All Posts, page 19

Florian goes over a set of confusingly named properties and values from the css-text-3 specification that control what happens to white spaces when laying out text, and how line breaking works. He explains the logic of the system, different ways the properties can be used to achieve various results, and looks into some of the complication caused by incomplete implementations.

I care about this topic a lot, but it really tests my patience. If only browser support for these properties were consistent, I could start to build a mental model that takes them all into consideration. As it stands, it’s such a mess that I routinely have to spend time reading about it, and still not be super confident with the results.

Lovely.

A really clever (if somewhat opaque) use of flexbox to achieve some semblance of container-based layout breakpoints. Intrinsic Web Design for the win!

Jonathan Snook tried to make it more understandable, and Heydon published a follow-up post with some optimizations.

Tim Kadlec:

When you stop to consider all the implications of poor performance, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that poor performance is an ethical issue.

Andy Bell:

It’s getting exhausting spending so much of my time defending one of the three pillars of the web: CSS. It should sit equal with HTML and JavaScript to produce accessible, progressively enhanced websites and web apps that help everyone achieve what they need to achieve.

The Economist reports on a recently published astronomy paper:

Dr Tarter reckoned that decades of searching had amounted to the equivalent of dipping a drinking glass into Earth’s oceans at random to see if it contained a fish.

Once the numbers had been crunched, the researchers reckoned humanity has done slightly better than Dr Tarter suggested. Rather than dipping a drinking glass into the ocean, they say, astronomers have dunked a bathtub.

Huh. I wonder if that really is an apt comparison.

Joseph Cox, for Motherboard:

In the case of the phone we tracked, six different entities had potential access to the phone’s data. T-Mobile shares location data with an aggregator called Zumigo, which shares information with Microbilt. Microbilt shared that data with a customer using its mobile phone tracking product. The bounty hunter then shared this information with a bail industry source, who shared it with Motherboard.

This is crazy. Zeynep Tufekci said it best: we are building a dystopia just to make people click on ads.

Follow-up: Hundreds of Bounty Hunters Had Access to AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint Customer Location Data for Years

Many people I meet think title texts, also known as tooltips, improve both the accessibility and usability of their sites. They don’t. In fact, they can even cause problems.

Painful. But at least human-readable?

These are always great and make me want to watch everything.

Dave Rupert:

As toolchains grow and become more complex, unless you are expertly familiar with them, it’s very unclear what transformations are happening in our code.

This is one hell of a tiny homemade documentary.

Will these lists ever get shorter?

Jeremy Keith:

Now when we look at new things added to HMTL, new features, new browser APIs, what we tend to ask, of course, is: how well does it work?

How well does this thing do what it claims it’s going to do? That’s an excellent question to ask whenever you’re evaluating a new technology or tool. But I don’t think it’s the most important question. I think it’s just as important to ask: how well does it fail?

Nothing like a full hour of Jeremy Keith to get the year’s work started.