Archive: September 2025

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 */
}