Micros

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.

Spent far too long looking blankly at the docs for the <dialog> element while wondering why my <details> element wasn’t working right.

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.

Sometimes I scroll through all the possible align-* and justify-* permutations to find the one I need.

Not for lack of knowledge, but instead because my brain has simply run out of compute.

I think it is important that you make sure everything you publish on the web is equally accessible to all.

Thus, my content is unusable no matter your abilities. In fact, you might be better off with a screen reader because then at least you don’t have to look at it. Shit’s fucked.

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?

I’ll be interested to see if there is a statistically notable uptick in clients reporting prefers-reduced-transparency as a result of Liquid Glass once iOS 26 releases.

Serious talk.

I appreciate that people make art of or containing me, but I ask that you do so in a respectful manner. Thank you.

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.

Do some people prefer to read content directly in their feed readers? With the exception of some news outlets, I much prefer to view content on site.

I feel that the site on which writing resides provides a large part of the content’s atmosphere.

In the same vein as Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, I propose some renamings:

• Safari Surfer
• Chromium Cruiser
• Firefox Forager
• Edge Envoy
• Vivaldi Voyager

Sometimes I find myself thinking about the fact that Google’s Material Symbols has an icon called “Skull List”.

I’m sure that’s nothing…

A few days ago I wrote a message and forgot to close a parenthesis. I’ve been talking as an aside ever since, and I can’t take it anymore.

)

I’m free!

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.

I’ve found myself redesigning a lot of Vale.Rocks. Not a complete overhaul, but a fairly comprehensive one with a lot of changes.

Ariel Salminen and Sia Karamalegos, both redesigned their sites recently, so I’ve decided to blame them. Thanks for their understanding.

What is it with big corps trying to make “everything apps”? We’ve already got apps that do everything.

Web browsers. I’m talking about web browsers. Just invest in the web. It isn’t hard.

I’ve been CAPTCHA’d. They’re holding me at a data centre and won’t let me go until I point out all the motorcycles, but they keep telling me I’m incorrect. Please send help! The situation is dire.

#372C25. The silty sediment that swirls at the bottom of a river bed. Slightly washed out and absorbent of light rather than reflective. Clay muddles what is otherwise organic and grounding. Decaying leaves and mud. Undulating and dispersing as it ebbs and flows between the toes of those who wade and splash.

The users. They yearn for toxicity. They will drag it with them and sew its seeds. Toxicity feeds drama, and drama feeds engagement.

The scripture tells us it’s true.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1320040111

I left my flexbox out in the sun for too long, which caused it to dry up. Now it won’t wrap anymore.

Do I need to get a new one, or can I rehydrate it somehow?

My website is too energetic. Does anyone know how to calm down hypertext?

How does one stop LinkedIn from serving them two-week-old reheated AI slop? Is there a button for that or..?

Sometimes I read something I’ve written and think, “Who the hell writes like that?”

Then I have the horrifying revelation that it is me. I write like that. Oh dear.

‘Did you, or did you not, kill this man?’

‘Your honour, he recommended I rewrite my static site with React because, quote, “It’s better.”’

‘The killing was justified. Court dismissed.’

Run this simple Vim substitute command to instantly improve your website’s codebase:

:%s/button/div/g

This just in:
People shocked as venture capital backed company with good product/service that was operated unsustainably and at a loss to draw in users enshittifies as backers scramble for return on investment.

“I’m shocked”, says one user of the product/service. “I know this exact thing has happened every other time without fail, but I thought this time would be different.”

Sending love to all the poor folks named Albert who go by Al.

None of us saw this coming, and I’m sorry most fonts don’t differentiate between ‘l’ and ‘I’.

A fantastic post from David Bushell regarding AI slop and its ever-continuing dribble into everything at the cost of better, more well-formed, and intentioned alternatives.

https://dbushell.com/2025/05/30/ensloppification

The natural beauty of watching a database migrating south for the update.

Last night I crept into your house under the cover of darkness and made almost imperceivable modifications to your browser’s user-agent stylesheet.

Changes just impactful enough that you will be mildly inconvenienced. I chucked a few !importants in there as well.

My evil knows no bounds.

“Your website should be a home/garden/portfolio/blog/etc.”

No. It should be a grimoire, dammit.

You use * + * because it is a useful CSS snippet. I use * + * because I think it looks funny, and I like saying ‘lobotomised owl’.

We are not the same.

A word of advice: don’t have a default username system if you’re running an online service which you’ll need to moderate.

Automated accounts will use these default names, which allows them to blend in with genuine users using default names and makes it harder to spot patterns.

Sometimes I push to prod simply because I’ve grown to hate my creation and wish to watch it suffer and toil in this cruel world at the twisted hands of deranged users.

Other times I feel sorry and have sympathy, so my pushes to prod are because I can’t bear to watch my own creation flounder alone within the confines of my machine with me as its sole tormentor any longer.

Part of becoming better at a craft is to reflect on shortcomings and to see what can be improved and iterated upon. I feel like a lot of people forget to do that bit when “moving fast and breaking things”.

Words, laid bare. Branded with the mark of shame: ‘[sic]’. The textual equivalent of a public flogging. Execution in bracketed form.

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’.

HTML. CSS. JavaScript.

Long ago, the three nations lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when The Frameworks attacked.

If you’re on Twitter/X, I think less of you.
If you’re on Substack, I think less of you.
If you’re on Facebook/Instagram, I think less of you.

To remain on them knowing the damage they are doing and facilitating is to comply with and endorse their actions. There isn’t an excuse for staying.

A local developer has been found dead. Upon interviewing their family, we discovered they’ve repeatedly been found typing alone in an empty IRC chat at odd hours of the morning regarding creating a “revolutionary new technology”. Police believe they were attempting to reinvent the literal wheel.

I always feel dirty talking about type. Serifs with lovely ball terminals. Soft shoulders. Attractive curves. Deep inktrap crotches. Beautiful eyes. Broad arms. Long, slender legs. Tittles.

(I mean, good typography is sexy – even ignoring the trade diction.)

If you ask for help, and someone decides to help you, and they ask you clarifying questions so they can provide that help, don’t fight them!

Don’t question their questions and push back; they’re asking for a reason.

As developers, our goal is to build something to be used. Part of this is ensuring it can be used by anyone and caters to everyone.

Accessibility isn’t a separate concept or goal. Making something more accessible for some people makes it better for all people, and that is our greater intent.

Remember when we used to talk about new technologies and say, “This is the worst it’ll ever be”?

I miss those days.

To avoid leaving heat stains on my wooden desk, I’ve been using my 3D printer as a coaster for my cups of tea.

An unplanned benefit is that the heated bed also works to keep them warm if I’m so inclined.

A lot of people fork my projects on GitHub and then do nothing with them. I was curious as to why so many do this, so I’ve asked some of them, and they all say it is for the sake of archival.

I’m not quite sure how effective of a strategy that is…

There is a tendency for the last 1% to take the longest time.

I wonder if that long last 1% will be before AGI, or ASI, or both.

It scares me how many people reply to no-reply email addresses. So many responses to sign-up confirmations and password resets with messages like ‘OK’ or ‘thank you’.

Do they think there is a human responding? Or do they just think it prudent to thank the automated machines? I’m perplexed.