A proton should be one of the simplest objects in physics. It’s a basic building block of all atoms, or, alternatively, the simplest possible atom all by itself, since hydrogen (one positively charged proton plus one negatively charged electron) is still hydrogen when it’s ionised.

Most of the atoms in the Universe are hydrogen, as are most of the atoms in your body. In fact, since electrons are tiny and weigh very little, it’s straightforward to conclude that you are mostly, specifically, protons.

Given all this, you’d think physicists would understand protons very well by now. You would be wrong.

I hear layout and grid talked about in extremes: it’s either this totally easy, trivial thing or a totally unknowable, unsolvable riddle. Like most things, the truth seems to be somewhere in the middle. There indeed an art to crafting an elegant, intuitive layout and grid solution for a design system. On the other hand, all we’re really doing is putting a couple boxes beside one another. It’s hard. It’s easy. It’s weird.

Het gebruik van dingen die al aanwezig zijn in je HTML om je CSS op te targeten. Ik vind dit altijd een goede reden om dit meer te doen:

This promotes an a11y-first mindset — if there is no attribute or pseudo selector available to represent the state we wish to style, should we add one? Are we using the right HTML element? We are forced to go through a mental flow chart of native, semantic HTML and CSS features we could tap into before resorting to classes.

Het helpt ook andersom: Als je per ongeluk de juiste attributen vergeet, ziet het er ook niet ok uit.

It feels to me as though we’ve become so fixated on the mechanisms that make it possible to deliver those promises—of efficiency, consistency and scale—that we’ve lost sight of the why.

Because if we can use our design systems to speed up meaningful work, standardise things to a high quality, and scale the things we actually want to reproduce - then the reverse is also true.

1. Not using the tab key for navigating
2. Home link alt text
3. The importance of descriptive link text
4. Not using the full screen
5. None used skip links

“It's important to note that "skip" links provide distinct benefits for sighted keyboard users, even if their usage among screen reader users is mixed.”

Nowadays people use tools like figma. These tools use a subset of css, which means that it is much easier to build a working website from a figma mockup, without using any hacks. These new tools are holding us back though.

The write-ups I’ve seen have all been deeply technical and more or less bury the lede, so let me begin with a quick summary of the three issues that have pivoted my impression of Azure from “serious contender, albeit one that targets a different market than the ones I talk to” to “this is a security clownshow that should be actively avoided.”

Some painful truths

• All common software now tracks what we do and reports on it by default
• Basically impossible to escape from this situation
• If you are a dysfunctional organization, your own on-premise efforts will not be good enough
• Cloud may be the best you can do
• Securing software is very hard to do, especially if dysfunctional ○ As a service may be the best you can do
• oftware is indeed terrible, the business model for good software is dead ○ “Only free software can afford to be good”
• Yet, even the most professional organizations have now given up
• We have globally accepted a terrible situation

If the View Transitions API works across page navigations, it could be the single best thing to happen to the web in years. If the View Transitions API only works for single page apps, it could be the single worst thing to happen to the web in years.

Programming portals are small, scoped areas within a graphical interface that give users access to command lines and text-based programmaing. They open a little window into the underlying functionality of an interface.

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Yes, the genie is out of the bottle. Doesn’t mean I have to make wishes.

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The next version of Adobe's apps will require you to pay that $21/month Pantone fee, or any Pantone-defined colors in your images will render as black. That's true whether you created the file last week or 20 years ago.

Doubtless, Adobe will blame Pantone for this, and it's true that Pantone's greed is the root cause here. But this is an utterly foreseeable result of Adobe's SaaS strategy.

Again I thought about going the JavaScript route, but I’m trying to keep to the Web’s slower pace layers as much as possible in this project for maximum compatibility over time and technology.

then I thought I heard about people using npm to do the same thing for client-side code. “That can’t be right!” I thought. I must’ve misunderstood. So I talked to someone from npm and explained how I must be misunderstanding something. But it turned out that people really were treating client-side JavaScript no different than server-side JavaScript. People really were pulling in megabytes of other people’s code to ship to end users so that they could, I dunno, left pad numbers or something. Listen, I don’t care what you get up to in the privacy of your own codebase. But don’t poison the well of the web with profligate client-side JavaScript.