csswizardry

`<a href="#start" role="button">Get started</a>`

Please, just use a link. This has a destination, so making it masquerade as a button gives so many false affordances.

Disclaimer: Ana is a very dear friend of mine and may well be the Best Person™. Ana, if you’re reading this, the live-coded karaoke talk you gave at State of the Browser was the best I’d seen in years.

All of my pals laugh at me for carrying a packing square with USB C–C, A–C, Lightning, EU adapters, and three-pin plugs. Until they need to borrow one.

I’m a web performance engineer — I help clients find and fix site speed issues — but recently I spotted what I thought might be a security/privacy issue. Security not being my specialism, I asked Fable to help me triage and, if necessary, raise the issue with my client.

It refused. It’s so so so adjacent to the work we’d already been doing, but the moment I asked it to help me understand what I thought I’d found, it left me high and dry!

> fun one first […] The recruiter died.

That took a turn!

Complete side note: I’m on public wifi right now and the domain used to host the images in this article is, for some reason, blocked. But as the author (or whatever tool was used to generate the article) has taken time to write decent `alt` text, I can still get a good idea of what is going on. Kudos.

Way ahead of its time. Unfortunately.

I used to share this sentiment (and I’m a web performance consultant by profession so very few people care about performance as much as me!), but when you consider how much calculation we _happily_ let our JS do at runtime, I don’t think forcing CSS to be static/preprocessed is worth it. And that’s not even me taking a swipe at overly-JSsed front-end; I’m talking about any runtime work that JS picks up.

Is preprocessed CSS faster? Yes. Is it meaningfully faster? Probably not.

In light of Apple’s new Liquid Glass UI, this 2017 post/paper looks at creating realistic glass-like refraction on the web.

A firm here in my city once got all of their signage printed and installed _before_ securing the social media handles they’d put on them. The Instagram username they’d opted for was actually literally impossible to register as it contained a special character. That was about six years ago. The signs are still up.