Wouldn’t it be great if all web tools gave warnings like this?
As you generate and tweak your type scale, Utopia will now warn you if any steps fail WCAG SC 1.4.4, and tell you between which viewports the problem lies.
Ahmad runs through some of the scenarios where text-wrap: balance could be handy.
Even though it’s not well-supported yet in browsers, there’s no reason not to start adding it to sites now; it’s classic progressive enhancement.
How do we write, design, and code a link that works for everyone on every device? Let’s dive into the world of creating the perfect link, without making a pig’s breakfast of it.
Check out the demo that Rich has put together to go with Amelia’s proposed syntax.
This is the flyer that Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau distributed at the Hypertext 91 Conference—the one where their submission was infamously rejected.
The WWW project merges the techniques of information rerieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system.
The project is based on the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone. lt aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups.
Rich explains what text-wrap:balance does …and what it doesn’t.
A very astute framing by Ted Chiang—large language models as a form of lossy compression for text.
When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.
A lot of uses have been proposed for large language models. Thinking about them as blurry JPEGs offers a way to evaluate what they might or might not be well suited for.
I did not know about box-decoration-break—sounds like a game-changer for text effects that wrap onto multiple lines.
It gives me warm fuzzies to see an indie web building block like rel="me" getting coverage like this.
This resonates with me.
View source on this bit of tongue-in-cheek fun from Terence.
Nicky Case has made an implementation of Ted Nelson’s StretchText that works across different domains.
I really like this experiment that Jim is conducting on his own site. I might try to replicate it sometime!
My talk, Building, was about the metaphors we use to talk about the work we do on the web. So I’m interested in this analysis of the metaphors used to talk about markup:
- Data is documents, processing data is clerking
- Data is trees, processing data is forestry
- Data is buildings, processing data is construction
- Data is a place, processing data is a journey
- Data is a fluid, processing data is plumbing
- Data is a textile, processing data is weaving
- Data is music, processing data is performing
An account of the mother of all demos, written by Steven Johnson.
The day we started to allow email clients to be full-blown web browsers (but without the protections of browsers) was the day we lost — time, security, privacy, and effectiveness. Now we spend all our time fighting with the materials of an email (i.e. color and layout) rather than refining its substance (i.e. story and language).
Another post prompted by my recent musings on writing alt text. This time Michelle looks at the case of text-as-images.
Prompted by my recent post on alt text, Geoff shares some resources on the right length for alt attributes.
This is exactly the pattern of usage I’ve been advocating for with web components—instead of creating a custom element from scratch, wrap an existing HTML element and use the custom element to turbo-charge it, like Zach is doing:
By enhancing native HTML instead of replacing it, we can provide a solid baseline experience, and add progressive enhancement as the cherry on top.
Imagine a world without hyperlinks or search:
Take WeChat as an example. It is home to the vast majority of China’s original writing, and yet:
- It doesn’t allow any external links;
- Its posts are not indexed by search engines such as Google or Baidu, and its own search engine is practically useless;
- You can’t check the author’s other posts if open the page outside of the WeChat app. In other words, each WeChat article is an orphan, not linked to anything else on the Internet, not even the author’s previous work.
Search engine indexing is key to content discovery in the knowledge creation domain, but in a mobile-first world, it is extremely difficult to pull content across the walled gardens, whether or not there is a profit incentive to do so.
Again, the issue here is not censorship. Had China relaxed its speech restrictions, a search start-up would’ve faced the same level of resistance from content platforms when trying to index their content, and content platforms would’ve been equally reluctant to create their own search engines, as they could serve ads and profit without a functional search engine.