Bunny Fonts | Explore Faster & GDPR friendly Fonts
A drop-in replacement for Google Fonts without the tracking …but really, you should be self-hosting your font files.
A drop-in replacement for Google Fonts without the tracking …but really, you should be self-hosting your font files.
My website has different themes you can choose from. I don’t just mean a dark mode. These themes all look very different from one another.
I assume that 99.99% of people just see the default theme, but I keep the others around anyway. Offering different themes was originally intended as a way of showcasing the power of CSS, and specifically the separation of concerns between structure and presentation. I started doing this before the CSS Zen Garden was created. Dave really took it to the next level by showing how the same HTML document could be styled in an infinite number of ways.
Each theme has its own stylesheet. I’ve got a very simple little style switcher on every page of my site. Selecting a different theme triggers a page refresh with the new styles applied and sets a cookie to remember your preference.
I also list out the available stylesheets in the head
of every page using link
elements that have rel
values of alternate
and stylesheet
together. Each link
element also has a title
attribute with the name of the theme. That’s the standard way to specify alternative stylesheets.
In Firefox you can switch between the specified stylesheets from the View
menu by selecting Page Style
(notice that there’s also a No style
option—very handy for checking your document structure).
Other browsers like Chrome and Safari don’t do anything with the alternative stylesheets. But they don’t ignore them.
Every browser makes a network request for each alternative stylesheet. The request is non-blocking and seems to be low priority, which is good, but I’m somewhat perplexed by the network request being made at all.
I get why Firefox is requesting those stylesheets. It’s similar to requesting a print stylesheet. Even if the network were to drop, you still want those styles available to the user.
But I can’t think of any reason why Chrome or Safari would download the alternative stylesheets.
City of Women encourages Londoners to take a second glance at places we might once have taken for granted by reimagining the iconic Underground map.
I love everything about this …except that there’s no Rosalind Franklin station.
A new search engine (and browser!) that will have a paid business model.
Between this and Duck Duck Go, there’s evidence of an increasing appetite for alternatives to Google’s increasingly-more-rubbish search engine.
Brendan describes the software he’s using to get away from Adobe’s mafia business model.
For full hipster points, make sure you’re using these services, and then casually drop them into conversation by saying “Yeah, it’s a pretty obscure service; you probably haven’t heard of it…”
A list of alternatives to Google’s products.
We humans are not good at imagining the future. The future we see ends up looking a lot like the past with a few things tweaked or added on.
A fascinating thought experiment from Ted Chiang:
So let’s imagine a world in which Chinese characters were never invented in the first place. Given such a void, the alphabet might have spread east from India in a way that it couldn’t in our history, but, to keep this from being an Indo-Eurocentric thought experiment, let’s suppose that the ancient Chinese invented their own phonetic system of writing, something like the modern Bopomofo, some thirty-two hundred years ago. What might the consequences be?
I like this theory!
China Miéville gives a rundown of some underrated classics of the alternative history subgenre …including Richard Curtis’s Notting Hill.