Technology doesn’t have to be terrible. Here’s an absolutely wonderful use of an e-ink display:
I made as much use of vanilla HTML and CSS as possible. I used a small amount of JavaScript but no framework or other libraries.
Mandy takes a deep dive into the treatment of altruism in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.
This chimes with something I’ve been pondering: we anticipate big breakthoughs in software—AI!, blockchain!, metaverse! chatbots!—but in reality the field is relatively stagnant. Meanwhile in areas like biology, there’s been unexpected advances. Or maybe, as Terence indicates, it’s all about the hype.
An experimental image font made using the University of Plymouth’s unique letterpress workshop.
Grungy!
The font is intended for display purposes only, and not is suitable for body text.
Always refreshing to see some long-term thinking applied to the web.
Although this piece is ostensibly about why we should be using web workers more, there’s a much, much bigger point about the growing power gap between the devices we developers use and the typical device used by the rest of the planet.
While we are getting faster flagship phones every cycle, the vast majority of people can’t afford these. The more affordable phones are stuck in the past and have highly fluctuating performance metrics. These low-end phones will mostly likely be used by the massive number of people coming online in the next couple of years. The gap between the fastest and the slowest phone is getting wider, and the median is going down.
This broke my brain.
The challenge: in the fewest resources possible, render meaningful text.
- How small can a font really go?
- How many bytes of memory would you need (to store it and run it?)
- How much code would it take to express it?
Lets see just how far we can take this!
Oh, this is magnificent! A rallying call for everyone designing and developing on the web to avoid making any assumptions about the people we’re building for:
People will use your site how they want, and according to their means. That is wonderful, and why the Web was built.
I would even say that the % of people viewing your site the way you do rapidly approaches zilch.
Marcin built this lovely little in-browser tool to demonstrate how segmented type displays work at different sizes.
This is a potentially useful bit of CSS that I had no idea existed.
A really deep dive into display: contents from Ire.
Tal Leming’s thoroughly delightful (and obsessive) account of designing the 90 Minutes typeface for U.S. Soccer.
FIFA has strict regulations that govern the size and stroke weight of numbers and letters used on official match uniforms. This made me unbelievably paranoid. I had a nightmare that one of the national teams would be set for kickoff of an important match and the referee would suddenly blow the whistle and say, “Hey, hey, hey! The bottom stroke of that 2 is 1 mm too light. The United States must forfeit this match!”
An interesting approach to digital preservation: storing digital video in the DNA of bacteria.
This looks like an interesting network-level approach to routing around the censorship of internet-hostile governments like China, Turkey, Australia, and the UK.
Rather than trying to hide individual proxies from censors, refraction brings proxy functionality to the core of the network, through partnership with ISPs and other network operators. This makes censorship much more costly, because it prevents censors from selectively blocking only those servers used to provide Internet freedom. Instead, whole networks outside the censored country provide Internet freedom to users—and any encrypted data exchange between a censored nation’s Internet and a participating friendly network can become a conduit for the free flow of information.
Everyone’s been talking about font-display: swap as a way of taking the pain out of loading web fonts, but here Chris looks at font-display: optional and font-display: fallback as well.
This is an excellent proposal from Emil. If we can apply display: contents to fieldsets, then we would finally have a way of undoing the byzantine browser styles that have hindered adoption of this element. This proposal also ensures backwards compatibility so there’d be no breakage of older sites:
The legacy appearance of fieldsets probably needs to be preserved for compatibility reasons. But
display: contentsis not supported in any old browsers, and is most likely used on exactly zero sites using the legacy look of fieldsets.
Whaddya say, browser makers?
This is a really clear explanation of how CSS works.
The font-display property is landing in browsers, and this is a great introduction to using it:
If you don’t know which option to use, then go with
swap. Not only does it provide an optimal balance between custom fonts and accessibility of content, it provides the same font loading behavior that we’ve relied on JavaScript for. If you have fonts on the page that you’d like to have load, but could ultimately do without, consider going withfallbackoroptionalwhen usingfont-display.
Until it’s more widely supported, you can continue to use a JavaScript solution, but even then you can feature detect first:
if ("fontDisplay" in document.body.style === false) {
/* JavaScript font loading logic goes here. */
}
One more reason to make the switch to HTTPS.
I’ve seen the exact problem that Rachel describes here—flexbox only applied to direct children, meaning the markup would have to be adjusted. display: contents looks like a nifty solution.