On 16th and 17th of June we will organise the fourth CSS Day in Amsterdam, preceded by HTML Special, a one-day conference on HTML. The programme is here, and you can buy tickets here.

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Instead of the work I was supposed to do I spent about a day and a half on the alpha version of a viewports visualisation app that, oh irony of ironies, only works on desktop browsers because of the necessary space.

It’s already been very useful to me, since figuring out how the viewports actually work is necessary for full understanding. I hope it does the same for you.

It also contains an example of absolute, fixed, and device-fixed position so that you understand the difference.

The app is by no means ready; there’s a ton of features I’d like to add. Still, for now I’ve run out of time, and as long as it’s impossible to actually make money with such apps I’m not sure how much time I’m willing to spend on it.

Last week I found out that as of Chrome 48 window.innerWidth/Height no longer exposes the dimensions of the visual viewport. Instead, it now exposes the dimensions of the layout viewport, and is thus a copy of document.documentElement.clientWidth/Height.

I’m not happy with this change. So it’s time for me to don my ceremonial robes as Guardian of the Viewports and ask the Chrome team to revert this change and restore the visual viewport to its rightful place.

There are three reasons why I think Chrome is making a mistake here:

1. It breaks the web. ALL other browsers support this.
2. It takes one simple trick for web developers to avoid problems with these properties, so the change is not necessary.
3. It chokes innovation, in particular zoom-based layouts.

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After my recent post about updating Chromium WebViews I was contacted by Scientia Mobile, the company behind the WURFL database, and was offered actual real-life stats!

The situation is less dire than I assumed. About 90% of the users do in fact use the latest Chromium WebView. This number is based on several hundred million hits in December 2015, primarily from North America and Europe.

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