Tags: experiment

Marbla

A fun variable font with three axes: inktrap, balloon, and curve.

The Splintered Mind: The Black Hole Objection to Longtermism and Consequentialism

Stick a singularity in your “effective altruism” pipe and smoke it.

A year of new avenues

All along, from the frothy 1990s to the per­co­lat­ing 2000s to the frozen 2010s to today, the web has been the sure thing. All along, it’s been grow­ing and maturing, sprout­ing new capabilities. From my van­tage point, that growth has seemed to accel­er­ate in the past five years; CSS, in par­tic­u­lar, has become incred­i­bly flex­i­ble and expressive. Maybe even a bit overstuffed — but I’ll take it.

For peo­ple who care about cre­at­ing worlds together, rather than get­ting rich, the web is the past and the web is the future. What luck, that this decentralized, per­mis­sion­less sys­tem claimed a posi­tion at the heart of the inter­net, and stuck there. It’s limited, of course; frustrating; some­times maddening. But that’s every cre­ative medium. That’s life.

Auto Dark Theme - Chrome Developers

At first glance, this looks like a terrible idea. But the key is in the implementation. In this case, the implementation is truly awful.

The section on detecting “auto dark theme” is, as far as I can tell, not intended as a joke.

Mind you, this could all be a galaxy-brain idea to encourage more developers to provide their own dark mode styles. (In much the same way that AMP was supposed to encourage better performance.)

CSS Font Lorem Ipsum

Professional web designer on a closed course. Do not attempt.

Social Attention: a modest prototype in shared presence (Interconnected)

I love, love, love this experiment from Matt—messin’ around in websites!

Blob Opera — Google Arts & Culture

Ridiculously cute and fun—all in the browser.

Vendor prefixes didn’t work. The theory was sound. It was a way of marking CSS and JavaScript features as being experimental. Developers could use the prefixed properties as long as they understood that those features weren’t to be relied upon.

That’s not what happened though. Developers used vendor-prefixed properties as though they were stable. Tutorials were published that basically said “Go ahead and use these vendor-prefixed properties and ship it!” There were even tools that would add the prefixes for you so you didn’t have to type them out for yourself.

Browsers weren’t completely blameless either. Long after features were standardised, they would only be supported in their prefixed form. Apple was and is the worst for this. To this day, if you want to use the clip-path property in your CSS, you’ll need to duplicate your declaration with -webkit-clip-path if you want to support Safari. It’s been like that for seven years and counting.

Like capitalism, vendor prefixes were one of those ideas that sounded great in theory but ended up being unworkable in practice.

Still, developers need some way to get their hands on experiment features. But we don’t want browsers to ship experimental features without some kind of safety mechanism.

The current thinking involves something called origin trials. Here’s the explainer from Microsoft Edge and here’s Google Chrome’s explainer:

• Developers are able to register for an experimental feature to be enabled on their origin for a fixed period of time measured in months. In exchange, they provide us their email address and agree to give feedback once the experiment ends.
• Usage of these experiments is constrained to remain below Chrome’s deprecation threshold (< 0.5% of all Chrome page loads) by a system which automatically disables the experiment on all origins if this threshold is exceeded.

I think it works pretty well. If you’re really interested in kicking the tyres on an experimental feature, you can opt in to the origin trial. But it’s very clear that you wouldn’t want to ship it to production.

That said…

You could ship something that’s behind an origin trial, but you’d have to make sure you’re putting safeguards in place. At the very least, you’d need to do feature detection. You certainly couldn’t use an experimental feature for anything mission critical …but you could use it as an enhancement.

And that is a pretty great way to think about all web features, experimental or otherwise. Don’t assume the feature will be supported. Use feature detection (or @supports in the case of CSS). Try to use the feature as an enhancement rather than a dependency.

If you treat all browser features as though they’re behind an origin trial, then suddenly the landscape of browser support becomes more navigable. Instead of looking at the support table for something on caniuse.com and thinking, “I wish more browsers supported this feature so that I could use it!”, you can instead think “I’m going to use this feature today, but treat it as an experimental feature.”

You can also do it for well-established features like querySelector, addEventListener, and geolocation. Instead of assuming that browser support is universal, it doesn’t hurt to take a more defensive approach. Assume nothing. Acknowledge and embrace unpredictability.

The debacle with vendor prefixes shows what happens if we treat experimental features as though they’re stable. So let’s flip that around. Let’s treat stable features as though they’re experimental. If you cultivate that mindset, your websites will be more robust and resilient.

Accessible to some - Manuel Matuzović

A score of 100 in Lighthouse or 0 errors in axe doesn’t mean that you’re done, it means that you’re ready to start manual testing and testing with real users, if possible.

How readable—Findings

The results are in for Daniel van Berzon’s most recent experiment into accurately measuring code readability. You can read the results and read about the methodology behind them.

What would happen if we allowed blocking 3rd-Party JavaScript as an option?

This would be a fascinating experiment to run in Firefox nightly! This is in response to that post I wrote about third-party scripts.

(It’s fascinating to see how different this response is to the responses from people working at Google.)

The Flawed Reasoning Behind the Replication Crisis — Nautilus

Bayesian analysis vs. statistical significance, clearly explained.

Variable Fonts for Developers

A showcase of fun experiments with variable fonts, courtesy of Mandy.

Word Bubbles — The Man in Blue

Wheeee! Another fun experiment from Cameron.

The 500-Year-Long Science Experiment - The Atlantic

Running an experiment for 500 years is hard enough. Then there’s the documentation…

The hard part is ensuring someone will continue doing this on schedule well into the future. The team left a USB stick with instructions, which Möller realizes is far from adequate, given how quickly digital technology becomes obsolete. They also left a hard copy, on paper. “But think about 500-year-old paper,” he says, how it would yellow and crumble. “Should we carve it in stone? Do we have to carve it in a metal plate?” But what if someone who cannot read the writing comes along and decides to take the metal plate as a cool, shiny relic, as tomb raiders once did when looting ancient tombs?

No strategy is likely to be completely foolproof 500 years later. So the team asks that researchers at each 25-year time point copy the instructions so that they remain linguistically and technologically up to date.

9 squares – The Man in Blue

Some lovely little animation experiments from Cameron.

Text Effects - a Collection by Mandy Michael on CodePen

Mandy’s experiments with text effects in CSS are kinda mindblowing—I can’t wait to see her at Ampersand at the end of the month!

JavaScript Systems Music

A massively in-depth study of boundary-breaking music, recreated through the web audio API.

1. Steve Reich - It’s Gonna Rain (1965)
2. Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music for Airports, 2/1 (1978)
3. Brian Eno - Discreet Music (1975)

You don’t have to be a musician or an expert in music theory to follow this guide. I’m neither of those things. I’m figuring things out as I go and it’s perfectly fine if you do too. I believe that this kind of stuff is well within reach for anyone who knows a bit of programming, and you can have a lot of fun with it even if you aren’t a musician.

One thing that definitely won’t hurt though is an interest in experimental music! This will get weird at times.

Font Map · An AI Experiment by IDEO

Fontlandia is yours to explore.

By leveraging AI and convolutional neural networks to draw higher-vision pattern recognition, we have created a tool that helps designers understand and see relationships across more than 750 web fonts.

Detecting text in an image on the web in real-time - Tales of a Developer Advocate by Paul Kinlan

The text detection API is still in its experimental stage, but it opens up a lot of really interesting possibilities for the web: assistive technology to read out text, archiving tools for digitising text …it’s all part of the nascent shape detection API.