When I consume AI art, it also evokes a feeling. Good, bad, neutral—whatever. Until I find out that it’s AI art. Then I feel deflated, grossed out, and maybe a little bit bored.

To be honest, I had a tough time understanding this article completely. But that is a me problem because I think I don’t have the right mental model for view transitions yet. Nevertheless, I’m sure this article will be super helpful someday in the future.

Enrique Peñalosa on how to build cities that prioritise human beings over cars and guarantee a citizen’s right to safe mobility.

In my opinion, the following bit at the start of the video certainly holds true for India:

The great inequality in developing countries makes it difficult to see, for example, that in terms of transport, an advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport or bicycles.

Nic Chan on how they overcame the hurdle of getting the signs to refresh on a page in a signage browser with no JavaScript. The solution was using a <meta> tag that tells the browser to refresh the page after the given number of seconds.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="3600" />

Today I learned, :root (0-1-0) has a higher specificity than html (0-0-1).

In hindsight, it’s obvious. :root is a CSS pseudo-class selector and, like most pseudo-class selectors, it has the same specificity as a class selector or an attribute selector.

Hot take: Padel is to tennis what bowling with bumpers on is to bowling. Its design choices lead to fewer mistakes and a lower barrier to entry.

To see how this unfolds, take the perspective of an ant on the march. When it comes to a gap in its path, it slows down. The rest of the colony, still barreling along at 12 centimeters per second, comes trampling over its back. At this point, two simple rules kick in.

The first tells the ant that when it feels other ants walking on its back, it should freeze. “As long as someone walks over you, you stay put,” Garnier said.

This same process repeats in the other ants: They step over the first ant, but — uh-oh — the gap is still there, so the next ant in line slows, gets trampled and freezes in place. In this way, the ants build a bridge long enough to span whatever gap is in front of them. The trailing ants in the colony then walk over it.

I love Astro. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to render the entire post content in my RSS feeds correctly. This article by Donnie D’Amato has been a lifesaver in this regard.

A great resource to understand how to use the alt attribute in various situations.

I keep forgetting, but the alt attribute of the <img> element is not just useful for users who are visually impaired. It is also useful when the image is not displayed in the browser for whatever reason. For example: the src attribute does not contain a valid path to an image.

John Mayer on how trying and not doing it well enough is a wonderful technique for being yourself:

Failing to sound exactly like the person you want to sound like is a wonderful way to sound like yourself. So I’m not necessarily thinking this thing from scratch, going, Okay, I’m gonna, like, do Jerry-esque things, but I’m still gonna sound like me. No, it’s more like, I want to sound just like Jerry, and then the way I naturally, obviously don’t — that’s your personality. Music doesn’t let you lie. […] You try to sound like who you want to sound like, and you just will always end up sounding like you.

I like this advice. It is an interesting take on the learning by copying method.

Initially, I thought this was just an article on how to fix the janky hover state of a card component. But it also goes over the HTML markup for a typical card component in the context of semantics and accessibility.

Ah! Good old Jeremy Keith, insightful and funny.

If I really want to change someone’s mind, then I need to make the effort to first understand their mind. That’s going to be far more productive than declaring that my own mind is made up. After all, if I show no willingness to consider alternative viewpoints, why should they?

There’s an old saying that before criticising someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. I’m going to try to put that into practice, and not for the two obvious reasons:

1. If we still disagree, now we’re a mile away from each other, and
2. I’ve got their shoes.

I just purchased Josh Comeau’s new course, Whimsical Animations. The course page itself has some delightful animations.

PS: I also discovered Gochi Hand, a cute handwritten font, on the course page.

John Oliver on drawing the line:

Giving the bully your lunch money doesn’t make him go away. It just makes him come back hungrier each time.

I really like this explanation of what happens in between the user entering a web address into the browser and the browser displaying the result.

1. The web browser requests the resource you want to access from the web server it is stored on.
2. If the request is successful, the web server sends a response back to the web browser containing the requested resource.
3. In some cases, the requested resource will then fire off more requests, which will result in more responses.
4. When all of the resources have been requested, the web browser parses and renders them as required, before displaying the result to the user.

Just like a word document can be displayed in a word processing application, a web page is simply an HTML document that can be displayed in a web browser. The only difference is that a web page can embed a variety of different types of resources such as styles, fonts, images, scripts, and so on.

Ana Tudor wrote on Mastodon:

Stupid #CSS question because I’m losing my mind here: why isn’t calc(.5*a) working? What am I missing? It doesn’t seem to be working in any browser.

Ana is trying to use calc(.5 * a) as a part of the relative color syntax, presumably to create semi transparent outlines. But it is not working because calc(.5 * a) is an invalid property value. As Valtteri Laitinen replied, it should actually be alpha in there instead of a.

.class {
	outline-color: rgb(from currentcolor r g b / calc(0.5 * a)); /* ❌ invalid */
	outline-color: rgb(
		from currentcolor r g b / calc(0.5 * alpha)
	); /* ✅ valid */
}

I re-read Heydon Pickering’s post on the HTML article element in the middle of writing the markup for a new website.

Heydon’s writing is so sharp and funny. Unmistakably theirs. No one else writes quite like them, and I’m here for it.

I was reading Manuel Matuzovic’s article on meta theme color and came across this snippet:

<style>
	:root {
		--theme: blue;
	}
</style>
<meta name="theme-color" content="var(--theme)" />

I wish it was possible to access custom properties outside the <style> tag in the <head>. It would keep things DRY.