Code print

You know what I like? Print stylesheets!

I mean, I’m not a huge fan of trying to get the damn things to work consistently—thanks, browsers—but I love the fact that they exist (athough I’ve come across a worrying number of web developers who weren’t aware of their existence). Print stylesheets are one more example of the assumption-puncturing nature of the web: don’t assume that everyone will be reading your content on a screen. News articles, blog posts, recipes, lyrics …there are many situations where a well-considered print stylesheet can make all the difference to the overall experience.

You know what I don’t like? QR codes!

It’s not because they’re ugly, or because they’ve been over-used by the advertising industry in completely inapropriate ways. No, I don’t like QR codes because they aren’t an open standard. Still, I must grudgingly admit that they’re a convenient way of providing a shortcut to a URL (albeit a completely opaque one—you never know if it’s actually going to take you to the URL it promises or to a Rick Astley video). And now that the parsing of QR codes is built into iOS without the need for any additional application, the barrier to usage is lower than ever.

So much as I might grit my teeth, QR codes and print stylesheets make for good bedfellows.

I picked up a handy tip from a Smashing Magazine article about print stylesheets a few years back. You can the combination of a @media print and generated content to provide a QR code for the URL of the page being printed out. Google’s Chart API provides a really handy shortcut for generating QR codes:

https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=150x150&chl=http://example.com

Except that there’s no telling how long that will continue to work. Google being Google, they’ve deprecated the simple image chart API in favour of the over-engineered JavaScript alternative. So just as I recently had to migrate all my maps over to Leaflet when Google changed their Maps API from under the feet of developers, the clock is ticking on when I’ll have to find an alternative to the Image Charts API.

For now, I’ve got the QR code generation happening on The Session for individual discussions, events, recordings, sessions, and tunes. For the tunes, there’s also a separate URL for each setting of a tune, specifically for printing out. I’ve added a QR code there too.

I’ve been thinking about another potential use for QR codes. I’m preparing a new talk for An Event Apart Seattle. The talk is going to be quite practical—for a change—and I’m going to be encouraging people to visit some URLs. It might be fun to include the biggest possible QR code on a slide.

I’d better generate the images before Google shuts down that API.

Measuring the Hard-to-Measure – CSS Wizardry

Everything old is new again—sometimes the age-old technique of using a 1x1 pixel image to log requests is still the only way to get certain metrics.

While tracking pixels are far from a new idea, there are creative ways in which we can use them to collect data useful to developers. Once the data is gathered, we can begin to make much more informed decisions about how we work.

The Futures of Typography

A wonderfully thoughtful piece from Robin, ranging from the printing technologies of the 15th century right up to the latest web technologies. It’s got all my favourite things in there: typography, digital preservation, and service workers. Marvellous!

dbohdan/classless-css: A list of classless CSS themes/frameworks with screenshots

A collection of stylesheets that don’t use class selectors. Think of them as alternatives to default user-agent stylesheets.

Body Margin 8px | Miriam Eric Suzanne

I love this kind of spelunking into the history of why things are they way they are on the web!

Here, Detective Chief Inspector Suzanne tries to get to the bottom of why every browser has eight pixels of margin applied to the body element in the user-agent stylesheet.

CSS and Network Performance – CSS Wizardry

Harry takes a look at the performance implications of loading CSS. To be clear, this is not about the performance of CSS selectors or ordering (which really doesn’t make any difference at this point), but rather it’s about the different ways of getting rid of as much render-blocking CSS as possible.

…a good rule of thumb to remember is that your page will only render as quickly as your slowest stylesheet.