Blog: #css

Trying out a new format with these link bundles, in the hope that dropping the bulleted list format is a) more flexible and b) more conducive to writing a bit more about the links, rather than limiting myself to a single line with an awkward semicolon shoved in if I need more room.

Andy Bell on recent/upcoming CSS changes. Good stuff here. I’m probably most looking forward to using :is and clamp() and ch (all of which I’d read about before but had mostly forgotten). Oh, and scroll-margin-top.

Design Engineering Handbook by Natalya Shelburne et al., a free ebook which looks interesting. (I’ve read part of the first chapter so far.) Design Better (which appears to be an InVision thing) has other free books available as well, on various design-related topics.

Max Koehler on continuous typography. Also see his post about the tool and the tool itself. This is great, and I hope these ideas get broader traction. (Also, I’m excited to start using Source Serif 4 and its optical sizing axis.)

Aleksey Kladov on including an ARCHITECTURE.md file. Great idea. Having a high-level overview is so helpful.

Graydon Hoare on always betting on text. I’ve probably linked to this before, but it’s good and worth rereading occasionally.

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• Hillel Wayne’s series on whether software engineering is really engineering — loved this; it’s something I’ve thought about often, and I love reading about other engineering fields
• Hillel Wayne again, on the real history behind Vim’s use of hjkl — the history of computing is endlessly fascinating to me
• Melanie Richards on sticky CSS Grid items — good writeup
• Peter Voth’s art — delicious, and by the way I hope at some point to start doing this kind of art
• Jeremy Mikkola on writing readable code — some good ideas here

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• David Moldawer on getting your setup right — agreed, getting rid of friction is usually worth it (just make sure to avoid the trap of spending all your time working on your setup and not ever getting to the actual thing you wanted to make) (been there)
• Tania Rascia’s history of what she’s learned as a software developer — stellar example of both learning in public and blogging (and her React tutorial is well done, too)
• Jim Nielsen on Sass color functions in CSS — more verbose, sure, but I think worth it
• Tanya Basu on digital gardens — I think it’s a given at this point that I’ll link to anything that talks about digital gardens
• Matt Webb on Machine English — some fascinating history here, and it’s an interesting idea

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• Pantelis Kalogiros’s CSS 3D Adventure — impressive hack, which makes me think about other ways CSS’s 3D functionality could be used (for actual projects)
• Ethan Wang on leading-trim in CSS — a much-needed fix, looking forward to this getting implemented
• NASA’s patent for a new way to get to the moon — I…didn’t know these could be patented
• An animation showing how Jupiter’s gravity saves us from asteroids — thank you, Jupiter
• Ben Southwood on the rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab — oh how I wish I could have worked at Bell Labs or Xerox PARC

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While not all of these are actually one-liners, Una Kravets’s Ten modern layouts in one line of CSS has some neat tricks I hadn’t seen before. (I’m realizing I really need to brush up on modern CSS. It’s been a few years and lots of things have changed in that time.)

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Finally got around to trying CSS grid layout. It’s amazing. I’m very much looking forward to learning it in depth — it seems so much easier for desktop-size layout.

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I wanted to add small timelines to a little web-based genealogy proof-of-concept I’m working on, and I realized that it’d be pretty easy to make the tick marks using CSS box-shadows. And it was.

There are some caveats (if you change the background color, you have to edit the CSS to match — you can’t use an rgba color with an opacity of 0 because then the tick marks fill the whole space), but overall it works well.

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