Tags: outline

11

sparkline

Monday, September 21st, 2020

Kinopio

Cennydd asked for recommendations on Twitter a little while back:

Can anyone recommend an outlining app for macOS? I’m falling out with OmniOutliner. Not Notion, please.

This was my response:

The only outlining tool that makes sense for my brain is https://kinopio.club/

It’s more like a virtual crazy wall than a virtual Dewey decimal system.

I’ve written before about how I prepare a conference talk. The first step involves a sheet of A3 paper:

I used to do this mind-mapping step by opening a text file and dumping my thoughts into it. I told myself that they were in no particular order, but because a text file reads left to right and top to bottom, they are in an order, whether I intended it or not. By using a big sheet of paper, I can genuinely get things down in a disconnected way (and later, I can literally start drawing connections).

Kinopio is like a digital version of that A3 sheet of paper. It doesn’t force any kind of hierarchy on your raw ingredients. You can clump things together, join them up, break them apart, or just dump everything down in one go. That very much suits my approach to preparing something like a talk (or a book). The act of organising all the parts into a single narrative timeline is an important challenge, but it’s one that I like to defer to later. The first task is braindumping.

When I was preparing my talk for An Event Apart Online, I used Kinopio.club to get stuff out of my head. Here’s the initial brain dump. Here are the final slides. You can kind of see the general gist of the slidedeck in the initial brain dump, but I really like that I didn’t have to put anything into a sequential outline.

In some ways, Kinopio is like an anti-outlining tool. It’s scrappy and messy—which is exactly why it works so well for the early part of the process. If I use a tool that feels too high-fidelity too early on, I get a kind of impedence mismatch between the state of the project and the polish of the artifact.

I like that Kinopio feels quite personal. Unlike Google Docs or other more polished tools, the documents you make with this aren’t really for sharing. Still, I thought I’d share my scribblings anyway.

Wednesday, October 16th, 2019

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:

  1. Check image descriptions
  2. Disable all styles
  3. Validate HTML
  4. Check the document outline
  5. Grayscale mode
  6. Use the keyboard

Sunday, July 21st, 2019

5 Keys to Accessible Web Typography | Better Web Type

Some excellent explanations for these five pieces of sensible typography advice:

  1. Set your base font size in relative units
  2. Check the colour of your type and only then its contrast
  3. Use highly legible fonts
  4. Shape your paragraphs well
  5. Correctly use the heading levels

Tuesday, June 18th, 2019

How to Section Your HTML | CSS-Tricks

A deep dive with good advice on using—and labelling—sectioning content in HTML: nav, aside, section, and article.

Thursday, August 2nd, 2018

Accessibility: Start with the foundations | susan jean robertson

I encourage you to think about and make sure you are using the right elements at the right time. Sometimes I overthink this, but that’s because it’s that important to me - I want to make sure that the markup I use helps people understand the content, and doesn’t hinder them.

Friday, April 20th, 2018

:focus-visible and backwards compatibility

Patrick is thinking through a way to implement :focus-visible that’s forwards and backwards compatible.

Monday, February 20th, 2017

Do we need a new heading element? We don’t know - JakeArchibald.com

Jake is absolutely spot-on here. There’s been a lot of excited talk about adding an h element to HTML but it all seems to miss the question of why the currently-specced outline algorithm hasn’t been implemented.

This is a common mistake in standards discussion — a mistake I’ve made many times before. You cannot compare the current state of things, beholden to reality, with a utopian implementation of some currently non-existent thing.

If you’re proposing something almost identical to something that failed, you better know why your proposal will succeed where the other didn’t.

Jake rightly points out that the first step isn’t to propose a whole new element; it’s to ask “Why haven’t browsers implemented the outline for sectioned headings?”

(I added a small historical note in the comments pointing to the first occurrence of this proposal way back in 1991.)

Friday, January 18th, 2013

The importance of HTML5 sectioning elements by Heydon Pickering

A good explanation of HTML5’s sectioning content and outline algorithm.

Tuesday, August 16th, 2011

HTML5 And The Document Outlining Algorithm - Smashing Magazine

A brave attempt to explain the new outline algorithm in HTML (although it inaccurately states that no browsers have support for it—Firefox shipped with it a while back).

You can safely skip the comments: most of them are discouraging, ignorant, and frankly, just plain stupid.

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011

Document Outlines | HTML5 Doctor

Mike takes on the very tricky task of explaining the new outline algorithm—definitely one of the hardest features of HTML5 to explain, in my opinion.

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

HTML 5 Outliner

A very handy tool to help you check the outline algorithm in HTML5.