Link archive: January, 2021

Data Visualization and the Modern Imagination - Spotlight at Stanford

There are some beautiful illustrations in this online exhibition of data visualisation in the past few hundred years.

Eggs - Hicks.design

Most days I cook eggs 🍳 and then paint them 🖌. These are those eggs.

Lovely!

But, wait …what’s this?

My favourite condiment with fried eggs is marmite mayo (4 parts mayonnaise to 1 part Marmite).

Okay, now I think this officially qualifies as outsider art.

How to avoid layout shifts caused by web fonts – Simon Hearne

A terrific in-depth look at improving the performance of web fonts.

How to be clear – gilest.org

Good advice for writing:

• Think about what your readers might already know
• Write shorter sentences, with simpler words
• Constantly think about audiences
• Communicate with purpose
• Clear communication helps teams solve problems

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction

A fascinating crowdsourced project. You can read the backstory in this article in Wired magazine.

The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML – Terence Eden’s Blog

I love the story that Terence relates here. It reminds me of all the fantastic work that Anna did documenting game console browsers.

Are you developing public services? Or a system that people might access when they’re in desperate need of help? Plain HTML works. A small bit of simple CSS will make look decent. JavaScript is probably unnecessary – but can be used to progressively enhance stuff.

CSS Frameworks, hype and dogmatism - Post - Piccalilli

You catch more flies with honey than Tailwind.

Halt and Catch Fire Syllabus

The intent is for this website to be used by self-forming small groups that want to create a “watching club” (like a book club) and discuss aspects of technology history that are featured in this series.

I’m about ready to rewatch Halt And Catch Fire. Anybody want to form a watching club with me?

Stumbling – Lucy Bellwood

Our footpaths converged around the same 5-10 platforms, each with its own particular manner of communication. I have learned, unintentionally, to code switch every time I craft a new post. It’s exhausting, trying to keep track of all those unspoken rules shaped by years of use.

But I don’t have rules like that on my blog. I turned off stats. There are no comments. No likes.

A minimum viable experience makes for a resilient, inclusive website or app - Post - Piccalilli

The whole idea of progressive enhancement is using the power that the web platform gives us for free—specifically, HTML, CSS and JavaScript—to provide a baseline experience for the people who visit our sites and/or apps, and then build on that where appropriate and necessary, depending on the capabilities of the technology that they are using.

Never Been Seen | Science Museum Group Collection

This is such a great use of an API—you can choose to view an object in the museum’s collection that no one else has seen yet.

It’s like the opposite of Amazon’s recommendation engine: “No one has ever purchased these items together…”

React Bias

Dev perception.

The juxtaposition of The HTTP Archive’s analysis and The State of JS 2020 Survey results suggest that a disproportionately small—yet exceedingly vocal minority—of white male developers advocate strongly for React, and by extension, a development experience that favors thick client/thin server architectures which are given to poor performance in adverse conditions. Such conditions are less likely to be experienced by white male developers themselves, therefore reaffirming and reflecting their own biases in their work.

Eleanor Lutz - An Orbit Map of the Solar System

A lovely visualisation of asteroids in our solar system.

Responsible Web Applications

An excellent collection of advice and examples for making websites responsive and accessibile (responsive + accessible = responsible).

Nested Media Queries – Bram.us

Huh. I don’t think I ever thought about nesting media queries …and yet I’m pleasantly surprised that it works!

The Art of Whaling: Illustrations from the Logbooks of Nantucket Whaleships – The Public Domain Review

Scrimshaws and sketches.

Feels like a Zooniverse project waiting to happen.

Enable/unmute WebAudio on iOS, even while mute switch is on

Remember when I wrote about Web Audio weirdness on iOS? Well, this is a nice little library that wraps up the same hacky solution that I ended up using.

It’s always gratifying when something you do—especially something that feels so hacky—turns out to be independently invented elsewhere.

Carbon Dioxide Removal Primer

A Creative Commons licensed web book that you can read online.

Carbon dioxide removal at a climate-significant scale is one of the most complex endeavors we can imagine, interlocking technologies, social systems, economies, transportation systems, agricultural systems, and, of course, the political economy required to fund it. This primer aims to lower the learning curve for action by putting as many facts as possible in the hands of the people who will take on this challenge. This book can eliminate much uncertainty and fear, and, we hope, speed the process of getting real solutions into the field.

HTML Video Sources Should Be Responsive | Filament Group, Inc.

Removing media support from HTML video was a mistake.

Damn right! It was basically Hixie throwing a strop, trying to sabotage responsive images. Considering how hard it is usually to remove a shipped feature from browsers, it’s bizarre that a good working feature was pulled out of production.

axe-con Digital Accessibility Conference | Deque

This looks like it’ll be a good event: a keynote from Vint Cerf and talks from Val Head, Rachel Andrew, Sara Soueidan, and others.

Best of all, it’s free!

Global Privacy Control — Take Control Of Your Privacy

This sounds a lot like Do Not Track …but looking at the spec, the interesting part is the way that this is designed to work in combination with legal frameworks. That’s smart. I don’t think a purely technical solution is workable (as we saw with Do Not Track).

Sticky CSS Grid Items | Melanie Richards

This is a useful technique that future me is almost certainly going to need at some point.

Simple Analytics - Simple, clean, and privacy-friendly analytics

Another nice alternative to Google Analytics with a focus on privacy.

Should The Web Expose Hardware Capabilities? — Smashing Magazine

This is a very thoughtful and measured response to Alex’s post Platform Adjacency Theory.

Unlike Alex, the author doesn’t fire off cheap shots.

Also, I’m really intrigued by the idea of certificate authorities for hardware APIs.

new.css

A minimal style sheet that applies some simple rules to HTML elements so you can take a regular web page and drop in this CSS to spruce it up a bit.

Contextual ads | Dave Smyth

If behavioural ads aren’t more effective than contextual ads, what is all of that data collected for?

If websites opted for a context ads and privacy-focused analytics approach, cookie banners could become obsolete…

Is Progressive Enhancement Dead Yet? (Webbed Briefs)

Heydon’s newest short video is right up my alley.

Robin Rendle › Newsletters

A rant from Robin. I share his frustration and agree with his observations.

I wonder how we can get the best of both worlds here: the ease of publishing newsletters, with all the beauty and archivability of websites.

My stack will outlive yours

My stack requires no maintenance, has perfect Lighthouse scores, will never have any security vulnerability, is based on open standards, is portable, has an instant dev loop, has no build step and… will outlive any other stack.

Loading and replacing HTML parts with HTML

I like this proposal for a declarative Ajax pattern. It’s relatively straightforward to polyfill, although backward-compatibility is an issue because of existing browser behaviour with the target attribute.