John Gruber:
There have always been bad Mac apps. But they seldom achieved any level of popularity because Mac users, collectively, rejected them.
Brad Frost:
I’m confident developers will get their heads around it. They’ll figure out their swim lanes and understand which JavaScript does what. I’m more concerned about other team members who are now staring at a Big Ol’ Intimidating Ball O’ JavaScript. And I’m concerned for those recruiters and hiring managers who are even further removed from the day to day. Those job listings with a giant spray of buzzwords and technologies can now be winnowed down to a single word: JavaScript. Those recruiters have a hard enough time separating Java from JavaScript, so best of luck to them making sense of the complex JavaScript ecosystem.
Jeremy Keith:
It’s not that CSS in inherently incapable of executing complex conditions. Quite the opposite. It’s precisely because CSS selectors (and the cascade) are so powerful that we choose to put guard rails in place.
On the news of Edge switching to the Chromium engine, Tim Kadlec writes:
We need Google to keep pushing the web forward. But it’s critical that we have other voices, with different viewpoints, to maintain some sense of balance. Monocultures don’t benefit anyone.
Hear, hear.
Christine Dodrill:
What? The code for that? It’s obvious, figure it out.
See? Five times as fast. Who cares that you have to throw out basically all your existing stuff, and if you mix rilkef and non-rilkef you’re gonna run into problems.
And they’ll soon be running on just two and a half browser engines ☹️
I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.
— Tom Eastman (@tveastman) December 3, 2018
I’ve been taking a lot of interest in this topic ever since I started working on my own reset/boilerplate — Cobalt.
Heydon Pickering:
By assuming the role of the Full Stack Developer (which is, in practice, a computer scientist who also writes HTML and CSS), one takes responsibility for all the code, in spite of its radical variance in syntax and purpose, and becomes the gatekeeper of at least some kinds of code one simply doesn’t care about writing well. This has two adverse effects:
- Poor quality code
- A bunch of people who can (and would enjoy!) expertly writing that code, standing unemployed on the sidelines muttering “WTF”
I so very much agree with everything Heydon says here. And that agreement comes from the experience of trying to become a full stack dev myself (though going at it from an HTML/CSS-first perspective).
Watched 2 December 2018
These films are very awkwardly put together. They feel shallow and soulless in a way that is hard to describe. In terms of epic narrative scale, they seem to be the most ambitious Godzilla films to date. Yet that ambition comes at the cost of detail and emotional tangibility. All characters look the same, animation is robotic, individual moments have no emotional heft. No part of it even got me to go “that’s cool”.
Sure, I would love to learn about the heroic future humans fighting to reclaim the Earth from Godzilla. But please, make me care about it.
Graphic design work on Incredibles 2 was brilliant, as expected. But there was one glaring exception, conspicuously missing from this post: the atrocious Edna Mode logo.
Arun Venkatesan:
During my research process, I noted down the keywords used to describe some of the typefaces. As I read through the list, the same words kept coming up over and over: friendly, modern, clean, simple, human. It’s like everyone wants something that they can use to define their brand, yet they really just want a slightly different version of what everyone has.
Watched 29 November 2018
No new take, just a patchwork of rehashed tropes. Every scene feels like something you’ve seen before, and the paper-thin “I have backstory!” characters don’t help either.
Ethan Marcotte:
Let me start by saying I generally avoid terms like “mobile,” “tablet,” and “desktop” in my work. It’s not that they’re bad; it’s because they’re broad. In my experience, terms like these confuse more than they clarify. Ask a roomful of clients or stakeholders to define “mobile,” and you’ll get a roomful of slightly different responses.
What I think is helpful, though, is breaking down the specific conditions or features that’ll cause our designs to adapt.
Paul Robert Lloyd:
Such notions of craftsmanship can soon lead us down a dangerous path, raising questions around elitism and discrimination. These are accusations you could level towards the IndieWeb. For all its promise of giving people the tools to regain ownership of their online identity and content, to do so fully and effectively requires a proficiency for coding and familiarity with an endless barrage of acronyms. Encouraging participants to selfdogfood only exacerbates the near-impenetrability and narrowness of this movement.
Rob Weychert chimes in and gets a strong +1 from me:
I’ve been making websites for 20 years. I read a bunch about how to set up webmentions and gave up before I started. 🤷🏻♂️ https://t.co/iIv1BgQXlY
— Rob Weychert (@robweychert) November 27, 2018
If even web people find it difficult, how can we ever manage to empower non-web people to produce web-like content?
Tom Scocca, for Slate:
There is no other word for it. Onions do not caramelize in five or 10 minutes. They never have, they never will—yet recipe writers have never stopped pretending that they will.
Good to know.
Colin Morris, for The Pudding:
What does this have to do with pop music? The Lempel-Ziv algorithm works by exploiting repeated sequences. How efficiently LZ can compress a text is directly related to the number and length of the repeated sections in that text.
Clever and well-executed dataviz porn.