The Weather Out There - Long Now
I really liked this short story.
Link tags: rel
132
Web Components from early 2024 · Chris Burnell
Some lovely HTML web components—perfect for progressive enhancement!
Qubyte Codes - IndieWebCamp Brighton 2024
Mark’s write-up of the excellent Indie Web Camp Brighton that he co-organised with Paul.
How We Verified Ourselves on Mastodon — and How You Can Too – The Markup
It gives me warm fuzzies to see an indie web building block like rel="me" getting coverage like this.
Why you should never use px to set font-size in CSS - Josh Collinsworth blog
Reminder:
emandremwork with the user’s font size;pxcompletely overrides it.
How To Improve Largest Contentful Paint for Faster Load Times - Calibre
A no-nonsense checklist of good performance advice from Karolina.
Understanding Layout Algorithms
Josh is great at explaining tricky concepts and here he’s really set himself a challenge: explaining layout modes in CSS.
A Quick History of Digital Communication Before the Internet - Eager Blog
A potted history of communication networks from the pony express and the telegraph to ethernet and wi-fi.
Townscaper
Now you can play a demo of Townscaper right in your browser.
There goes your productivity.
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.
An Idea from Computer Science That Can Change Your Life – Jorge Arango
Applying Postel’s Law to relationships:
I aspire to be conservative in what and how I share (i.e., avoid drama) while understanding that other people will say all sorts of unmindful things.
Is Safari the new Internet Explorer?
The transcript from the latest episode of the HTTP 203 podcast is well worth perusing.
- Internet Explorer halted development, no innovation. Would you say Safari is the new IE?
- There was loads of stuff missing. Is Safari the new IE?
- My early career was built on knowing the bugs in IE6 and how to solve them. Is Safari the new IE?
- Internet Explorer 6, it had a really slow JavaScript engine, performance was bad in that browser. Is Safari the new IE?
- Internet Explorer had a fairly cavalier attitude towards web standards. Is Safari the new IE?
- Back in the day that we had almost no communication whatsoever. Is Safari the new IE?
- Slow-release cycle. Is Safari the new IE?
Kevin Kelly on Why Technology Has a Will | Palladium Magazine
Technologies are always coming out of networks that require other related ideas to have the next one. The fact that we have simultaneous independent invention as a norm works against the idea of the heroic inventor, that we’re dependent on them for inventions. These things will come when all the other pieces are ready.
AddyOsmani.com - Preload late-discovered Hero images faster
Did you know there’s an imagesrcset attribute you can put on link rel="preload" as="image" (along with an imagesizes attribute)?
I didn’t. (Until Amber pointed this out.)
On dependency | RobWeychert.com V7
I’m very selective about how I depend on other people’s work in my personal projects. Here are the factors I consider when evaluating dependencies.
- Complexity How complex is it, who absorbs the cost of that complexity, and is that acceptable?
- Comprehensibility Do I understand how it works, and if not, does that matter?
- Reliability How consistently and for how long can I expect it to work?
I really like Rob’s approach to choosing a particular kind of dependency when working on the web:
When I’m making things, that’s how I prefer to depend on others and have them depend on me: by sharing strong, simple ideas as a collective, and recombining them in novel ways with rigorous specificity as individuals.
geoTrad - Google My Maps
Well, this is a rather wonderful mashup made with data from thesession.org:
The distribution of Irish traditional tunes which reference place names in Ireland
Hobbies for the hell of it | Brad Frost
We should celebrate our hobbies for the joy-giving activities they are, and recognize that they don’t need to become anything bigger than that. And of course that’s not to say they those hobbies can’t turn into something bigger — it’s incredible when your passions and your occupation overlap — but it should be because you want to rather than that you feel pressured to. Not every activity you do needs to become a big official thing.
Why Progressive Web Apps Are The Future of Mobile Web [2019 Research]
PWAs just work better than your typical mobile site. Period.
But bear in mind:
Maybe simply because the “A” in PWA stands for “app,” too much discussion around PWAs focuses on comparing and contrasting to native mobile applications. We believe this comparison (and the accompanying discussion) is misguided.
The Simplest Way to Load CSS Asynchronously | Filament Group, Inc.
Scott re-examines the browser support for loading everything-but-the-critical-CSS asynchronously and finds that it might now be as straightforward as this one declaration:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/path/to/my.css" media="print" onload="this.media='all'">
I love the fact the Filament Group are actively looking at how deprecate their loadCSS polyfill—exactly the right attitude for polyfills in general.
Spurious Correlations
Correlation does not imply causation.