Taking time away from something and then returning to it later often reveals flaws otherwise unseen. I’ve been thinking about how to gain the same benefit without needing to take time away.
Changing perspective is the obvious approach.
In art and design, flipping a canvas often forces a reevaluation and reveals much that the eye has grown blind to. Inverting colours, switching to greyscale, obscuring, etc, can have a similar effect.
When writing, speaking written words aloud often helps in identifying flaws.
Similarly, explaining why you’ve done something – à la rubber duck debugging – can weed out things that don’t make sense.
I went to a bank and put a really high negative margin on all the money inside. This offset was enough for it to appear outside the bank, allowing me to abscond with it.
Of course, banks can easily avoid this situation by applying overflow: hidden to their vaults, but they very rarely remember to. It tends to be an operational oversight.
Learn more neat tricks like this in my upcoming book, CSS for Crime.
Y’know, when I started getting into development proper, I read so many blog posts and publications from fantastic people.
If you’d told me as a youngster that as a 19-year-old I’d be writing for these publications and chatting with figures whose work I admired, I simply wouldn’t have believed you.
I know you should ‘never meet your heroes’, but I’m ecstatic to get to meet so many of my inspirations.
There are a lot of fields out there, and I’m so glad I found myself doing web/front-end development. I can scarcely think of communities so kind and open to sharing knowledge.
Thank you to all.
I’ve used Lexend as my go-to for years, but its lack of OpenType features is really bothering me. I can’t find anything else quite like it, though.
It has a heavy default weight, wide letterforms, and is very legible. Fira, IBM Plex, and Manrope aren’t it.
Any suggestions?
Oh, look. Accessibility horrors beyond comprehension from Apple. A company with so much money the human mind boggles to comprehend it.
Accessibility horrors so blatant it takes one glance to identify many of the more offensive failings.
Accessibility horrors that are so inaccessible that even the completely able struggle.
Accessibility horrors that are covered in the very first class of any UI/UX design or front-end development education.
Accessibility horrors that you have to force through because even the worst testers are screaming at you.
And with a single click, I find myself transported to an ancient place. I’m a digital archaeologist, and I’ve stumbled across a long-forgotten remnant of those who came before. UI untouched for a decade.
It is two rebrands old. The palette is warped. Distorted. There are gradients. Buttons forged from a low-resolution image. I brush away a drop-shadow-lg.png to inspect an input form. Picking it up, I bring it to my face to count the pixels, only to be hit by the harsh aroma of Bootstrap 2 in the back of my throat.
I drop it to the ground, and it shatters into CSS properties. “Oh well,” I muse aloud. “It’ll be fixed on refresh. Assuming anyone ever discovers this place again.”
I do what I came to do and close the tab.
New post published:
Advising Reasonable AI Criticism
We're the good guys. They're the bad guys.
A loose analysis of the unproductive criticism surrounding artificial intelligence from both pro and anti camps, with advocations for more nuanced, constructive engagement and how that can be achieved to allow more informed and respectful discussions about AI technology and its impact.
https://vale.rocks/posts/ai-criticism
Carousels are a web staple. Websites use them, and thus people do in turn. They’ve garnered a lot of hate over the years, primarily due to being largely inaccessible and poor ways of presenting information, yet still they persist. So, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
The Chrome team put together Carousels with CSS which Sara Soueidan has examined in extreme depth. My main takeaway from the main article and Sara’s analysis is that while this is a vague step in the correct direction, it doesn’t address any of the core issues like accessibility and introduces new ones. I was disappointed to see the approach taken in regard to addressing those issues and think Eric Eggert hit the nail on the head.
It completely fails with regard to separation of concerns by using CSS for structure, rather than HTML. I don’t know how to address that other than asking why? I’ve noticed a lot of new CSS features, especially ones with the Chrome team’s influence, are getting a little too markup-y for my liking. David Bushell has covered this and the overreliance of pseudo-elements with touchings on the carousel kerfuffle.
HTML is for structure, CSS is for styling, JS is for anything that can’t be achieved with HTML/CSS, and accessibility isn’t omittable. We should be striving to build a web that is both functional and inclusive. Respect the web; respect users.
I wanted to see how the times Bluesky posts are published affect the popularity of those posts, so I put together a super quick and dirty little tool to do that.
https://tools.vale.rocks/bluesky-posting-analyser
My findings lined up with my hypothesis that posts around American mornings and evenings merit the most activity.
I was surprised to see that weekends are popular within technical communities, as I expected engagement to drop off when people aren’t ‘working’.
