This chimes with something I’ve been pondering: we anticipate big breakthoughs in software—AI!, blockchain!, metaverse! chatbots!—but in reality the field is relatively stagnant. Meanwhile in areas like biology, there’s been unexpected advances. Or maybe, as Terence indicates, it’s all about the hype.
It’s said that the best way to learn about something is to teach it. I certainly found that to be true when I was writing the web.dev course on responsive design.
I felt fairly confident about some of the topics, but I felt somewhat out of my depth when it came to some of the newer modern additions to browsers. The last few modules in particular were unexplored areas for me, with topics like screen configurations and media features. I learned a lot about those topics by writing about them.
Best of all, I got to put my new-found knowledge to use! Here’s how…
The Session is a progressive web app. If you add it to the home screen of your mobile device, then when you launch the site by tapping on its icon, it behaves just like a native app.
In the web app manifest file for The Session, the display-mode property is set to “standalone.” That means it will launch without any browser chrome: no address bar and no back button. It’s up to me to provide the functionality that the browser usually takes care of.
So I added a back button in the navigation interface. It only appears on small screens.
Do you see the assumption I made?
I figured that the back button was most necessary in the situation where the site had been added to the home screen. That only happens on mobile devices, right?
Nope. If you’re using Chrome or Edge on a desktop device, you will be actively encourged to “install” The Session. If you do that, then just as on mobile, the site will behave like a standalone native app and launch without any browser chrome.
So desktop users who install the progressive web app don’t get any back button (because in my CSS I declare that the back button in the interface should only appear on small screens).
I was alerted to this issue on The Session:
It downloaded for me but there’s a bug, Jeremy - there doesn’t seem to be a way to go back.
Luckily, this happened as I was writing the module on media features. I knew exactly how to solve this problem because now I knew about the existence of the display-mode media feature. It allows you to write media queries that match the possible values of display-mode in a web app manifest:
.goback {
display: none;
}
@media (display-mode: standalone) {
.goback {
display: inline;
}
}
Now the back button shows up if you “install” The Session, regardless of whether that’s on mobile or desktop.
Previously I made the mistake of inferring whether or not to show the back button based on screen size. But the display-mode media feature allowed me to test the actual condition I cared about: is this user navigating in standalone mode?
If I hadn’t been writing about media features, I don’t think I would’ve been able to solve the problem. It’s a really good feeling when you’ve just learned something new, and then you immediately find exactly the right use case for it!
An experimental image font made using the University of Plymouth’s unique letterpress workshop.
Grungy!
The font is intended for display purposes only, and not is suitable for body text.
Always refreshing to see some long-term thinking applied to the web.
Playing Chief O’Neill’s Favourite (hornpipe) on bouzouki:
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.
This broke my brain.
The challenge: in the fewest resources possible, render meaningful text.
- How small can a font really go?
- How many bytes of memory would you need (to store it and run it?)
- How much code would it take to express it?
Lets see just how far we can take this!
Oh, this is magnificent! A rallying call for everyone designing and developing on the web to avoid making any assumptions about the people we’re building for:
People will use your site how they want, and according to their means. That is wonderful, and why the Web was built.
I would even say that the % of people viewing your site the way you do rapidly approaches zilch.
Marcin built this lovely little in-browser tool to demonstrate how segmented type displays work at different sizes.
This is a potentially useful bit of CSS that I had no idea existed.
A really deep dive into display: contents from Ire.
Tal Leming’s thoroughly delightful (and obsessive) account of designing the 90 Minutes typeface for U.S. Soccer.
FIFA has strict regulations that govern the size and stroke weight of numbers and letters used on official match uniforms. This made me unbelievably paranoid. I had a nightmare that one of the national teams would be set for kickoff of an important match and the referee would suddenly blow the whistle and say, “Hey, hey, hey! The bottom stroke of that 2 is 1 mm too light. The United States must forfeit this match!”
An interesting approach to digital preservation: storing digital video in the DNA of bacteria.
This looks like an interesting network-level approach to routing around the censorship of internet-hostile governments like China, Turkey, Australia, and the UK.
Rather than trying to hide individual proxies from censors, refraction brings proxy functionality to the core of the network, through partnership with ISPs and other network operators. This makes censorship much more costly, because it prevents censors from selectively blocking only those servers used to provide Internet freedom. Instead, whole networks outside the censored country provide Internet freedom to users—and any encrypted data exchange between a censored nation’s Internet and a participating friendly network can become a conduit for the free flow of information.
Everyone’s been talking about font-display: swap as a way of taking the pain out of loading web fonts, but here Chris looks at font-display: optional and font-display: fallback as well.
This is an excellent proposal from Emil. If we can apply display: contents to fieldsets, then we would finally have a way of undoing the byzantine browser styles that have hindered adoption of this element. This proposal also ensures backwards compatibility so there’d be no breakage of older sites:
The legacy appearance of fieldsets probably needs to be preserved for compatibility reasons. But
display: contentsis not supported in any old browsers, and is most likely used on exactly zero sites using the legacy look of fieldsets.
Whaddya say, browser makers?
This is a really clear explanation of how CSS works.
The font-display property is landing in browsers, and this is a great introduction to using it:
If you don’t know which option to use, then go with
swap. Not only does it provide an optimal balance between custom fonts and accessibility of content, it provides the same font loading behavior that we’ve relied on JavaScript for. If you have fonts on the page that you’d like to have load, but could ultimately do without, consider going withfallbackoroptionalwhen usingfont-display.
Until it’s more widely supported, you can continue to use a JavaScript solution, but even then you can feature detect first:
if ("fontDisplay" in document.body.style === false) {
/* JavaScript font loading logic goes here. */
}
One more reason to make the switch to HTTPS.
I’ve seen the exact problem that Rachel describes here—flexbox only applied to direct children, meaning the markup would have to be adjusted. display: contents looks like a nifty solution.