Linkbait 46
Baiting you into clicking.
- This presentation by Stephanie Rieger makes the case for regulation of the web in order to get rid of hate speech and fake news. Worth thinking about.
While reading through it I had a thought: what if we’d require payments for social media memberships? It’s certain to be quite complicated, so before we do anything we should discuss if it would help at all.
- Rachel Andrew explains an interesting payment experiment that I missed: Igalia, the company that implements rather more browser features than most people know, started an Open Prioritization drive where people can pay to get CSS features implemented. Once a feature is fully funded it’s pushed into Igalia’s work queue.
Simple idea, might work. More of this, please!
- An ambitious project: Web History, chapter 1: Birth,
chapter 2: Browsers, and chapter 3: The Website. The first chapter is less interesting to me, because I already know most of the story. 2 and 3 already contain a few items I didn’t know about. I expect this series to become much more interesting to me once we get to later chapters, the ones I can remember.
- Nice project: Modern CSS solutions for old CSS problems. It revisits a few golden oldies such as always keeping the footer at the page bottom no matter the content size. How would we solve these problems with modern CSS?
Even better, Stephanie Eckles is running Style Stage, a showcase site where people can provide their own CSS for a given HTML page. (Sounds familiar to an old-timer?) Let's hope it’s a massive success; we need it.
- Interesting details about CSS
gap: it’s supported on flex and grid, except in Safari, where it only works on grid. And how do you detect support? Safari does support gap, so @supports (gap: 1em) will return true but hide the fact that it’s not supported on flex. (See also this discussion.)
Ahmad Shaheed offers a JavaScript workaround that works, but it involves creating and measuring a test element, which is something that could kill your performance if overused.
Anyway, interesting read if you’re into the problems of @supports, as I am.
- An in-depth look at the load and DOMContentLoaded events and their differences. Contains quite a few details I didn’t know about, such as the rules for deferred and async script tags. Worth a look if you’re struggling with initialisation and up-front load times.
- Native JS formatting options for numbers: a very useful overview, with simple pictures to begin with. Turns out there are quite a few more internationalisation options for numbers in JavaScript than I was aware of.
- An serious discussion of the performance consequences of React and Preact when creating a simple site. The message is familiar: React, and to a lesser extent Preact, degrade your website’s performance. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use them, but it does mean you should think before using them, especially in cases of simple websites.
The article also calls for keeping sites accessible to users of old or low-specced devices. I agree, but the chance of this happening is slight.
- Speaking of old or low-specced devices, here’s a look at their cost, not in money but in days worked.
Device cost is but one factor, and connection cost is the other, but it’s an up-front one that people may struggle with. Governments can help here, especially in times of Corona.
- An interesting story about Yugoslavian microcomputers in the eighties. Turned out there was quite a scene, and one radio DJ even broadcast programs! Programs were stored on cassette tapes (C64 aficionados will know how that goes), and listeners to this show could just tape whatever program the radio station broadcast and run it on their own computers. Never heard of this trick before.
Update: A reader told me this broadcasting of computer programs also took place in the Netherlands. So it's not as unique as I thought.
- I always love this sort of project: a to-scale map of the solar system where the Moon is one pixel. Takes a LONG time to scroll through. We are unable to truly understand these huge amounts of space.
- Have a tip for the next Linkbait? Or a comment on this one? Let me know (or here or here).
