sparkline

The ideal viewport doesn’t exist

Some lovely scroll-driven animations illustrate this great little microsite.

There’s something very pleasy about the chunky design that harkens back to the Zeldmanesque early web.

Web Almanac 2020

I spent most of the weekend reading through this and I’ve still barely scratched the surface—a lot of work has gone to the analyses and write-ups!

The sections on accessibility and performance get grimmer each year but the raw numbers on framework adaption are refreshingly perspective-setting.

Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data

I like the way that Simon is liberating his data from silos and making it work for him.

The History of the URL

This is a wonderful deep dive into all the parts of a URL:

scheme:[//[user:password@]host[:port]][/]path[?query][#fragment]

There’s a lot of great DNS stuff about the host part:

Root DNS servers operate in safes, inside locked cages. A clock sits on the safe to ensure the camera feed hasn’t been looped. Particularily given how slow DNSSEC implementation has been, an attack on one of those servers could allow an attacker to redirect all of the Internet traffic for a portion of Internet users. This, of course, makes for the most fantastic heist movie to have never been made.

[this is aaronland] #mw19 – the presentation

The web embodies principles of openness and portability and access that best align with the needs, and frankly the purpose, of the cultural heritage sector.

Aaron’s talk from the 2019 Museums and the Web conference.

In 2019 the web is not “sexy” anymore and compared to native platforms it can sometimes seems lacking, but I think that speaks as much to people’s desire for something “new” as it does to any apples to apples comparison. On measure – and that’s the important part: on measure – the web affords a better and more sustainable framework for the cultural heritage to work in than any of the shifting agendas of the various platform vendors.

Don’t build that app! – Luke Jackson - YouTube

This is a fascinating look at how you can get the benefits of React and npm without using React and npm.

Here’s an accompanying article on the same topic.

What is tree shaking and how does it work?

The context here is JavaScript, not apples or olives.

This is yet another great explainer from Ire. Tree shaking is one of those things that I thought I understood, but always had the nagging doubt that I was missing something. This article really helped clear things up for me.

Horrific Soccer Injuries

The horror …the horror.

Superfan! — Sacha Judd

The transcript of a talk that is fantastic in every sense.

Fans are organised, motivated, creative, technical, and frankly flat-out awe-inspiring.

90 Minutes | Type Supply

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!”

Cascading Web Design with Feature Queries ◆ 24 ways

24 Ways is back! Yay! This year’s edition kicks off with a great article by Hui Jing on using @supports:

Chances are, the latest features will not ship across all browsers at the same time. But you know what? That’s perfectly fine. If we accept this as a feature of the web, instead of a bug, we’ve just opened up a lot more web design possibilities.

CSS: Current, Soon, Someday (Web Directions Code 2017) // Speaker Deck

Oh, how I wish I could’ve been at Web Directions Code in Melbourne to see this amazing presentation by Charlotte. I can’t quite get over how many amazing knowledge bombs she managed to drop in just 20 minutes!

Jekyll Includes are Cool - daverupert.com

Dave explains how Jekyll Includes are starting to convert him to web components. The encapsulation is nice and neat. And he answers the inevitable “but why not use React?” question:

Writing HTML that contains JavaScript, not JavaScript that contains HTML, feels good to me.

The key feature for me is that this approach doesn’t have to depend on JavaScript in the browser:

I like that Web Components are an entirely client-side technology but can be rendered server-side in existing tech stacks whether it’s Jekyll, Rails, or even some Enterprise Java system.

An intro to web components with otters – Monica Dinculescu

A really great introduction to web components by Monica. But I couldn’t help but be disheartened by this:

Web components tend to have dependencies on other web components, so you need a package manager to herd all them cats.

For me, this kind of interdependence lessens the standalone nature of web components—it just doesn’t feel quite so encapsulated to me. I know that this can be solved with build tools, but now you’ve got two problems (and one more dependency).

It’s a nice little illustration of how we can use advanced features of CSS right now, without the usual wait for widespread support.

Using Feature Queries in CSS ★ Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog

A thorough explanation of @supports from Jen, with plenty of smart strategies for using it in your CSS today.

The History of the URL: Domain, Protocol, and Port - Eager Blog

From the ARPANET to the internet, this is a great history of the Domain Name System:

Root DNS servers operate in safes, inside locked cages. A clock sits on the safe to ensure the camera feed hasn’t been looped. Particularly given how slow DNSSEC implementation has been, an attack on one of those servers could allow an attacker to redirect all of the Internet traffic for a portion of Internet users. This, of course, makes for the most fantastic heist movie to have never been made.

Link tags: ports

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