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News
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California is making available the source code for Adobe PostScript. More context in PostScript: A Digital Printing Press.
CSS parsing rules don't leave enough elbow room for CSS Nesting to have a syntax as straightforward as everyone would like. Jen Simmons invites authors to weigh in on their preferred alternative.
WordPress 6.1 “Misha” introduces Twenty Twenty-Three, a new block theme — which is to say it supports Full-Site Editing, introduced in WordPress 5.9. Along with developing your own blocks, these features should enable new ways of building WordPress websites.
SvelteKit, the framework for building websites with Svelte, has just seen its inaugural stable release.
Articles
Farmbound, or how I built an app in 2022, Stuart Langridge on building and publishing a small web game. A gentle reminder that not every project needs a custom domain name: I don’t really want to be on the hook forever for paying for a domain; sure, it’s not much money, but it’s still annoying that I’m paying for a couple of ideas that I had a decade ago and which nobody cares about any more. I can’t drop them, because of course cool URIs don’t change, and I didn’t want to be thinking a decade from now, do I still need to pay for this?
Designing a Utopian layout grid: Working with fluid responsive values in a static design tool by James Gilyead aims to contextualise the Utopia fluid grid calculator which helps you to define a layout grid by clicking a few buttons.
Breaking content out of a central column is by now a classic CSS pattern, the latest and most robust iteration of which makes use of CSS Grid. A detailed write-up by Joshua Comeau: Full-Bleed Layout Using CSS Grid.
Speaking of classic CSS patterns, James Edwards thoroughly breaks down the anatomy of .visually-hidden.
Speaking of thoroughly breaking down, Manuel Matuzović walks us through building the main navigation for a website. An interesting tidbit, as pointed out by Kitty Giraudel, is using the <template> element for easy templating in HTML. (Even easier if one could somehow use <slot> to fill in the blanks, if you ask me!)
While the <details> and <summary> elements invite use for all sorts of different interactivity needs (e.g. tree views), Scott O'Hara documents some subleties in their support and behavior that may steer you towards custom widgets for some use cases: The details and summary elements, again.
In a decisively more mathy area, The continuity of splines is a wide-ranging visual explanation by Freya Holmér (previously, The beauty of Bézier curves).
Raph Levien proposes a significantly better solution to the parallel curve problem than the current state of the art. It is accurate, robust, and fast. It should be suitable to implement in interactive vector graphics applications, font compilation pipelines, and other contexts
: Parallel curves of cubic Béziers.
Facts about State Machines, a series of short musings by Chris Pressey. The goal of this list of facts is not to teach you what state machines are or how to use them; there are plenty of other resources for that. Rather, the goal here is to motivate their usage and to highlight things about them that are frequently overlooked, but nonetheless relevant.
Algorithms by Evan Wallace, a list of algorithms and data structures that I found interesting enough to prototype and useful enough to write about
, mostly around CRDTs.
Ink & Switch essays are always fascinating. Inkbase: Programmable Ink and Potluck: Dynamic documents as personal software are two recent ones.
Coping strategies for the serial project hoarder, a talk by Simon Willison about staying on top of several projects with comprehensive documentation and automated tests.
Tools & Resources
Classic HCI demos, a collection of HCI demo videos produced during the golden age from 1983-2002
, curated by Jack Rusher from the ACM SIGCHI YouTube channel.
Axel Rauschmayer's new book Shell scripting with Node.js goes into the nitty-gritty of building command-line tools with Node.js and publishing them as npm packages.
Live Coding: A User's Manual by Alan F. Blackwell, Emma Cocker, Geoff Cox, Alex McLean, and Thor Magnusson provides a practice-focused account of the origins, aspirations, and evolution of live coding, including expositions from a wide range of live coding practitioners.
The 4th edition of Erik Spiekermann's classic Stop stealing sheep & find out how type works has been released as a Creative-Commons-licensed PDF on the Google Fonts Knowledge page.
Mona Sans and Hubot Sans are a pair of variable fonts from GitHub, designed with Deni Anggara of Degarism Studio and released under the SIL Open Font License.
Gaël Poupard's chaarts probes how far you can take data visualization with just HTML + CSS. Every chart in this project relies solely on semantic markup —
<table> based — and a spread of CSS variables carried by the tags. No JavaScript required for display, and styles are progressively enhanced depending on your browser's capabilities.
Lightning CSS, an extremely fast CSS parser, transformer, bundler, and minifier
written in Rust by Devon Govett.