My Modern CSS Reset | jakelazaroff.com

I like the approach here: logical properties and sensible default type and spacing.

React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity – Baldur Bjarnason

An insightful and incisive appraisal of technology adoption. This truth hits hard:

React and the component model standardises the software developer and reduces their individual bargaining power excluding them from a proportional share in the gains. Its popularity among executives and management is entirely down to the fact that it helps them erase the various specialities – CSS, accessibility, standard JavaScript in the browser, to name a few – from the job market. Those specialities might still exist in practice – as ad hoc and informal requirements during teamwork – but, as far as employment is concerned, they’re such a small part of the overall developer job market that they might as well be extinct.

Designing better target sizes

This is a wonderfully in-depth interactive explainer on touch target sizes, with plenty of examples.

Invokers (Explainer) | Open UI

This is a really interesting proposal, and I have thoughts.

A long-term plan for logical properties? | Miriam Eric Suzanne

Well, now I’m really glad I wrote that post about logical properties!

We’re not there yet. So how do we get there?

Well, I don’t know for sure – but articles like this are very helpful as we try to work it out!

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.

6, 97: Why scorpions?

A fascinating and inspiring meditation on aerodynamics.

Flexibly Centering an Element with Side-Aligned Content – Eric’s Archived Thoughts

This is a great little tip from Eric for those situations when you want an element to be centred but you want the content inside that element to remain uncentred:

max-inline-size: max-content;
margin-inline: auto;

And I completely concur with his closing thoughts on CSS today:

It’s a nice little example of the quiet revolution that’s been happening in CSS of late. Hard things are becoming easy, and more than easy, simple. Simple in the sense of “direct and not complex”, not in the sense of “obvious and basic”. There’s a sense of growing maturity in the language, and I’m really happy to see it.

Loading and replacing HTML parts with HTML

I like this proposal for a declarative Ajax pattern. It’s relatively straightforward to polyfill, although backward-compatibility is an issue because of existing browser behaviour with the target attribute.

Burnt out? - The Midult

It me.

And yet now, in this moment of semi-stillness, the pause button may have slowed down our geographical dashing, but it has only accelerated our inner flounder. The dull thrum of imprecise apprehension. The gratitude for semi-safety made weird by the ever-blooming realisation that there is little to get excited about.

The 3 Laws of Serverless - Burke Holland

“Serverless”, is a buzzword. We can’t seem to agree on what it actaully means, so it ends up meaning nothing at all. Much like “cloud” or “dynamic” or “synergy”. You just wait for the right time in a meeting to drop it, walk to the board and draw a Venn Diagram, and then just sit back and wait for your well-deserved promotion.

That’s very true, and I do not like the term “serverless” for the rather obvious reason that it’s all about servers (someone else’s servers, that is). But these three principles are handy for figuring out if you’re building with in a serverlessy kind of way:

1. You have no knowledge of the underlying system where your code runs.
2. Scaling is an intrinsic attribute of the technology; so much so that it just happens automatically.
3. You only pay for what you use.

Abstraction; scale; consumption.

Fixed Headers and Jump Links? The Solution is scroll-margin-top | CSS-Tricks

I didn’t know about scroll-margin-top! I wonder if you could apply a universal rule …like, say you’ve got a fixed header that’s 2em in height, couldn’t you declare:

:target { scroll-margin-top: 2em; }

Link Targets and 3.2.5 | Adrian Roselli

Here are the many, many reasons why you should not open links in a new window (or tab).

Regardless of what accessibility conformance level you target, do not arbitrarily open links in a new window or tab. If you are required to do so anyway, inform users in text.

A Walk In Hong Kong (Idle Words)

Maciej goes marching.

The protests are intentionally decentralized, using a jury-rigged combination of a popular message board, the group chat app Telegram, and in-person huddles at the protests.

This sounds like it shouldn’t possibly work, but the protesters are too young to know that it can’t work, so it works.

The Flawed Reasoning Behind the Replication Crisis — Nautilus

Bayesian analysis vs. statistical significance, clearly explained.

How to speak Silicon Valley: decoding tech bros from microdosing to privacy | US news | The Guardian

Every one of these is chef’s kiss.

Break out of the echo chamber - Andy Bell

So much of my echo chamber is consumed by people, including myself, who have a very dim view of JavaScript frameworks being thrown at everything, arguing with the people who are in the process of throwing JavaScript frameworks at everything. We forget one very important thing, though: we represent the minority of the web community and our arguments probably look very pointless and silly to the majority.

Getting help from your worst enemy

Onboarding. Reaching out. In terms of. Synergy. Bandwidth. Headcount. Forward planning. Multichannel. Going forward. We are constantly bombarded and polluted with nonsense speak. These words and phrases snag and attach themselves to our vocabulary like sticky weeds.

Words become walls.

I love this post from Ben on the value of plain language!

We’re not dumbing things down by using simple terms. We’re being smarter.

Read on for the story of the one exception that Ben makes—it’s a good one.

Forget privacy: you’re terrible at targeting anyway - apenwarr

A spot-on description of how targetted advertising works …or rather, how it doesn’t.

They are still trying to sell me car insurance for my subway ride.

Registering as a Share Target with the Web Share Target API  |  Web  |  Google Developers

Well, this could be very handy for Huffduffer!