2020 in numbers
Numbers and sparklines.
Journal archive: 2020
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Books I read in 2020
Fiction and non-fiction, rated and reviewed.
Words I wrote in 2020
Blogging through a very strange year.
SVGs in dark mode
Styling sheet music …and then unstyling it.
Web Audio API weirdness on iOS
Fixing a heisenbug with silence.
Audio
The sound of worlds colliding.
Ampvisory
I have been elected to the AMP advisory committee. My reign of terror begins!
Cascading Style Sheets
The terminology of applying CSS.
Lists
Do websites need to sound the same in every screen reader?
Clean advertising
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that behavioural advertising is more effective than contextual advertising.
Insecure …again
Breaking the web for security.
The Correct Material
Wishing for Cold War Space Race dramas from the Russian perspective.
Caching and storing
Caches are for copies.
Upgrades and polyfills
Apple’s policy of locking browser updates to operating system updates is bad for the web and bad for the planet.
aria-live
An exception to my general rule that ARIA attributes should be added with JavaScript.
Bookshop
Manually machine tagging books as a kind of mindless meditation.
Portals and giant carousels
Trying to understand why people think they need to make single page apps.
ARIA in CSS
Apply your ARIA attributes with JavaScript and then use them as hooks in your CSS.
Accessible interactions
Abstracting common interaction patterns as a starting point for accessible components.
Standards processing
Pushing for a share button type—the story so far…
Continuous partial browser support
Treat every browser feature like an experimental feature.
Saving forms
A defensive enhancement to avoid losing everything you just typed into a textarea.
The Web History podcast
Narrated by yours truly.
Owning Clearleft
After fifteen years, it’s time to commit.
The reason for a share button type
It’s not because it’s declarative—it’s because it’s robust.
200 tunes
A tune a day, every day, for 200 days.
Downloading from Google Fonts
For some reason, Google Fonts only provides .ttf files if you’re self-hosting. I don’t know why.
Unobtrusive feedback
An interface pattern for Ajax interactions that’s borrowed from video games.
Performance and people
When it comes to web performance, there are technical issues and then there are human issues.
Web browsers on iOS
As mobile and desktop operating systems converge, Apple’s hypocritical browser policy becomes clearer and clearer.
Kinopio
A brain-dumping tool that matches my process.
A polyfill for button type=”share”
Kicking the tyres on a declarative Web Share API.
A declarative Web Share API
button type=”share”
T E N Ǝ T
A spoiler-filled look at the new Christopher Nolan film.
Submitting a form with datalist
It can autocomplete, but how do you get it to autosubmit?
Web on the beach
Dining out safely, thanks to the World Wide Web.
Design Principles For The Web—the links
Hyperlinks to accompany a talk.
Mind the gap
If you’re making a library or framework, treat it like a polyfill.
Netlify redirects and downloads
How to use HTML’s `download` attribute even if you’re storing your files on S3.
Season one of the Clearleft podcast
That’s a wrap!
BetrayURL
You can kiss URLs goodbye after all.
Design sprints on the Clearleft podcast
The final episode of season one came right down to the wire.
Influence
An interesting idea from the birth of CSS.
Dream speak
My subconscious is an asshole.
Connections
A book recommendation via conspiracies, games, pattern-matching, hypertext and apophenia.
Design maturity on the Clearleft podcast
The penultimate episode of this season has seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
Design ops on the Clearleft podcast
The fourth episode gets meta about the semantics of semantics.
Wildlife Photographer Of The Year on the Clearleft podcast
The third episode is a case study—and what a case study!
Hey now
Hey! Been tryin’ to meet you.
Service design on the Clearleft podcast
The second episode uses conference talks as raw material.
Accessibility
Making the moral argument.
Putting design principles into action
There are observational principles, and there are imperative principles. Let’s put them together.
Implementors
Different browser vendors have different priorities.
Design systems on the Clearleft podcast
The first episode is here! Please be gentle with me.
Custom properties
Don’t touch that DOM.
Announcing the Clearleft podcast
Subscribe today—the first episode drops this week.
Feeds
I’ve made a /feeds URL.
The Machines Stop
Reversing entropy.
Dark mode revisited
Adding another theme to my stylesheet switcher.
Hemimastigophora
Life, but not as we know it.
100 tunes
💯 🎶 🎉
Gormless
Lost in translation.
CSS custom properties and the cascade
This behaviour surprised me (at first).
Intent
Black lives matter.
Programming CSS to perform Sass colour functions
Combining custom properties, hsl(), and calc() to get cascading button styles.
Integration
A2 _B2-_BAG A2 (3zGF C2
Hard to break
Brittleness is the opposite of resilience. But they both share something in common.
Photograph
A moment in time seven decades ago.
Sass and clamp
Worst buddy movie ever.
A decade apart
Happy tenth birthday to A Book Apart and HTML5 For Web Designers!
Television
A run-down of what I’ve been watching during The Situation
User agents
The web browser is your mutual friend.
Modified machete
The viewing order for a Star Wars movie marathon
Principles and priorities
Using design principles to embody your priorities.
Reading
Marking up the books you’re reading for aggregation and visualisation.
Lightweight
Minimum viable television and minimum viable websites.
Overlay gap
A problem shared is a problem halved. And the web has a big problem with awful overlays.
Future Sync 2020
Questions and answers from the opening talk of an online conference.
Podcasts
Four audio outings.
Web Share API test
Figuring out how Safari on iOS uses the Web Share API.
Plumbing
How the pipes of the web have been closed off.
A bit of Blarney
I was on a different kind of podcast.
A reading of The Enormous Space by J.G. Ballard
Take some time out to listen to this story of self isolation. It’s not like you’ve got anywhere to be, right?
Living Through The Future
William Gibson, Arthur C.Clarke, Daniel Dafoe, Stephen King, Emily St. John Mandel, John Wyndham, Martin Cruz-Smith, Marina Koren and H.G. Wells.
Apple’s attack on service workers
Kiss your service workers goodbye on iOS.
Oh, embed!
Embedding YouTube videos without sacrificing performance.
Outlet
Tinkering with your website can be a fun distraction.
Local
Think global, act local. In fact, just stay at home.
Nice
The meaning of life.
Home
I am, unsurprisingly, working from home.
A curl in every port
Postel’s port numbers.
Lighthouse bookmarklet
You don’t need Chrome to run Lighthouse.
41 hours in Galway
A weekend of food and music to celebrate my birthday.
Abolish Silicon Valley by Wendy Liu
Reviewing the forthcoming memoir.
Insecure
Security or access: choose one.
Telling the story of performance
Measuring performance is important. Communicating the story of performance is equally important.
Utopia
Why do I like fluid responsive typography? Let me count the ways…
IncrementURL
Jake’s got an idea for improving the security of displaying URLs in browsers.
Hydration
Progressive enhancement. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Design systems roundup
Design systems are neither good nor bad (nor are they neutral).
Three books
Some potential reading material for 2020.
Union
Taking a tour.
Architects, gardeners, and design systems
Citing Frank Chimero, Debbie Chachra, and Lisa O’Neill.
Web standards, dictionaries, and design systems
There’s a common pattern here.
Unity
One way of looking at the new browser landscape.
Indie Web Camp London 2020
Saturday, March 14th and Sunday, March 15th.
Install prompt
Browsers are still trying to figure out how to highlight progressive web apps.
Browser defaults
What would the repercussions be if browsers were to tweak some of their default behaviours?
The Rise Of Skywalker
My spoilertastic thoughts on the final film in the Skywalker saga.
2019
A quick look back at the year just gone.