Linkbait 47
Insert funny tagline here.
- The State of CSS 2020 survey is running, Please take it! It’s important for fifguring out where CSS should go next, and what people actually know. Slight disadvantage: you have to register. I’m not totally sure what to make of that, and hope that future versions leave it out, but in the end I did register because I think the survey is important enough.
- Excellent question: What does 100% mean in CSS? I always tell my CSS students to ask that question, and sometimes the answer is non-obvious. This page treats a few of the simpler use cases, as well as margin and padding, which are not so much complicated but rather counter-intuitive.
- Rachel Andrew explains CSS masking. Does more need to be said? No.
- Lea Verou invents a way to unset CSS custom properties. This can be very useful for toggling page-wide or component-wide states. The trick? Simply making the custom property’s value a whitespace. It’s allowed, but doesn’t have any meaning, ergo, the property is unset.
- Nicholas Zakas explains JavaScript promises (in a multi-part series) by writing a promises tool, which requires you to fully understand the underlying technology.
I mainly include this for myself; I need to fully understand promises as well, and this series is just what I need.
- Coil, the most interesting web monetisation project of the moment, releases its developer site. Unfortunately, creating a Coil account is not a smooth process, but this page helps. Also gives information about the web monetization standard. Still fairly bare-bones, but hey, it’s been out there only for a couple of week. Let’s give it time to grow.
- Oh, and TechDirt decided to give Coil a spin and see what happens.
- Another money-related system is Libra, though it is not specifically for the web. Instead, as far as I can glean from the fairly bare-bones information, it works by storing money on your phone, like systems such as mPesa do. Also, it has a new programming language (why?) and buzzwords.
Not to disparage them immediately, but a clearer idea how how the system works for users in four paragraphs would have been useful.
- And privacy: The Global Privacy Control specification and its implementations are coming online. Not yet in the major browsers, but once it works you should be able to have control over what you do and don’t tell websites. Unfortunately Chrome will never implement it; the idea is to much at odds with Google’s interest as an ad supplier.
- An important piece by Benedict Evans: The end of the American internet. With TikTok, Americans have to face a foreign social network being used massively in their country for the first time. The American internet is over. Let’s see if it adjusts their preconceptions. (My guess: no.)
- The Mozilla Browser Compatibility Report 2020 is here, focusing on how web developers see browser compatibility. The two top pain points are IE (duh) and layout and style, which is a rather broad category but ties in with my idea that layout is badly understood, though I'm still not sure why. Fortunately the report contains many examples.
- A Brief Totally Accurate History Of Programming Languages. As it says on the tin.
- What did the Roman emperors look like? We have quite decent portraits of especially the earlier ones, and the Romans believed in realistic portrayal: if you have a wart on your nose your portrait has a wart on its nose. Now this has been taken one step further by adding some modern algorithms to the portraits, stirring in some ancient written sources, and the result is life-like portraits in modern CGI. No proof that these are 100% correct (skin colour is rarely described explicitly, for inatance, and cannot be inferred from marble busts), but it’s still fascinating to see.
- Have a tip for the next Linkbait? Or a comment on this one? Let me know (or here or here).
