Hand-picked links from the depths of the interweb by Arpit Agrawal.
Personal branding is about bringing focus to your touchpoints with the world (of strangers) so that the right kinds of people can find you and remember you. You make use of the attention when you really need it. But it is good to be in the consideration set.
As a freelancer, I’m always eager to learn how other folks work. Piccalilli’s behind-the-scenes look at their redesign is extremely useful.
Dr. Steve Bagley explains in layman’s terms what an operating system is:
[…] Imagine the difference between a house and a hotel. If you own a house, you can decide how to use the rooms, what color to paint the walls. But if that house becomes a hotel, you might give people the option to change the air conditioning temperature, but you wouldn’t let them fit air conditioning into their room without permission from the building owner. And it’s a bit the same with a computer. The operating system is a bit like the people who run the hotel in that it’s controlling all the resources for the system. So if Microsoft Word crashes, these days it’s not going to take down your computer because the operating system is set up in such a way that it can access resources that have been assigned to it and clean that up, and everything else continues hunky-dory.
And what happens if the operating system crashes and you get the blue screen of death (BSoD):
At that point, the thing that’s in charge of controlling everything has gone wrong, is corrupted, and can no longer run. So there’s pretty much no option at that point other than to halt the machine, say something’s gone wrong, and let the user reboot and restart.
Wow! Who knew you could use modern CSS to test HTML? Well, Heydon certainly did!
This article by Michelle Barker for Piccalilli is a great read. I learned about a bunch of new CSS properties that I didn’t know existed.
Eric Meyer describes his journey of learning about and implementing fully-Light-DOM web components.
You just take some normal HTML markup, wrap it with a custom element, and then write some JS to add capabilities which you can then style with regular CSS! Everything’s of the Light Side of the Web. No need to pierce the Vale of Shadows or whatever.
Jeremy Keith discusses what makes a custom element an HTML web component.
If your custom element is empty, it’s not an HTML web component. But if you’re using a custom element to extend existing markup, that’s an HTML web component.
React encouraged a mindset of replacement: “forgot [sic] what browsers can do; do everything in a React component instead, even if you’re reinventing the wheel.”
HTML web components encourage a mindset of augmentation instead.
In this piece, Karan Thapar emphasizes that:
In this article, Dave Rupert explains how testing in forced colors mode improves accessibility for users and reveals design flaws, such as excessive reliance on color cues.
In Level 3 of the Display specification, the value of
displayis defined as two keywords. These keywords define the outer value of display, which will beinlineorblockand therefore define how the element behaves in the layout alongside other elements. They also define the inner value of the element — or how the direct children of that element behave.This means that when you say
display: grid, what you are really saying isdisplay: block grid. You are asking for a block level grid container. An element that will have all of the block attributes — you can give it height and width, margin and padding, and it will stretch to fill the container. The children of that container, however, have been given the inner value ofgridso they become grid items. How those grid items behave is defined in the CSS Grid Specification: thedisplayspec gives us a way to tell the browser that this is the layout method we want to use.
As simply put by Rachel:
When you define layout on a box in CSS, you are defining what happens to this box in terms of how it behaves in relation to all of the other boxes in the layout. You are also defining how the children of that box behave.
(Discovered via Stefan Judis)
If there’s one thing you can do to make your websites better, it is to embrace what the web platform gives you: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — in that order. Apply the Rule of Least Power. Build with progressive enhancement in mind. You’ll be a happier developer. Your visitors will be happier, too, as things work as expected.
Jim Nielsen makes the case for design engineers as professionals who do design work with code. He also emphasizes the limitations of traditional design tools, which often produce static images that don’t fully capture the dynamic nature of web interactions, and advocates for designing in the browser instead.
You need someone who can do design work with code.
That’s right: design work with code.
Pixels of an interface from a GUI tool are a static representations of a dynamic form. It’s the difference between a picture of me and the living, breathing, moving me.
Design engineers don’t just push pixels around in a GUI tool, they do it in a web browser — the medium of delivery — designing not just the visuals but the interactions that make sense for a living, breathing, moving interface.
This is one essay I re-read every year. In it, amongst other things, Bhagat Singh challenges blind faith and advocates for reason and critical thinking.
Bhagat Singh on the importance of critical thinking and the dangers of blind faith:
Criticism and independent thinking are the two indispensable qualities of a revolutionary. Because Mahatamaji is great, therefore none should criticise him. Because he has risen above, therefore everything he says —may be in the field of Politics or Religion, Economics or Ethics— is right. Whether you are convinced or not you must say: “Yes, that’s true”. This mentality does not lead towards progress. It is rather too obviously reactionary.
[…] Any man who stands for progress has to criticise, disbelieve and challenge every item of the old faith. Item by item he has to reason out every nook and corner of the prevailing faith. If after considerable reasoning one is led to believe in any theory or philosophy, his faith is welcomed. His reasoning can be mistaken, wrong, misled, and sometimes fallacious. But he is liable to correction because reason is the guiding star of his life. But mere faith and blind faith is dangerous: it dulls the brain and makes a man reactionary. A man who claims to be a realist has to challenge the whole of the ancient faith. If it does not stand the onslaught of reason it crumbles down.
Bhagat Singh on the Hindu concept of sufferings as a divine punishment for sins committed in the previous life:
Poverty is a sin, it is a punishment. I ask you how far would you appreciate a criminologist, a jurist or a legislator who proposes such measures of punishment which shall inevitably force men to commit more offences. Had not your God thought of this, or he also had to learn these things by experience, but at the cost of untold sufferings to be borne by humanity?
Bhagat Singh on divine inaction:
I ask why your omnipotent God does not stop every man when he is committing any sin or offence? He can do it quite easily. Why did he not kill warlords or kill the fury of war in them and thus avoid the catastrophe hurled down on the head of humanity by the Great War? Why does he not just produce a certain sentiment in the mind of the British people to liberate India? Why does he not infuse the altruistic enthusiasm in the hearts of all capitalists to forego their rights of personal possessions of means of production and thus redeem the whole labouring community —nay, the whole human society, from the bondage of capitalism? You want to reason out the practicability of socialist theory; I leave it for your almighty to enforce it. People recognise the merits of socialism in as much as the general welfare is concerned. They oppose it under the pretext of its being impracticable. Let the Almighty step in and arrange everything in an orderly fashion. Now don’t try to advance round about arguments, they are out of order. Let me tell you, British rule is here not because God wills it, but because they possess power and we do not dare to oppose them. Not that it is with the help of God that they are keeping us under their subjection, but it is with the help of guns and rifles, bomb and bullets, police and militia, and our apathy, that they are successfully committing the most deplorable sin against society —the outrageous exploitation of one nation by another. Where is God? What is he doing? Is he enjoying all these woes of human race? A Nero; a Changez!! Down with him!
Bhagat Singh on the belief in God:
If no God existed, how did the people come to believe in him? My answer is clear and brief. As they came to believe in ghosts and evil spirits; the only difference is that belief in God is almost universal and the philosophy well developed. Unlike certain of the radicals I would not attribute its origin to the ingenuity of the exploiters who wanted to keep the people under their subjection by preaching the existence of a supreme being and then claiming an authority and sanction from him for their privileged positions, though I do not differ with them on the essential point that all faiths, religions, creeds and such other institutions became in turn the mere supporters of the tyrannical and exploiting institutions, men and classes. Rebellion against king is always a sin, according to every religion.
As regards the origin of God, my own idea is that having realised the limitation of man, his weaknesses and shortcoming having been taken into consideration, God was brought into imaginary existence to encourage man to face boldly all the trying circumstances, to meet all dangers manfully and to check and restrain his outbursts in prosperity and affluence. God, both will his private laws and parental generosity, was imagined and painted in greater details. He was to serve as a deterrent factor when his fury and private laws were discussed, so that man may not become a danger to society. He was to serve as a father, mother, sister and brother, friend and helper, when his parental qualifications were to be explained. So that when man be in great distress, having been betrayed and deserted by all friends, he may find consolation in the idea that an ever-true friend, was still there to help him, to support him and that he was almighty and could do anything. Really that was useful to the society in the primitive age. The idea of God is helpful to man in distress.
He wrote all this while in jail when he was just a 23 year old.