something is to do, the more demand there is for it.

Cameron looks at the historical effects of automation and applies that to design systems. The future he sees is one of increased design democratisation and participation.

This is actually something that designers have been championing for decades – inclusive design at all levels of the company, and an increase in design thinking at all stages of product development. Now that we finally have a chance of achieving that it’s not a time to be scared. It’s a time to be celebrated.

Using Ethics In Web Design — Smashing Magazine

A remarkably practical in-depth guide to making ethical design decisions, with enjoyable diversions into the history of philosophy throughout.

Lisbon Azulejos

When I was in Porto a few weeks back, I took lots of pictures of the beautiful tiles. They reminded me of the ubiquitous repeating background images that were so popular on the early web. I was thinking about abstracting them into a collection of reusable patterns but now it looks like I’ve been beaten to it!

Mood boards in a content-first design process — Thomas Byttebier

How style tiles can work great in combination with content prototypes:

Surprisingly, it helps clients understand the HTML content prototype better. They now clearly see the difference and the relationship between content and design. In general it helps me explain the content-first process better and it helps them make more sense of it.

the new code – Even Stevens: Using Round and Space in Repeated Background Images

See, when I first heard about background-repeat: round; I thought it was something to do with making things circular. But no, it’s about tiling a background image so that nothing gets cut off. The amount of tiling required is rounded to the nearest whole number.

Now I get it.

Meet Walter Pitts, the Homeless Genius Who Revolutionized Artificial Intelligence

The fascinating story of logic, learning, and the origins of electronic computing. Russell, Shannon, Turing, Wiener, Von Neumann …they’re all in there, woven around the tragic figure of Walter Pitts.

It is a sad and beautiful world.

Thanks to their work, there was a moment in history when neuroscience, psychiatry, computer science, mathematical logic, and artificial intelligence were all one thing, following an idea first glimpsed by Leibniz—that man, machine, number, and mind all use information as a universal currency. What appeared on the surface to be very different ingredients of the world—hunks of metal, lumps of gray matter, scratches of ink on a page—were profoundly interchangeable.