Linkbait 45
Cleaning up my tabs.
- So a performance.now() sponsor asked if there was any performance-centric publication. I did not know,
asked around, and found that just about the only one is the perf email newsletter. So just so you know; it’s supposed to be worth the subscription.
(BTW: we postponed performance.now() to 2021. This year it’s just not possible to run physical events.)
- Speaking of events, Benedict Evans wrote an excellent article on the future of events. His experience is more with the huge trade shows than with our focused events, but he makes a few cogent points. Online events are quite different from physical ones (I already figured that out), but nobody yet knows how to do them properly. Instead of doing something truly online, most events just copy physical events while pointing a camera at the speaker and providing. That’s not the way forward. See also the early web that copied print. We slowly learned that it’s something quite different.
Regardless, Krijn and I are not going to try online events. Instead we’ll wait until we can hold physical ones again; that’s where our strength lies.
One more excellent point from the article: expensive, or even not-cheap, tickets, as well as organising and paying for your flight and hotel, serves as a selection filter, so that you end up with people who really value physical events.
There is a lot of pent-up demand for phyiscal events, and that won’t go away, so physical events will return. Still, new forms of online events might also come out of this crisis.
- A while ago I considered writing an article about the Apple/Google initiative for somewhat-privacy-protecting Covid-tracking, and I gathered some sources. I never wrote the article, but here are the sources anyway:
- The press release
- Google’s simple overview
- Specifications
- Initial Cnet overview article
- A rather critical look at the privacy implications. I had the idea the author was too negative, or made some assumption somewhere that was not entirely warranted, but I never actually figured out what sort of problem I felt this article had.
- A more moderate Wired article that acknowledges possible privacy problems, and gives practical examples, one creepy neighbour and one creepy ad firm, and runs through some other problems as well. As I see it, these problems are inherent to any form of smartphone-based mass surveillance scheme.
(To be honest, to me contact tracing apps are a sneaky way to avoid the much more expensive contact tracing by actual humans, which I suspect works much better. Also, politicians desperately want to be seen to be tech-literate, so we need an app. Absolutely, positively need an app. I mean, it’s technology, you know ...)
- A nice line of CSS Grid for you to study. I found out about
auto-fill here.
- Lea takes a look at hybrid positioning (ie. switching from a fixed-like to an absolute-like positioning) in CSS, and as usual I learned a lot here as well. I had this effect on my site since 2004 or so, and I switch from fixed to absolute with JavaScript, because that was the only possibility back then. Meanwhile it turns out you can do this mostly in CSS as well. Also teaches you how to change CSS custom properties in JavaScript.
I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t see a way of doing this in pure CSS, because at some point you have to switch from fixed to absolute, and that cannot be done in CSS alone.
- Speaking of CSS custom properties, Lea’s article and this one taught me that they in fact contain strings that do not have to be valid CSS. It’s only interpreted when it’s actually used in a CSS expression. See also this conversation with Lea and Tab, as well as this article by Jeremy that actually pushed me in to this particular rabbit hole. Thing learned!
- The Chrome team is preparing to do something about ultra-heavy ads; overview, technical details. Curious what comes of this. Something must be done on the browser side of things to clamp down on online junk; this may be a step in the right direction. Supposed to land somewhere in August.
- I am probably going to write more about monetization of resources such as this one, or front-end tools, and had a good Twitter conversation (yes! they still exist!) with Scott Wilson in particular. I gathered a few articles, but an incident with my computer made me lose most of them. Here are the two surviving ones:
- An excellent overview of OSS business models (which I think we should take as a template for web dev monetization)
- A more critical look at several options. Money quote (pun not intended):
We should remember that a big part of innovation comes from developers working at organizations adopting open source software [...]. It’s these organizations that should be tasked to sustain open source software [...], especially since they depend on open source software to survive as a business.
- Very nice online presentation of excerpts from the diaries of captain DaCosta, a 16th century black Portuguese sea captain who ended up in Japan. Contains interesting details. The only thing I’m missing is bibliographical information about the full diary. If it’s translated into a language I can read I might actually pick it up.
- Have a tip for the next Linkbait? Or a comment on this one? Let me know (or here or here).
