Link archive: December, 2021

Manrope – free sans-serif variable font

This font is a crossover of different font types: it is semi-condensed, semi-rounded, semi-geometric, semi-din, semi-grotesque. It employs minimal stoke thickness variations and a semi-closed aperture.

Add Less | CSS-Tricks - CSS-Tricks

Let the power of the browser work for you, and use less stuff!

Amen!

Your websites start fast until you add too much to make them slow. Do you need any framework at all? Could you do what you want natively in the browser?

Add a Service Worker to Your Site | CSS-Tricks - CSS-Tricks

Damn, I wish I had thought of giving this answer to the prompt, “What is one thing people can do to make their website better?”

If you do nothing else, this will be a huge boost to your site in 2022.

Chris’s piece is a self-contained tutorial!

Brian Eno on NFTs and Automaticism

Much of the energy behind crypto arises from the very strong need that some people feel to operate outside of a state, and therefore outside of any sort of democratic communal overview. The idea that Ayn Rand, that Nietzsche-for-Teenagers toxin, should have had her whacky ideas enshrined in a philosophy about money is what is terrifying to me.

Tailwind and the Femininity of CSS

So when it comes down to the root of the problem, perhaps it isn’t CSS itself but our unwillingness to examine our sexist ideas of what is worthy in web development.

Remove Trackers - CSS-Tricks

Laura and I are on the same page here.

Defensive CSS - Ahmad Shadeed

This is a smart collection of situations to consider and the CSS to resolve them. It’s all about unearthing assumptions.

Serve folder for web development

This is a very nifty use of a service worker—choose a local folder that you want to navigate using HTTP rather than the file system.

Embrace the Platform - CSS-Tricks

This is a wonderful piece by Bram. Half history lesson, and half practical advice for building resilient websites today:

By embracing what the web platform gives us — instead of trying to fight against it — we can build better websites.

Keep it simple. Apply the Rule of Least Power. Build with progressive enhancement in mind.

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — in that order.

Help Users Accomplish What They Came For - CSS-Tricks

If I were to point out one thing that people can do to make their website better, it is to take a moment to think about the most crucial actions that we want our users to be able to do on a page and make them as easy and accessible as possible.

All visual effects, fancy graphics, beautiful interactions, and tracking scripts should come second.

Wise words from Anna.

I hope that progressive enhancement doesn’t become yet another buzzword and that you really take a moment to help the user accomplish what they came for.

Linking Manifesto – Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking

We invite software developers to do their part, by

1. ensuring their users can conveniently obtain a link to the currently open or selected resource via a user interface; and
2. providing an application programming interface (API) to obtain or construct a link to that resource (i.e., to get its address and name).

Test Your Product on a Crappy Laptop - CSS-Tricks

Eric’s response to Chris’s question—“What is one thing people can do to make their website better?”—dovetails nicely with my own answer:

The two real problems here are:

1. Third-party assets, such as the very analytics and CRM packages you use to determine who is using your product and how they go about it. There’s no real control over the quality or amount of code they add to your site, and setting up the logic to block them loading their own third-party resources is difficult to do.
2. The people who tell you to add these third-party assets. These people typically aren’t aware of the performance issues caused by the ask, or don’t care because it’s not part of the results they’re judged by.

Inertia - CSS-Tricks

Here’s a thoughtful response from Chris to my post about Svelte, Astro, and React.

Advent of Bloggers 2021: Day 3 | James’ Coffee Blog

James is featuring a different blog every day of Christmas and he chose mine for day three. What a lovely project!

I love writing this series. For the last three days, one of the first things on my mind after waking up is “what blog am I going to feature today?” I have seen so many interesting websites in the last few years. If you ever feel like the web is all the same, I’d recommend checking out the IndieWeb or clicking through the websites I feature in this series. You’ll realise there is still a great deal of creative content on the web written by independent bloggers: you just have to know where to start looking.

Simon Collison | Stream on

Writing has been essential for focus, planning, catharsis, anger management, etc. Get it down, get it out. Writing is hard, but it’s also therapy: give order to a pile of thoughts to understand them better and move on.

I concur! Though it’s worth adding that it feels qualitatively different (and better!) to do this on your own site rather than contributing to someone else’s silo, like Twitter or Facebook.

Web tech is better. Developer norms are worse. | Go Make Things

The web historically moves in waves.

Libraries are created to push complex features in an easier way. Then the libraries themselves get complicated, often more so than the benefits they provide.

Eventually, (some of) the core features of those libraries make their way into the browser itself, but the libraries linger like water on the shore, slowly receding.

And before the sand has a chance to fully dry, a new set of libraries washes in to push the web even further.

morals in the machine | The Roof is on Phire

We are so excited by the idea of machines that can write, and create art, and compose music, with seemingly little regard for how many wells of creativity sit untapped because many of us spend the best hours of our days toiling away, and even more can barely fulfill basic needs for food, shelter, and water. I can’t help but wonder how rich our lives could be if we focused a little more on creating conditions that enable all humans to exercise their creativity as much as we would like robots to be able to.

The Case Against Crypto | Pervasive Media Studio

The underlying technology of cryptocurrency is based on a world without trust. Its most ardent proponents want to demolish institutions and abolish regulation, reducing the world to a numbers game which they believe they can win. If the wildest fantasies of cryptocurrency enthusiasts were to come true, if all the environmental and technical objections were to fall away, the result would be financial capitalism with all the brakes taken off.

The promotion of cryptocurrencies is at best irresponsible, an advertisement for an unregulated casino. At worst it is an environmental disaster, a predatory pyramid scheme, and a commitment to an ideology of greed and distrust. I believe the only ethical response is to reject it in all its forms.

Jacques Corby-Tuech - Marketers are Addicted to Bad Data

We’ve got click rates, impressions, conversion rates, open rates, ROAS, pageviews, bounces rates, ROI, CPM, CPC, impression share, average position, sessions, channels, landing pages, KPI after never ending KPI.

That’d be fine if all this shit meant something and we knew how to interpret it. But it doesn’t and we don’t.

The reality is much simpler, and therefore much more complex. Most of us don’t understand how data is collected, how these mechanisms work and most importantly where and how they don’t work.

Making Colophon Cards – Baldur Bjarnason

I think Baldur is onto something here with his categorisation of software. There’s the software based on innovation, something truly novel:

Innovation’s the word. Pushing the boundaries. You know the phrases. Usually spouted by that dude at the party.

Then there’s the software based on itertion, making a better version of a proven tool:

We are now in a place where we have entire genres of software that have decades of history, are backed by stacks of new and old research, have dozens of successful, well-made exemplar apps, and a broad enough conceptual space to allow for new variations on the theme.

In short, we have genre software and we have avant-garde software, and I’ve always been more interested in genre fiction than literary fiction.

Ain’t No Party Like a Third Party - CSS-Tricks

Chris is doing another end-of-year roundup. This time the prompt is “What is one thing people can do to make their website bettter?”

This is my response.

I’d like to tell you something not to do to make your website better. Don’t add any third-party scripts to your site.

Townscaper

Now you can play a demo of Townscaper right in your browser.

There goes your productivity.

Aliendscapes - Alien Planet Generator

Generative landscapes made with 2K of vanilla JavaScript.

Click (or refresh) for a new one.

Best laid plans by Amy Hupe, content designer.

All of Amy’s writing recently has been absolutely wonderful, some of the best I’ve read in a long while, but I particularly needed this one.

I don’t know where we go from here, with this latest pandemic setback, but I do know that things will keep moving.

And if you feel bad today, feel bad. Feel sad or angry or scared or whatever it is you need to feel. Give yourself to yourself as you are.

Things will keep changing. Life will keep unfolding. We will keep going.

Webrise

Prompted by my talk, The State Of The Web, Brian zooms out to get some perspective on how browser power is consolidated.

The web is made of clients and servers. There’s a huge amount of diversity in the server space but there’s very little diversity when it comes to clients because making a browser has become so complex and expensive.

But Brian hopes that this complexity and expense could be distributed amongst a large amount of smaller players.

10 companies agreeing to invest $10k apiece to advance and maintain some area of shared interest is every bit as useful as 1 agreeing to invest $100k generally. In fact, maybe it’s more representative.

We believe that there is a very long tail of increasingly smaller companies who could do something, if only they coordinated to fund it together. The further we stretch this out, the more sources we enable, the more its potential adds up.