“Was it easier to build websites a decade ago? - Go Make Things”

Absolutely agree with this. The modern web is capable of amazing things. You don’t have to do it the hard way. (I mean, yeah you do if your boss is dead set on it, but you know what I mean)

“Every search bar looks like a URL bar to users – Terence Eden’s Blog”

So, it looks like the kerning/spacing problems I saw in the PDF output of puppeteer/headless chrome on Linux wasn’t just an issue with a single font. Snaps from a test file: Literata, EB Garamond, and Inter

A screenshot of a sample text showing very ugly spacing issues. Literata, which is a readable serif font.A screenshot of a sample text showing very ugly spacing issues. EBGaramond, which is a pretty but less readable serif font.A screenshot of a sample text showing very ugly spacing issues. Inter, which is a very nice sans-serif font.

“CSS is Going Gosh-Darned Hog Wild, I Tell Ya What - CSS-Tricks”

CSS is easily my favourite part of the web stack.

“Appwalls and their apps are destructive to the open web. - Airbag Industries”

So, it turns out that the typographic quality of Chrome’s PDF output varies quite a bit OS to OS.

Subjective assessment:

  • macOS: really good
  • Windows: not bad, though not as good as macOS
  • Desktop Linux: same to marginally worse than Windows
  • Headless Linux: quite bad.

As always, I am a goddamn bug magnet. Not only have I run into a known Chrome bug in my PDF testing (no hyphenation on linux when headless/puppeteer) but I seem to have discovered a ligature bug in weasyprint. Justifying text with a custom font seems to disable ligatures.

“Discovery - Feedback - Silicon Valley Product Group”

“About TypeScript Hype. Are you happy about TS? Good, really…”

TS is a very useful JS superset. Its fanbase, however, is extremely annoying, even tho it feels a bit like they’ve toned it down a bit of late. Maybe that’s just the folks I follow, tho.

Working on a series of reviews of various free/OSS tools for generating print-ready PDFs from HTML and CSS. First up is will be weasyprint. Can you guess which of these is which: latex, weasyprint, and Chrome/puppeteer?

A sample paragraph. The text is unimportant. What matters is that the word spacing on the second sample is absolutely horrible

“Heading off confusion: When do headings fail WCAG? - TPGi”

People with smarphones: use all sorts of fancy software and machine learning to fake a shallow DoF.

Me with an expensive camera: deep focus everywhere! Sharp!

Also met one of the friendly neighbourhood cats A cat. Looks serious

Walk around the neighbourhood 3: not the only person on an autumn walk

Two people walk through Hveragerði's tiny park

Walk around the neighbourhood 2 Somebody's a little bit too curious about the waterfall in Hveragerði

Walk around the neighbourhood 1 The ruins of an early attempt to generate power from the river in Hveragerði

“Google’s apps to embrace iOS on iOS – Six Colors”

About time.

“Service worker strategies - Go Make Things”

“Comparing Google Analytics and Plausible Numbers - CSS-Tricks”

As with all statistics and metrics, the answer seems to be ‘it depends’.

“Windows 11’s Start Menu ~ take”

Curious to see all of this nostalgia for the Windows 10 start menu. My main workstation is a Windows one, and I pretty much never use the start menu, just search and the taskbar.

“Buttons vs. Links · Eric Eggert”

“Transitional Apps with Rich Harris”

“The secret sauce in transitional web apps is progressive enhancement.”

This key to a Kuhn-style paradigm shift: a new model that does a better job of fitting all of the various existing ideas and practices together

“Safe DOM manipulation with the Sanitizer API”

IMO, this would be the most important addition to web platform in recent years. Much more important than all of the fugu/USB/filesystem stuff. 🙏🏻

“A practical example of flat file storage”

There’s a ‘magic’ trick that lets you use flat file storage in production sites that need to scale: use S3 instead. Same structure, strong consistency, worldwide scale. Works a lot better than you’d think

“How to blog - macwright.com”