2019 Firefox Flashback
Here’s an end-of-year roundup of all the data that Mozilla have gathered through their Firefox browser—very impressive!
Link tags: ua
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The New York City Subway Map as You’ve Never Seen It Before - The New York Times
The design history of the New York subway map.
The Size of Space
Celestial objects ordered by size, covering a scale from one astronaut to the observable universe.
Case Study: lynnandtonic.com 2019 refresh - lynnandtonic.com
Lynn gives a step-by-step walkthrough of the latest amazing redesign of her website. There’s so much joy and craft in here, with real attention to detail—I love it!
2019 End-of-Year Thoughts Archives | CSS-Tricks
I’m really enjoying this end-of-the-year round-up from people speaking their brains. It’s not over yet, but there’s already a lot of thoughtful stuff to read through.
There are optimistic hopeful thoughts from Sam and from Ire:
Only a few years ago, I would need a whole team of developers to accomplish what can now be done with just a few amazing tools.
And I like this zinger from Geoff:
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: it’s still the best cocktail in town.
Then there are more cautious prognostications from Dave and from Robin:
The true beauty of web design is that you can pick up HTML, CSS, and the basics of JavaScript within a dedicated week or two. But over the past year, I’ve come to the conclusion that building a truly great website doesn’t require much skill and it certainly doesn’t require years to figure out how to perform the coding equivalent of a backflip.
What you need to build a great website is restraint.
Firefox’s fight for the future of the web | Technology | The Guardian
A good overview of the unfair playing field of web browsers, dominated by the monopolistic practices by Google and Apple.
Mozilla is no longer fighting for market share of its browser: it is fighting for the future of the web.
Open UI
An interesting project that will research and document the language used across different design systems to name similar components.
Beyond automatic accessibility testing: 6 things I check on every website I build - Manuel Matuzović
Six steps that everyone can do to catch accessibility gotchas:
- Check image descriptions
- Disable all styles
- Validate HTML
- Check the document outline
- Grayscale mode
- Use the keyboard
The Real Dark Web
Charlie’s thoughts on dev perception:
People speak about “the old guard” and “stupid backwards techniques”, forgetting that it’s real humans, with real constraints who are working on these solutions. Most of us are working in a “stupid backwards way” because that “backwardsness” WORKS. It is something that is proven and is clearly documented. We can implement it confident that it will not disappear from fashion within a couple of years.
Design tools are holding us back
My main concern about this new generation of tools is that they require a specific toolchain in order to function. “If you just use this version of React and just use this styling library and configure things in exactly this way, your designers can play around with coded components.” It worries me that teams would end up choosing (and subsequently holding onto) specific tools not because they’re the best choices for our users but because the designers’ and developers’ workflow depends on a specific toolchain to work properly.
How using component-based design helps us build faster
A case study from Twitter on the benefits of using a design system:
With component-based design, development becomes an act of composition, rather than constantly reinventing the wheel.
I think that could be boiled down to this:
Component-based design favours composition over invention.
I’m not saying that’s good. I’m not saying that’s bad. I’m also not saying it’s neutral.
The Guardian digital design style guide
What a lovely way to walk through the design system underpinning the Guardian website.
Bonus points for using the term “tweak points”!
NeXT Software and Peripherals catalog Fall 1989
Brian found this scanned copy of a NeXT manual on the Internet Archive. I feel a great fondness for this machine after our CERN project.
Spurious Correlations
Correlation does not imply causation.
Lights at sea
Lighthouses of the world, mapped.
How to speak Silicon Valley: decoding tech bros from microdosing to privacy | US news | The Guardian
Every one of these is chef’s kiss.
Phenological Mismatch - e-flux Architecture - e-flux
Over the last fifty years, we have come to recognize that the fuel of our civilizational expansion has become the main driver of our extinction, and that of many of the species we share the planet with. We are now coming to realize that is as true of our cognitive infrastructure. Something is out of sync, felt everywhere: something amiss in the temporal order, and it is as related to political and technological shifts, shifts in our own cognition and attention, as it is to climatic ones. To think clearly in such times requires an intersectional understanding of time itself, a way of thinking that escapes the cognitive traps, ancient and modern, into which we too easily fall. Because our technologies, the infrastructures we have built to escape our past, have turned instead to cancelling our future.
James writes beautifully about rates of change.
The greatest trick our utility-directed technologies have performed is to constantly pull us out of time: to distract us from the here and now, to treat time as a kind of fossil fuel which can be endlessly extracted in the service of a utopian future which never quite arrives. If information is the new oil, we are already, in the hyper-accelerated way of present things, well into the fracking age, with tremors shuddering through the landscape and the tap water on fire. But this is not enough; it will never be enough. We must be displaced utterly in time, caught up in endless imaginings of the future while endlessly neglecting the lessons and potential actions of the present moment.
When should you be using Web Workers? — DasSur.ma
Although this piece is ostensibly about why we should be using web workers more, there’s a much, much bigger point about the growing power gap between the devices we developers use and the typical device used by the rest of the planet.
While we are getting faster flagship phones every cycle, the vast majority of people can’t afford these. The more affordable phones are stuck in the past and have highly fluctuating performance metrics. These low-end phones will mostly likely be used by the massive number of people coming online in the next couple of years. The gap between the fastest and the slowest phone is getting wider, and the median is going down.
Mornington Crescent - Esolang
A (possibly) Turing complete language:
As the validity and the semantics of a program depend on the structure of the London underground system, which is administered by London Underground Ltd, a subsidiary of Transport for London, who are likely unaware of the existence of this programming language, its future compatibility is uncertain. Programs may become invalid or subtly wrong as the transport company expands or retires some of the network, reroutes lines or renames stations. Features may be removed with no prior consultation with the programming community. For all we know, Mornington Crescent itself may at some point be closed, at which point this programming language will cease to exist.
Language and the Invention of Writing | Talking Points Memo
Language is not an invention. As best we can tell it is an evolved feature of the human brain. There have been almost countless languages humans have spoken. But they all follow certain rules that grow out of the wiring of the human brain and human cognition. Critically, it is something that is hardwired into us. Writing is an altogether different and artificial thing.