Tags: rem

I find Brian Eno to be a fascinating chap. His music isn’t my cup of tea, but I really enjoy hearing his thoughts on art, creativity, and culture.

I’ve always loved this short piece he wrote about singing with other people. I’ve passed that link onto multiple people who have found a deep joy in singing with a choir:

Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness. And then there are what I would call “civilizational benefits.” When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

Then there’s the whole Long Now thing, a phrase that originated with him:

I noticed that this very local attitude to space in New York paralleled a similarly limited attitude to time. Everything was exciting, fast, current, and temporary. Enormous buildings came and went, careers rose and crashed in weeks. You rarely got the feeling that anyone had the time to think two years ahead, let alone ten or a hundred. Everyone seemed to be passing through. It was undeniably lively, but the downside was that it seemed selfish, irresponsible and randomly dangerous. I came to think of this as “The Short Now”, and this suggested the possibility of its opposite - “The Long Now”.

I was listening to my Huffduffer feed recently, where I had saved yet another interview with Brian Eno. Sure enough, there was plenty of interesting food for thought, but the bit that stood out to me was relevant to, of all things, prototyping:

I have an architect friend called Rem Koolhaas. He’s a Dutch architect, and he uses this phrase, “the premature sheen.” In his architectural practice, when they first got computers and computers were first good enough to do proper renderings of things, he said everything looked amazing at first.

You could construct a building in half an hour on the computer, and you’d have this amazing-looking thing, but, he said, “It didn’t help us make good buildings. It helped us make things that looked like they might be good buildings.”

I went to visit him one day when they were working on a big new complex for some place in Texas, and they were using matchboxes and pens and packets of tissues. It was completely analog, and there was no sense at all that this had any relationship to what the final product would be, in terms of how it looked.

It meant that what you were thinking about was: How does it work? What do we want it to be like to be in that place? You started asking the important questions again, not: What kind of facing should we have on the building or what color should the stone be?

I keep thinking about that insight: “It didn’t help us make good buildings. It helped us make things that looked like they might be good buildings.”

Substitute the word “buildings” for whatever output is supposedly being revolutionised by generative models today. Websites. Articles. Public policy.

The Unraveling of Space-Time | Quanta Magazine

This special in-depth edition of Quanta is fascinating and very nicely put together.

To remember, or to forget?

What are your own scribbles, your own ordinary plenty, not worth much to you now but that someone in the future may treasure?

Invisible success – Eric Bailey

Snook’s Law in action:

Big, flashy things get noticed. Quiet, boring things don’t.

There isn’t much infrastructure in place to quantify the constant, silent, boring, predictable, round-the-clock passive successes of this aspect of design systems after the initial effort is complete.

A lack of bug reports, accessibility issues, design tweaks, etc. are all objectively great, but there are no easy datapoints you can measure here.

If you’re a fan of gratuitous initialisms, you’ll love Google’s core web vitals. Just get a load of the obfuscation in the important-sounding metrics like CLS, FCP, LCP, and more.

To be fair to Google, this is a problem in the web performance world in general. Practioners prefer to talk about TTFB rather than “time to first byte” even though both contain exactly the same number of syllables.

The big news in the web performance community this month is the arrival of a new initialism. INP sounds like one of those pseudo-scientific psychologic profiles but it’s meant to stand for Interaction to Next Paint (even if they were to swear off pointless initialisms, you’d still have to pry Pointless Capitalisation from Google’s cold dead hands).

This new metric is a welcome one. It’s replacing first input delay. Sorry, First Input Delay, or FID, one of the few web vital initialisms that can be spoken as a word, making it a true acronym (fortunately fid’s successor, inp, also works as an acronym).

First Input Delay has long outstayed its welcome. It was always an outlier in the core web vitals. It didn’t seem to measure anything actually useful. I know it sounds like it’s measuring the delay until the user can interact with a web page, but when you dive into what it actually does, it’s a mess:

FID measures the time from when a user first interacts with a page (that is, when they click a link, tap on a button, or use a custom, JavaScript-powered control) to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction.

See that word “begin” in there? It’s doing a lot of work. First Input Delay doesn’t measure the lag between the user interaction and the browser response; it only measures the lag between the user interaction and the browser beginning to respond. The actual response could take ages, but that lag doesn’t get measured. Unlike the other core web vitals, this metric is very far removed from what actually matters to the user’s experience.

What the fid where they thinking? How the fid did this measurement ever get included in core web vitals in the first place?

Well, feel free to take what I’m about to say as pure gossip, but I have my sources, I trust ’em, and no, I’m not going to reveal ’em…

It’s because of AMP.

Remember Google AMP? An acronym so pointless they eventually just forgot it ever stood for anything?

The AMP project ended up doing incredible damage to Google’s developer relations. By colluding with the search team to privilege the appearance of AMP pages in the top news carousel, Google effectively blackmailed the entire publishing industry into using their format.

In the end, it didn’t work. It was a shit format. All they did was foster resentment and animosity:

AMP seems to have faded away. Most publishers have started dropping support, and even Google doesn’t seem to care much anymore.

It turns out that Google search wasn’t the only team infected by AMP. The core web vitals team also had to play ball.

Originally they had a genuinely useful metric for measuring the lag between input and response. But guess which pages did terribly? That’s right: AMP pages.

Rather than ship an actually-useful measurement, the core web vitals team instead had to include the broken First Input Delay, brainchild of a certain someone on the AMP team.

Now it all makes sense.

So good riddance to FID. Welcome to INP. And here’s hoping it won’t be much longer till we’re finally burying AMP.

Jessica and I spent last week working remotely. We always work remotely in the sense of not being in an office, but I mean we were remote from home too.

We’ve done this twice before. Once in Ortigia, Sicily and once in Cáceres, Spain. This time we were in Turin.

We had one day at the start of the trip to explore the city and do touristy things, checking out museums and such. After that we hunkered down in a very lovely and cosy AirBnB working each day.

I found it very productive. Maybe it’s a similar effect to going to a coffee shop to write—something about the change of scene encourages more of a flow state. The apartment was nice and quiet too so it wasn’t a problem when I needed to be on a call.

Best of all was what awaited at the end of each working day. We were staying in the Quadrilatero neighbourhood, famed for its aperitivo scene. Heck, there was a wonderful Vermouth bar literally across the street.

And after an aperitivo? Time to sample some Piedmontese cuisine. Bagna càuda! Vitello tonnato! Agnolotti! Panna cotta! We had some wonderful meals at restaurants like Consorzio, L’Acino, and Pautasso (a neighbourhood spot we went to on our last night that had the most perfectly convivial atmosphere you could imagine).

They say a change is as good as a rest. I certainly enjoyed this change of scene.

There’s something about going somewhere for a working week that feels very different to going somewhere primarily as a tourist. You get a different flavour of a place.

Rebecca Solnit: Slow Change Can Be Radical Change ‹ Literary Hub

Beautiful writing from Rebecca Solnit, that encapsulates what I’ve been trying to say:

You want tomorrow to be different than today, and it may seem the same, or worse, but next year will be different than this one, because those tiny increments added up. The tree today looks a lot like the tree yesterday, and so does the baby.

After two days at border:none in Nuremberg, it was time for two days at Indie Web Camp, also in Nuremberg.

I hadn’t been to an Indie Web Camp since before The Situation. It felt very good to be back. I had almost forgotten how inspiring and productive they can be.

This one had a good turnout of around twenty people. We had ourselves an excellent first day of thought-provoking sessions. Then on day two it was time to put some of those ideas into action.

A little trick I like to do on the practical day is to have two tasks to attempt: one of them quite simple, and the other more ambitious. That way, as long as I get the simpler task done, I’ll always have at least something to demo at the end of the day.

This time I attempted three bits of home improvement on my website.

Autolinking Mastodon usernames

The first problem I set myself was ostensibly the simple one. But it involved regular expressions, so then I had two problems.

I wanted to automatically link up Mastodon usernames if I mentioned one in my notes. For example, during border:none I mentioned Brian’s mastodon username in a note: @briansuda@loðfíll.is.

That turned out to be an excellent test case. Those Icelandic characters made sure I wasn’t making unwarranted assumptions about character sets.

Here’s the regular expression I came up with. It’s not foolproof by any means. Basically it looks for @[email protected].

Good enough. Ship it.

Related posts

My next task was a bit more ambitious. It involved SQL queries, something I’m slightly better at than regular expressions but that’s a very low bar.

I wanted to show related posts when you get to the end of one of my blog posts.

I’ve been tagging all my blog posts for years so that’s the mechanism I used for finding similar posts. There’s probably a clever SQL statement that could do this, but I ended up brute-forcing it a bit.

I don’t feel too bad about the hacky clunky nature of my solution, because I cache blog post pages. That means only the first person to view the blog post (usually me) will suffer any performance impacts from my clunky database queries. After that everything’s available straight from a cached file.

Let’s say you’re reading a blog post of mine that I’ve tagged with ten different keywords. I make a separate SQL query for each keyword to get all the other posts that use that tag. Then it’s a matter of sorting through all the results.

I loop through the results of each tag and apply a score to the tagged post. If the post shares one tag with the post you’re looking at, it has a score of one. If it shares two tags, it has a score of two, and so on.

I decided that for a post to be considered related, it had to share at least three tags. I also decided to limit the list of related posts to a maximum of five.

It worked out pretty well. If you scroll down on my recent post about JavaScript, you’ll see links to related posts about JavaScript. If you read through a post on accessibility testing, you’ll find other posts about accessibility testing. If you make it to the end of this post about Mars colonisation you’ll see links to more posts about exploring our solar system.

Right now I’m just doing this for my blog but I’d like to do it for my links too. A job for a future Indie Web Camp.

Link rot

I was very inspired by Remy’s recent post on how he’s tackling link rot on his site. I wanted to do the same for mine.

On the first day at Indie Web Camp I led a session on link rot to gather ideas and alternative approaches. We had a really good discussion, though it’s always worth bearing in mind that there’ll never be a perfect solution. There’ll always be some false positives and some false negatives.

The other Jeremy at Indie Camp Nuremberg blogged about the session. Sebastian Greger was attending remotely and the session inspired him to spend the second day also tackling linkrot.

In the end I decided to stick with Remy’s two-pronged approach:

1. a client-side script that—as a progressive enhancement—intercepts outbound links and re-routes them to
2. a server-side script that redirects to the Internet Archive if the link is broken.

Here’s the JavaScript I wrote for the first part.

It’s very similar to Remy’s but with one little addition. I check to see if the clicked link is inside an h-entry and if it is, I pass on the date from the post’s dt-published value.

Here’s the PHP I wrote for the server-side redirector. The comments tell the story of what the code is doing:

• Check that the request is coming from my site.
• There also has to be a URL provided in the query string.
• Make a very quick curl request to get the response headers from the URL. The time limit is set to 1 second.
• If there was any error (like a time out), give up and go to the URL.
• Pick the response headers apart to get the HTTP status code.
• If the response is OK, go to the URL.
• If the response is a redirect, go around again but this time use the redirect URL.
• Construct the archive.org search endpoint.
• If we have a date, provide it. Otherwise ask for the latest snapshot.
• Ping that archive.org URL. This time there’s no time limit; this might take a while.
• If there’s an archived copy, redirect to that.
• There’s no archived copy. Give up and go the URL anyway.

Not perfect by any means, but it works for the most common cases of link rot.

For the demo at the end of the day I went back into my archive of over 10,000 links and plucked out some old posts, like this one from December 2005. It takes a little while to do the rerouting but eventually you get to see the archived version from the same time period as when I linked to it.

Here’s another link from 2005. Here’s another. Those links are broken now, but with a little patience, you’ll still get to read them on the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive’s wayback machine really is a gift. I can’t imagine how would it be even remotely possible to try to address link rot on my site without archive.org.

I will continue to donate money to the Internet Archive and I encourage you to do the same.

In 2013, I spoke at the border:none event in Nuremberg. I gave a talk called The Power of Simplicity.

It was a great little event. Most of the talks were, like mine, on technical topics; design, development, the usual conference material.

This year Joschi and Marc decided to have another border:none event ten years on from the first one. They invited back all the original speakers, as well as some new folks. They kept the ticket price the same as ten years ago—just thirty euros.

For us speakers from the previous event, the only brief they gave us was to consider what’s happened in the past decade. I played it pretty safe and talked about the web. I’ll post a transcript of my talk soon.

Some of the other speakers were far more ambitious. They spoke about themselves, the world, the meaning of life …my presentation was very tame in comparison.

I really, really admire the honesty and vulnerability that those people displayed. Tobias Baldauf in particular took my breath away. He delivered an intensely personal talk on generational trauma that was meticulously researched and took incredible bravery to deliver. It was worth going to Nuremberg just for the privilege of being present for that talk.

Other talks were refreshingly tech-free. There was a talk on cold-water swimming. There was a talk on paragliding. And I don’t mean they were saying “what designers can learn from cold-water swimming” or “how I became a better developer through paragliding.” The talks were literally about swimming and paragliding.

There was a great variety of speakers this time around, include age ranges from puberty to menopause (quite literally—that was the topic of one of the talks). I had the great pleasure of providing some coaching before the event to fifteen year old Maya who was delivering her first talk in English. She did a fantastic job! And the talk she gave—about how teachers in her school aren’t always trusting of the technology they provide to students—was directly relevant to what we’re seeing in the world of work. Give people autonomy, agency and trust.

There was a lot of trust at border:none. Everyone who bought a ticket did so on trust—they had no idea what to expect. Likewise, Marc and Joschi put their trust in the speakers. They gave the speakers the freedom to talk about whatever they wanted. That trust was repayed.

Florian took some superb pictures of the event. Matthias wrote up his experience. So did Tom. Valisis shared the gist of his excellent talk.

At the end of the event there was some joking about returning in 2033. I love the idea of a conference that happens once every ten years. Count me in!

border:none 2023 – florian.photo

I love these black and white photos from the border:none event that just wrapped up in Nuremberg!

The Illusion Of Developer “Productivity” Opens The Door To Snake Oil – Codemanship’s Blog

There are a lot of astute observations in here.

August was a month of travels. You can press play on that month’s map to follow the journey.

But check out the map for September too because the travels continue. This time my adventures are confined to Europe.

I’m in Spain. Jessica and I flew into Madrid on Saturday. The next day we took a train ride across the Extremaduran landscape to Cáceres, our home for the week.

This is like the sequel to our Sicilian trip. We’re both working remotely. We just happen to do be doing it from a beautiful old town with amazing cuisine.

We’re in a nice apartment that—crucially—has good WiFi. It’s right on the main square, but it’s remarkably quiet.

There’s a time difference of one hour with Brighton. Fortunately everything in Spain happens at least an hour later than it does at home. Waking up. Lunch. Dinner. Everything is time-shifted so that I’m on the same schedule as my colleagues.

I swear I’m more productive working this way. Maybe it’s the knowledge that tapas of Iberican ham await me after work, but I’m getting a lot done this week.

And when the working week is done, the fun begins. Cáceres is hosting its annual Irish fleadh this weekend.

I’ve always wanted to go to it, but it’s quite a hassle to get here just for a weekend. Combining it with a week of remote work makes it more doable.

I’m already having a really nice time here and the tunes haven’t even started yet.

Before The Situation, I used to work in the Clearleft studio quite a bit. Maybe I’d do a bit of work at home for an hour or two before heading in, but I’d spend most of my working day with my colleagues.

That all changed three years ago:

Clearleft is a remote-working company right now. I mean, that’s hardly surprising—just about everyone I know is working from home.

Clearleft has remained remote-first. We’ve still got our studio space, though we’ve cut back to just having one floor. But most of the time people are working from home. I still occasionally pop into the studio—I’m actually writing this in the studio right now—but mostly I work out of my own house.

It’s funny how the old ways of thinking have been flipped. If I want to get work done, I stay home. If I want to socialise, I go into the studio.

For a lot of the work I do—writing, podcasting, some video calls, maybe some coding—my home environment works better than the studio. In the Before Times I’d have to put on headphones to block out the distractions of a humming workplace. Of course I miss the serendipitous chats with my co-workers but that’s why it’s nice to still have the option of popping into the studio.

Jessica has always worked from home. Our flat isn’t very big but we’ve got our own separate spaces so we don’t disturb one another too much.

For a while now we’ve been thinking that we could just as easily work from another country. I was inspired by a (video) chat I had with Luke when he casually mentioned that he was in Cypress. Why not? As long as the internet connection is good, the location doesn’t make any difference to the work.

So Jessica and I spent the last week working in Ortygia, Sicily.

It was pretty much the perfect choice. It’s not a huge bustling city. In fact it was really quiet. But there was still plenty to explore—winding alleyways, beautiful old buildings, and of course plenty of amazing food.

The time difference was just one hour. We used the extra hour in the morning to go to the market to get some of the magnificent local fruits and vegetables to make some excellent lunches.

We made sure that we found an AirBnB place with a good internet connection and separate workspaces. All in all, it worked out great. And because we were there for a week, we didn’t feel the pressure to run around to try to see everything.

We spent the days working and the evenings having a nice sundowner appertivo followed by some pasta or seafood.

It was simultaneously productive and relaxing.

In Search of Lost Time, by Tom Vanderbilt

Temporal standards bodies.

Adoption. — Ethan Marcotte

Ethan highlights a classic case of the McNamara Fallacy—measuring adoption of design system components.

Vibe Driven Development

This describes how I iterate on The Session:

It comes down to this annoying, upsetting, stupid fact: the only way to build a great product is to use it every day, to stare at it, to hold it in your hands to feel its lumps. The data and customers will lie to you but the product never will.

This whole post reminded of the episode of the Clearleft podcast on measuring design.

The problem underlying all this is that when it comes to building a product, all data is garbage, a lie, or measuring the wrong thing. Folks will be obsessed with clicks and charts and NPS scores—the NFTs of product management—and in this sea of noise they believe they can see the product clearly. There are courses and books and talks all about measuring happiness and growth—surveys! surveys! surveys!—with everyone in the field believing that they’ve built a science when they’ve really built a cult.

Why you should never use px to set font-size in CSS - Josh Collinsworth blog

Reminder:

em and rem work with the user’s font size; px completely overrides it.

Remix and the Alternate Timeline of Web Development - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

It sounds like Remix takes a sensible approach to progressive enhancement.

Will Serving Real HTML Content Make A Website Faster? Let’s Experiment! - WebPageTest Blog

Spoiler: the answer to the question in the title is a resounding “hell yeah!”

Scott brings receipts.