Journal tags: order

In 2013, I spoke at the border:none event in Nuremberg. I gave a talk called The Power of Simplicity.

It was a great little event. Most of the talks were, like mine, on technical topics; design, development, the usual conference material.

This year Joschi and Marc decided to have another border:none event ten years on from the first one. They invited back all the original speakers, as well as some new folks. They kept the ticket price the same as ten years ago—just thirty euros.

For us speakers from the previous event, the only brief they gave us was to consider what’s happened in the past decade. I played it pretty safe and talked about the web. I’ll post a transcript of my talk soon.

Some of the other speakers were far more ambitious. They spoke about themselves, the world, the meaning of life …my presentation was very tame in comparison.

I really, really admire the honesty and vulnerability that those people displayed. Tobias Baldauf in particular took my breath away. He delivered an intensely personal talk on generational trauma that was meticulously researched and took incredible bravery to deliver. It was worth going to Nuremberg just for the privilege of being present for that talk.

Other talks were refreshingly tech-free. There was a talk on cold-water swimming. There was a talk on paragliding. And I don’t mean they were saying “what designers can learn from cold-water swimming” or “how I became a better developer through paragliding.” The talks were literally about swimming and paragliding.

There was a great variety of speakers this time around, include age ranges from puberty to menopause (quite literally—that was the topic of one of the talks). I had the great pleasure of providing some coaching before the event to fifteen year old Maya who was delivering her first talk in English. She did a fantastic job! And the talk she gave—about how teachers in her school aren’t always trusting of the technology they provide to students—was directly relevant to what we’re seeing in the world of work. Give people autonomy, agency and trust.

There was a lot of trust at border:none. Everyone who bought a ticket did so on trust—they had no idea what to expect. Likewise, Marc and Joschi put their trust in the speakers. They gave the speakers the freedom to talk about whatever they wanted. That trust was repayed.

Florian took some superb pictures of the event. Matthias wrote up his experience. So did Tom. Valisis shared the gist of his excellent talk.

At the end of the event there was some joking about returning in 2033. I love the idea of a conference that happens once every ten years. Count me in!

I was refactoring some CSS on The Session over the weekend. I thought it would be good to switch over to using logical properties exclusively. I did this partly to make the site more easily translatable into languages with different writing modes, but mostly as an exercise to help train me in thinking with logical properties by default.

All in all, it went pretty smoothly. You can kick the tyres by opening up dev tools on The Session and adding a writing-mode declaration to the body or html element.

For the most part, the switchover was smooth. It mostly involved swapping out property names with left, right, top, and bottom for inline-start, inline-end, block-start, and block-end.

The border-radius properties tripped me up a little. You have to use shorthand like border-start-end-radius, not border-block-start-inline-end-radius (that doesn’t exist). So you have to keep the order of the properties in mind:

border-{{block direction}}-{{inline-direction}}-radius

Speaking of shorthand, I also had to kiss some shorthand declarations goodbye. Let’s say I use this shorthand for something like margin or padding:

margin: 1em 1.5em 2em 0.5em;

Those values get applied to margin-top, margin-right, margin-bottom, and margin-left, not the logical equivalents (block-start, inline-end, block-end, and inline-start). So separate declarations are needed instead:

margin-block-start: 1em;
margin-inline-end: 1.5em;
margin-block-end: 2em;
margin-inline-start: 0.5em;

Same goes for shorthand like this:

margin: 1em 2em;

That needs to be written as two declarations:

margin-block: 1em;
margin-inline: 2em;

Now I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it feels really weird that you can’t use logical properties in media queries. Although as I said:

Now you could rightly argue that in this instance we’re talking about the physical dimensions of the viewport. So maybe width and height make more sense than inline and block.

But along comes the new kid on the block (or inline), container queries, ready to roll with container-type values like inline-size. I hope it’s just a matter of time until we can use logical properties in all our conditional queries.

The other place where there’s still a cognitive mismatch is in transforms and animations. We’ve got a translateX() function but no translate-inline(). We’ve got translateY() but no translate-block().

On The Session I’m using some JavaScript to figure out the details of some animation effects. I’m using methods like getBoundingClientRect(). It doesn’t return logical properties. So if I ever want to adjust my animations based on writing direction, I’ll need to fork my JavaScript code.

Oh, and one other thing: the aspect-ratio property takes values in the form of width/height, not inline/block. That makes sense if you’re dealing with images, videos, or other embedded content but it makes it really tricky to use aspect-ratio on elements that contain text. I mean, it works fine as long as the text is in a language using a top-to-bottom writing mode, but not for any other languages.

The Rise Of Skywalker arrives on Disney Plus on the fourth of May (a date often referred to as Star Wars Day, even though May 25th is and always will be the real Star Wars Day). Time to begin a Star Wars movie marathon. But in which order?

Back when there were a mere two trilogies, this was already a vexing problem if someone were watching the films for the first time. You could watch the six films in episode order:

1. The Phantom Menace
2. Attack Of The Clones
3. Revenge Of The Sith
4. A New Hope
5. The Empire Strikes Back
6. The Return Of The Jedi

But then you’re spoiling the grand reveal in episode five.

Alright then, how about release order?

1. A New Hope
2. The Empire Strikes Back
3. Return Of The Jedi
4. The Phantom Menace
5. Attack Of The Clones
6. Revenge Of The Sith

But then you’re front-loading the big pay-off, and you’re finishing with a big set-up.

This conundrum was solved with the machete order. It suggests omitting The Phantom Menace, not because it’s crap, but because nothing happens in it that isn’t covered in the first five minutes of Attack Of The Clones. The machete order is:

1. A New Hope
2. The Empire Strikes Back
3. Attack Of The Clones
4. Revenge Of The Sith
5. Return Of The Jedi

It’s kind of brilliant. You get to keep the big reveal in The Empire Strikes Back, and then through flashback, you see how this came to be. Best of all, the pay-off in Return Of The Jedi has even more resonance because you’ve just seen Anakin’s downfall in Revenge Of The Sith.

With the release of the new sequel trilogy, an adjusted machete order is a pretty straightforward way to see the whole saga:

1. A New Hope
2. The Empire Strikes Back
3. The Phantom Menace (optional)
4. Attack Of The Clones
5. Revenge Of The Sith
6. Return Of The Jedi
7. The Force Awakens
8. The Last Jedi
9. The Rise Of Skywalker

Done. But …what if you want to include the standalone films too?

If you slot them in in release order, they break up the flow:

1. A New Hope
2. The Empire Strikes Back
3. The Phantom Menace (optional)
4. Attack Of The Clones
5. Revenge Of The Sith
6. Return Of The Jedi
7. The Force Awakens
8. Rogue One
9. The Last Jedi
10. Solo
11. The Rise Of Skywalker

I’m planning to watch all eleven films. This was my initial plan:

1. Rogue One
2. A New Hope
3. The Empire Strikes Back
4. The Phantom Menace
5. Attack Of The Clones
6. Revenge Of The Sith
7. Solo
8. Return Of The Jedi
9. The Force Awakens
10. The Last Jedi
11. The Rise Of Skywalker

I definitely want to have Rogue One lead straight into A New Hope. The problem is where to put Solo. I don’t want to interrupt the Sith/Jedi setup/payoff.

So here’s my current plan, which I have already begun:

1. Solo
2. Rogue One
3. A New Hope
4. The Empire Strikes Back
5. The Phantom Menace
6. Attack Of The Clones
7. Revenge Of The Sith
8. Return Of The Jedi
9. The Force Awakens
10. The Last Jedi
11. The Rise Of Skywalker

This way, the two standalone films work as world-building for the saga and don’t interrupt the flow once the main story is underway.

I think this works pretty well. Neither Solo nor Rogue One require any prior knowledge to be enjoyed.

And just in case you’re thinking that perhaps I’m overthinking it a bit and maybe I’ve got too much time on my hands …the world has too much time on its hands right now! Thanks to The Situation, I can not only take the time to plan and execute the viewing order for a Star Wars movie marathon, I can feel good about it. Stay home, they said. Literally saving lives, they said. Happy to oblige!

I just got back from Nürnberg where I gave the closing talk at the cheap’n’cheerful border:none event. It was my first time in Nürnberg and I wish I could’ve stayed longer in such a beautiful place. I would’ve liked to stick around for today’s Open Device Lab admin meetup, but alas I had to get up at the crack of dawn to start making my way back to Brighton.

I was in Germany last month too. That time I was in Freiburg, where I was giving the closing talk at Smashing Conference. That was a lot of fun:

So I threw away my slidedeck and went Keynote commando.

The video from that slideless talk is up on Vimeo now for your viewing and/or downloading pleasure.

If you watch it through to the end, then you’ll know why I could be found immediately afterwards showing people some centuries-old carvings on Freiburg’s cathedral.

Update: I’ve published a transcript of the talk.

Sierra Vista is located just a few miles to north of Mexico. If you’re driving up to Benson or Tucson, you can expect to be stopped by the border police. Please have your papers ready for inspection.

Most days, a tethered unmanned blimp hovers over the mountains to the south of Sierra Vista. On some nights, you can see the light of a drone traversing the air above the border.

Sierra Vista is also home to an army base, hence the occasional helicopters and aircraft.

Tomorrow we leave for San Diego, right next to the border with Tijuana.