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.

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.

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 very simple skull icon next to three lines representing a list.

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.

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.

Note with text distorted like a CAPTCHA reading: 'I'm still stuck here. I feel insanity creeping in. I swear I clicked all of the motorcycles. Do the little bits in the corners count? I'm starting to think they just like the sound of my panicked keyboard clicks. Please help me. I beg of you.'

A hand reaching out through a Google reCAPTCHA interface towards the viewer. The top reads: 'Select all squares where something feels wrong. If there are none, click skip'. The hand is going beyond the borders of the image box and covering portions of the UI.

#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.

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?

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.’

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’.