Nic Chan
What an excellent personal website!
What an excellent personal website!
Exploring the graphic design history of Penguin books:
The covers presented on this site are all from my own collection of about 1400 Penguins, which have been chosen for the beauty or interest of their cover designs. They span the history of the company all the way back to 1935 when Penguin Books was launched.
This is grim:
If you look at the data below on how popular websites today are actually transpiling and deploying their code to production, it turns out that most sites on the internet ship code that is transpiled to ES5, yet still doesn’t work in IE 11—meaning the transpiler and polyfill bloat is being downloaded by 100% of their users, but benefiting none of them.
This is a damned fine list.
I really, really like Paul’s idea of splitting up the indie web principles into one opinionated nerdy list of dev principles, and a separate shorter list of core principles for everyone:
- Own your identity An independent web presence starts with an online identity you own and control. The most reliable way to do this today is by having your own domain name.
- Own your content You should retain control of the things you make, and not be subject to third-parties preventing access to it, deleting it or disappearing entirely. The best way to do this is by publishing content on your own website.
- Have fun! When the web took off in the 90’s people began designing personal sites with garish backgrounds and animated GIFs. It may have been ugly but it was fun. Let’s keep the web weird and interesting.
If you liked David Grann’s book The Wager, here’s another shipwreck tale, this time from the other side of the world.
Good advice for documentation—always document steps in the order that they’ll be taken. Seems obvious, but it really matters at the sentence level.
Laying out sheet music with CSS grid—sounds extreme until you see it abstracted into a web component.
We need fluid and responsive music rendering for the web!
Another terrific interactive tutorial from Ahmad, this time on container queries.
The arc of the web is long and bends towards flexibility.
Robin Sloan on The Culture:
The Culture is a utopia: a future you might actually want to live in. It offers a coherent political vision. This isn’t subtle or allegorical; on the page, citizens of the Culture very frequently articulate and defend their values. (Their enthusiasm for their own politics is considered annoying by most other civilizations.)
Coherent political vision doesn’t require a lot, just some sense of “this is what we ought to do”, yet it is absent from plenty of science fiction that dwells only in the realm of the cautionary tale.
I don’t have much patience left for that genre. I mean … we have been, at this point, amply cautioned.
Vision, on the other hand: I can’t get enough.
This isn’t just a great explanation of :has()
, it’s an excellent way of understanding selectors in general. I love how the examples are interactive!
Here’s a taste of what Rich will be delivering at Patterns Day on Thursday—can’t wait!
This looks like a handy collection of HTML web components for common interface patterns.
drab does not use the shadow DOM, so you can style content within these elements as usual with CSS.
Wouldn’t it be great if all web tools gave warnings like this?
As you generate and tweak your type scale, Utopia will now warn you if any steps fail WCAG SC 1.4.4, and tell you between which viewports the problem lies.
I concur:
Just because a user interface uses 3D-buttons and some shading doesn’t mean that it has to look tacky. In fact, if you have to make the choice between tacky-but-usable and minimalistic-but-hard-to-use, tacky is the way to go. You don’t have to make that choice though: It’s perfectly possible to create something that is both good-looking and easy to use.
This is a wonderfully in-depth interactive explainer on touch target sizes, with plenty of examples.
Okay, if you weren’t already excited for Patterns Day, get a load of what Rich is going to be talking about!
You’ve got your ticket, right?
I didn’t want to play the game of striving to be seen.
I just wanted to be.
This is a really interesting proposal, and I have thoughts.