How Google made the world go viral - The Verge
On the sad state of Google search today:
How did a site that captured the imagination of the internet and fundamentally changed the way we communicate turn into a burned-out Walmart at the edge of town?
Link tags: tti
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Pulling my site from Google over AI training – Tracy Durnell
I’m not down with Google swallowing everything posted on the internet to train their generative AI models.
A principled approach to evolving choice and control for web content
This would mean a lot more if it happened before the wholesale harvesting of everyone’s work.
But I’m sure Google will put a mighty fine lock on that stable door that the horse bolted from.
CSS Text balancing with text-wrap:balance - Ahmad Shadeed
Ahmad runs through some of the scenarios where text-wrap: balance could be handy.
Even though it’s not well-supported yet in browsers, there’s no reason not to start adding it to sites now; it’s classic progressive enhancement.
Notes, links, etc | 28 March - 2 April weeknotes
There’s a difference between creativity and production. I knit things but it’s not a creative process for me, it’s a physical one. I’m not interested in doing ‘something new’ with knitting (I don’t even call myself a ‘knitter’ to be honest. I don’t really think I’ve earned it). I haven’t learned the methods of construction. I’ve never tried to make something new out of the stitches I’ve learned. It’s not why I knit. I knit to relax. There’s joy in following a pattern and knowing that a more accomplished, knowledgeable person has done the hard creative work for me, and if I just do what they say, thing’s will probably work out fine. And I love the things I make. I put care into the production process - I take care to get the stitches neat, if I can. But when people look at the things I make and say “you’re so creative” - it’s just not true. In that context I can only ever say “no, I followed a pattern - it’s a good pattern. Do you want the link?”
Chrome exempts Google sites from user site data settings
Collusion between three separate services owned by the same company: the Google search engine, the YouTube website, and the Chrome web browser.
Gosh, this kind of information could be really damaging if there were, say, antitrust proceedings initiated.
In the meantime, use Firefox
Web Typography News #43: Typesetting Moby-Dick, part 2
Great typography on the web should be designed in layers. The web is an imperfect medium, consumed by countless different devices over untold numbers of network connections—each with their own capabilities, limitations, and peculiarities. To think that you can create one solution that will look and work the same everywhere is a fantasy. To make this more than just one nice book website, the whole project and process needs to embrace this reality.
Rise of the Digital Fonts
A history of typesetting from movable type to variable fonts.
Point, don’t point — I love Typography
A brief history of the manicule, illustrated with some extreme examples.
Could browsers fix more accessibility problems automatically?
Some really interesting ideas here from Hidde on how browsers could provide optional settings for users to override developers when it comes to accessibility issues like colour contrast, focus styles, and autoplaying videos.
A short history of body copy sizes on the Web
A look at the trend towards larger and larger font sizes for body copy on the web, culminating with Resilient Web Design.
There are some good arguments here for the upper limit on the font size there being too high, so I’ve adjusted it slightly. Now on large screens, the body copy on Resilient Web Design is 32px (2 times 1em), down from 40px (2.5 times 1em).
Yap
yap is an ephemeral, real-time chat room with up to six participants. your messages appear and disappear as quickly as you type them, which means unless you pay attention to what everyone says (for once), you’ll miss it.
CSS { In Real Life } | How to Accessibly Split Text
This is why we need an nth-letter selector in CSS .
How Google Pagespeed works: Improve Your Score and Search Engine Ranking
Ben shares the secret of SEO. Spoiler: the villain turns out to be Too Much JavaScript. Again.
Time to Interactive (TTI) is the most impactful metric to your performance score.
Therefore, to receive a high PageSpeed score, you will need a speedy TTI measurement.
At a high level, there are two significant factors that hugely influence TTI:
- The amount of JavaScript delivered to the page
- The run time of JavaScript tasks on the main thread
8 DOM features you didn’t know existed - LogRocket Blog
If you ignore the slightly insulting and condescending clickbaity title, this is a handy run-down of eight browser features with good support:
- extra arguments in
addEventListener(), scrollTo(),- extra arguments in
setTimeout()andsetInterval(), - the
defaultCheckedproperty for checkboxes, normalize()andwholeTextfor strings of text,insertAdjacentElement()andinsertAdjacentText(),event.detail, andscrollHeightandscrollWidth.
Type in the digital era is a mess
Marcin explains why line height works differently in print and the web. Along the way, he hits upon this key insight about CSS:
Web also took away some of the control from typesetters. What in the print era were absolute rules, now became suggestions.
Remember that every line of CSS you write is a suggestion to the browser.
All you need to know about hyphenation in CSS | Clagnut by Richard Rutter
Everything you need to know about hyphenation on the web today, from Rich’s galaxy brain.
Hyphenation is a perfect example of progressive enhancement, so you can start applying the above now if you think your readers will benefit from it – support among browsers will only increase.
Killed by Google - The Google Graveyard & Cemetery
147 dead properties and counting.
New Adventures 2019 | Part Two: Progressive Web | Abstrakt
Here’s a thorough blow-by-blow account of the workshop I ran in Nottingham last week:
Jeremy’s workshop was a fascinating insight into resilience and how to approach a web project with ubiquity and consistency in mind from both a design and development point of view.