Once Upon a Browser
Browse through some truly web-native artwork by Eric, and read all about it:
There is a lot, and I mean a lot, of room for variability in web technologies. We work very hard to tame it, to deny it, to shun it.
Link tags: iab
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Marbla
A fun variable font with three axes: inktrap, balloon, and curve.
Monaspace
Five lovely monospaced variable fonts.
Mona Sans & Hubot Sans
Two new lovely open source variable fonts from Github.
Octavia Butler’s Science Fiction Predicted the World We Live In - The New York Times
A profile of the life and work of the brilliant Octavia E. Butler.
Fontshare: Quality Fonts. Free.
A whole lotta nice fonts—most of them variable fonts—from Indian Type Foundry.
Roboto … But Make It Flex - Material Design
This version of Roboto from Font Bureau is a very variable font indeed.
Fluid type sizes and spacing — Piper Haywood
Prompted by Utopia, Piper shares her methodology for fluid type in Sass.
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.
UK ICO: surveillance advertising is dead
Behavioral ads are only more profitable than context ads if all the costs of surveillance – the emotional burden of being watched; the risk of breach, identity-theft and fraud; the potential for government seizure of surveillance data – is pushed onto internet users. If companies have to bear those costs, behavioral ads are a total failure, because no one in the history of the human race would actually grant consent to all the things that gets done with our data.
Tracking-industry body IAB Europe told that it has infringed the GDPR, and its “consent” pop-ups used by Google and other tech firms are unlawful. - Irish Council for Civil Liberties
Google and the entire tracking industry relies on IAB Europe’s consent system, which has now been found to be illegal.
Software developers have stopped caring about reliability
My web browser has been perfectly competent at submitting HTML forms for the past 28 years, but for some stupid reason some asshole developer decided to reimplement all of the form semantics in JavaScript, and now I can’t pay my electricity bill without opening up the dev tools. Imagine what it’s like to not know how to do that. Imagine if you were blind.
Folks, this is not okay. Our industry is characterized by institutional recklessness and a callous lack of empathy for our users.
MD Nichrome by Mass-Driver
Marvin has some competition! Here’s another beautiful sci-fi variable font:
MD Nichrome is a display typeface based on the typography of paperback science fiction from the 70s and early 80s.
CSS { In Real Life } | Quick Tip: Style Pseudo-elements with Javascript Using Custom Properties
Oh, this is smart! You can’t target pseudo-elements in JavaScript, but you can use custom properties as a proxy instead.
Building Dark Mode | Product Blog • Sentry
Robin makes a good point here about using dark mode thinking as a way to uncover any assumptions you might have unwittingly baked into your design:
Given its recent popularity, you might believe dark mode is a fad. But from a design perspective, dark mode is exceptionally useful. That’s because a big part of design is about building relationships between colors. And so implementing dark mode essentially forced everyone on the team to think long, hard, and consistently about our front-end design components. In short, dark mode helped our design system not only look good, but make sense.
So even if you don’t actually implement dark mode, acting as though it’s there will give you a solid base to build in.
I did something similar with the back end of Huffduffer and The Session—from day one, I built them as though the interface would be available in multiple languages. I never implemented multi-language support, but just the awareness of it saved me from baking in any shortcuts or assumptions, and enforced a good model/view/controller separation.
For most front-end codebases, the design of your color system shows you where your radioactive styles are. It shows you how things are tied together, and what depends on what.
Proxima Vara by Mark Simonson
Oh, nice! A version of the classic Proxima Nova that’s a variable font that allows you to vary weight, width, and slant.
RFC 8752 - Report from the IAB Workshop on Exploring Synergy between Content Aggregation and the Publisher Ecosystem (ESCAPE)
During the workshop, several online publishers indicated that if it weren’t for the privileged position in the Google Search carousel given to AMP content, they would not publish in that format.
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.
What Can You Put in a CSS Variable? / Coder’s Block
A reminder that the contens of custom properties don’t have to be valid property values:
From a syntax perspective, CSS variables are “extremely permissive”.
The Empty Box | CSS-Tricks
This is an excellent framing for minimal viable products—what would the black box theatre production be?
Forget about all the production and complexity you could build. What’s the purpose you want to convey at the core?