Strolling along the seafront with the Clearleft crew.
Tags: os
1099
Thursday, August 6th, 2020
Friday, July 31st, 2020
Why Medium is Not the Home for Your Ideas – The Hulry
Some good blogging advice.
Building a blog for the long run? Avoid Medium.
On the origin of cascades
This is a great talk by Hidde, looking at the history and evolution of cascading style sheets. Right up my alley!
Monday, July 27th, 2020
Is my host fast yet?
This is an interesting project to try to rank web hosts by performance:
Real-world server response (Time to First Byte) latencies, as experienced by real-world users navigating the web.
Friday, July 24th, 2020
Celebrating.
Sunday, July 19th, 2020
90s Festival Generator
I spent far too long hitting refresh and then clicking on the names of some of the Irish bands down near the bottom of the line-up.
Coldwater.Science
The World Ocean is as close as you can get to outer space without leaving Earth. It’s an entirely different universe, nothing like the life we have on land.
Saturday, July 18th, 2020
CSS photo effects - a Collection by Lynn Fisher on CodePen
These wonderfully realistic photo effects from Lynn are quite lovely!
Tuesday, July 14th, 2020
Ariel Waldman: The colorful critter world of microbes in Antarctica | TED Talk
Ariel gave a TED talk and it’s mind-blowingly good!
Friday, July 10th, 2020
Out and about in Brighton.
Thursday, July 9th, 2020
Implementors
The latest newsletter from The History Of The Web is a good one: The Browser Engine That Could. It’s all about the history of browsers and more specifically, rendering engines.
Jay quotes from a 1992 email by Tim Berners-Lee when there was real concern about having too many different browsers. But as history played out, the concern shifted to having too few different browsers.
I wrote about this—back when Edge switched to using Chromium—in a post called Unity where I compared it to political parties:
If you have hundreds of different political parties, that’s not ideal. But if you only have one political party, that’s very bad indeed!
I talked about this some more with Brian and Stuart on the Igalia Chats podcast: Web Ecosystem Health (here’s the mp3 file).
In the discussion we dive deeper into the naunces of browser engine diversity; how it’s not the numbers that matter, but representation. The danger with one dominant rendering engine is that it would reflect one dominant set of priorities.
I think we’re starting to see this kind of battle between different sets of priorities playing out in the browser rendering engine landscape.
Webkit published a list of APIs they won’t be implementing in their current form because of security concerns around fingerprinting. Mozilla is taking the same stand. Google is much more gung-ho about implementing those APIs.
I think it’s safe to say that every implementor wants to ship powerful APIs and ensure security and privacy. The issue is with which gets priority. Using the language of principles and priorities, you could crudely encapsulate Apple and Mozilla’s position as:
Privacy, even over capability.
That design principle would pass the reversibility test. In fact, Google’s position might be represented as:
Capability, even over privacy.
I’m not saying Apple and Mozilla don’t value powerful APIs. I’m not saying Google doesn’t value privacy. I’m saying that Google’s priorities are different to Apple’s and Mozilla’s.
Alas, Alex is saying that Apple and Mozilla don’t value capability:
There is a contingent of browser vendors today who do not wish to expand the web platform to cover adjacent use-cases or meaningfully close the relevance gap that the shift to mobile has opened.
That’s very disappointing. It’s a cheap shot. As cheap as saying that, given Google’s business model, Chrome wouldn’t want to expand the web platform to provide better privacy and security.
Wednesday, July 1st, 2020
The design systems between us. — Ethan Marcotte
Smart thoughts from Ethan on how design systems can cement your existing ways of working, but can’t magically change how collaboration works at your organisation.
Modern digital teams rarely discuss decisions in terms of the collaborative costs they incur. It’s tempting—and natural!—to see design- or engineering-related decisions in isolation: that selecting Vue as a front-end framework only impacts the engineering team, or that migrating to Figma only impacts designers. But each of these changes the way that team works, which impacts how other teams will work and collaborate with them.
Sunday, June 28th, 2020
Takin’ five. — Ethan Marcotte
I linked to the first of Ethan’s short videos on accessibility last week, but it’s well worth checking out all five:
Friday, June 26th, 2020
Why BaseCamp & Hey.com are Wrong About the Apple App Store
I feel for BaseCamp, I do. But give up on the native app path. Make sure your existing web interface is a good progressive web app and you can end-run around Apple.
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2020
CSS folded poster effect
This is a very nifty use of CSS gradients!
Friday, June 19th, 2020
Went for a nice walk in the countryside. ’Twas lovely to have the company of fellow humans like @Clagnut, @ChrisHow, and @CassieCodes.
Wednesday, June 17th, 2020
Pandemic Time: A Distributed Doomsday Clock - NOEMA
A meditative essay on the nature of time.
The simultaneous dimming of Betelgeuse and the global emergence of COVID-19 were curiously rhyming phenomena: disruptions of familiar, reassuring rhythms, both with latent apocalyptic potential.
Time and distance are out of place here.
We will have left a world governed by Chronos, the Greek god of linear, global, objective time measured by clocks, and arrived into a world governed by Kairos, the Greek god of nonlinear, local, subjective time, measured by the ebb and flow of local patterns of risk and opportunity. The Virus Quadrille is not just the concluding act of pandemic time but the opening act of an entire extended future.
Monday, June 15th, 2020
Igalia Chats: Web Ecosystem Health with Jeremy Keith and Stuart Landridge
Myself and Stuart had a chat with Brian about browser engine diversity.
Here’s the audio file if you’d like to huffduff it.
Thursday, June 11th, 2020
A Rare Smile Captured in a 19th Century Photograph | Open Culture
I wrote a while back about one of my favourite photographs but this might just give it a run for its money.
It was only near the end of the 19th century that shutter speeds improved, as did emulsions, meaning that spontaneous moments could be captured. Still, smiling was not part of many cultures. It could be seen as unseemly or undignified, and many people rarely sat for photos anyway.
Saturday, June 6th, 2020
Hybrid positioning with CSS variables and max() – Lea Verou
Yet another clever technique from Lea. But I’m also bookmarking this one because of something she points out about custom properties:
The browser doesn’t know if your property value is valid until the variable is resolved, and by then it has already processed the cascade and has thrown away any potential fallbacks.
That explains an issue I was seeing recently! I couldn’t understand why an older browser wasn’t getting the fallback I had declared earlier in the CSS. Turns out that custom properties mess with that expectation.