Something I love about speculative fiction is that it looks at trends that were nascent at the time of writing and extrapolates them out to their logical conclusions. Several weeks ago I read Aldous Huxley’s 1932 book Brave New World . It was…odd, not at all what I was expecting. But there’s one thing that has really stuck with me. I don’t think it’s spoiling too much to say that a key method of…
My parental leave ends today — a very bittersweet milestone. Among many other things, it gave me an opportunity to read a bunch of books. (It turns out audio books are an excellent way to extend your patience when sitting with a screaming baby in the middle of the night.) So, here’s what I read/listened to over the past six-ish weeks: Storm Front and Fool Moon – Jim Butcher The first two books in…
Several weeks ago Westbrook Johnson asked whether it was possible to get the number of columns in an auto-fit / auto-fill grid in CSS. The answer is yes, which I demoed and then found that Ana Tudor had done it a few months earlier (because of course she had :) ). It takes a bit of algebra, but that’s not the point here. (See Ana’s linked post for full details.) The point is that I recently had…
In elementary school my favorite movie was Jurassic Park because dinosaurs! computers! In middle school my favorite movie was Jurassic Park because the special effects were captivating. In high school my favorite movie was Jurassic Park because a teenage nerd hacker saves the day. In college my favorite movie was Jurassic Park because it felt like a realistic piece of speculative fiction. In grad…
Nested interactive elements — like clickable things inside other clickable things — are a no-no on the web. Keyboard focus becomes a mess, screen readers have trouble announcing what’s what, and if you’re using semantic HTML, your HTML is probably invalid. For a deeper dive on nested interactive elements, why they’re problematic, and approaches to mitigating them, Cat Johnson gave a nice talk on…
A couple weeks ago I posted this survey on Mastodon: This just popped into my head and I have not thought about it deeply in the slightest, but slot { all : inherit ; } Post by @noleli@mastodon.social View on Mastodon The yeas and nays were pretty evenly divided, but the wuts won by a mile, so I guess I should answer the “wut”. Say you have a tooltip component. The tooltip works by wrapping the…
When we had an HVAC service person out a few months ago, he pointed out that whoever installed our system did something right: on a long run of duct with vents along the way, it should get narrower as it goes on in order to keep the pressure up. This is fairly intuitive, but the math also checks out. I was thinking about this the other day and remembered the ideal gas law from high school…
tl;dr The web, famously, is a medium that forces designers to be flexible. From Dao to Responsive Web Design to Viewports.fyi , we are constantly reminded that we have no idea where, how, or on what our creations will end up. I’ve been thinking about what that means for how I structure my CSS and how I compose my components, and here’s where I’ve landed: it’s generally a good idea for size to be…
At an Eicha reading a few years ago, some people brought up the plight of Palestinians at the hand of the state of Israel, and the plight of communities of color in the US at the hands of police. Afterward, a friend pushed back on bringing these issues up in that context: we have all year to focus our energies outward on issues of justice for the world, so on Tish’a Be’Av we should focus our…
I was recently asked to help debug an issue with autocomplete styles in <input> elements in Chrome. When Chrome autofills a form field, it sets the text and background color in that field. The team didn’t want to override colors specified by the designer, so they needed a way to prevent these autocomplete styles from kicking in. The Chrome user agent stylesheet includes the following:…