May 2020

MDN says about CSS property writing-mode:

Lea's article Today’s Javascript, from an outsider’s perspective states yet another time that our JavaScript environment needs a reboot. I also mentioned the topic a couple of times. But what shall we do?

Lately I am coming a across a couple of those tools that promise to remove the bundling overhead and pain from our projects. I already mentioned snowpack.

I asked this morning what I can improve on jskatas.org. Daniel answered with something that I can apply to picostitch too: use the "correct line length". He pointed me to practicaltypography.com which states:

I posted the following on reddit, finding out that the bot does not permit it. Read how I discovered reddit, finally.

A disclosure widget is a simple control whose sole purpose is to hide or show stuff. See his article for very in depth content on how to use <details> and <summary> tags. https://adrianroselli.com/2020/05/disclosure-widgets.html

With latest privacy awareness I believe cookies are also one sensitive topic. I have no numbers, but I guess there are more people who have cookies disabled then we believe. If not, I learned something here.

@Peter Coles wrote "HTTP Cookies: What's the difference between Max-age and Expires?" in 2009, but he has updated the article later and there is the answer for wether to use "expires" and/or "max-age" when you set cookies.

I wish to have a type system where I only need to type-hint the published parts (of a module/file) and let the type system infer all internal types. Though, I learned that even in Haskell land it is referred to as good practice to still type every function, no matter if public or private. Flow sounds to be doing what I want.

In short &#9776; <!-- Results in ☰ -->
See it in use, here is the commit I just made for this site. Look at the bottom right or top left on smaller screens. found at https://www.abeautifulsite.net/the-unicode-character-for-menu-icons

It is a bit more than a month ago that WebStorm has shipped the feature Displaying terminal sessions side by side and I am using it every day now.

Since QuickTime on Mac is great for short screen recordings, but the web can handle animated gifs better, I need https://cloudconvert.com/mov-to-gif it's a simple and awesome service!
Pricing: "absolutely free for up to 25 conversions per day", totally cool. Thanks!

Looking around for resource for JavaScript developers that get into TypeScript I found this TypeScript for JavaScript Programmers in the TypeScript handbook.

TypeScript 3.9 was released. Since I am basically a fan of making code safer and better to understand, that's what I use types for, I see nothing interesting to me in this release. But I also use TypeScript in a much simpler way than the cracks and fans. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/announcing-typescript-3-9/

You don't need to rename all your ".js" files to ".ts" to go all in on TypeScript, you can go gradually. Adopt TypeScript step by step, become familiar with it in your existing JavaScript project. No need to put development on hold for weeks, while you convert the code base to TypeScript and fix all type errors. Read on to see how I adopt TypeScript for JavaScript for the sourcecode of jskatas.org.

I wanted to scriptNode.cloneNode(true) and expected it to re-evaluate the JS of the node, but it didn't.

First search result for "CSS reset" is by the mighty Eric Meyer https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/ from quite some time ago. And looking up the source of his site I see the reset is not really included, also no modified version as far as I saw it. Next I came across https://cssreset.com/what-is-a-css-reset/ which nicely explains the whys and also states the cons. Unfortunately the latter article is missing a date, so I can't say how old this knowledge is. That's why I was so very keen on having all items properly dated on my blog.

The things I took away for me until now, while I am still reading the book:

The headline is a quote from Hammer and Nails by Stuart Langridge where he states how we make every user's browser a "fat client" (I called it that) by making them work far beyond rendering some HTML+CSS.

Bundler like webpack take up too much of our intention, imho. We spend a lot of time configuring them and waiting for them to build so we can see our site. Snowpack moves the bundler out of the way so you can develop without worrying about it locally.

In October 17, 1990 IMDb started as a unix script.
December 25, 1990 Tim Berners-Lee releases WorldWideWeb (later Nexus) on Christmas day, the first ever browser for the web.
August 6, 1991 Tim Berners-Lee responding to a thread on the alt.hypertext Usenet newsgroup, publicly announces the World Wide Web project for the first time. The History of the Web has so interesting stuff. Very worth a read. A great site to spend a lot of time on.

Brutalist Web Design seems quite aligned with Accessibility. The chapters of the guidelines are:

I was just filtering a list list.filter(someCondition) and I only wanted the first element in case there is one. Doing list.filter(someCondition)[0] fails when the filtered list is empty. So I am using slice(0, 1), which returns the first element if there is one, an empty list otherwise. Now I do list.filter(someCondition).slice(0, 1) and never list.filter(someCondition)[0]. Such small things.

WebStorm has this awesome feature they call Live Templates where you can configure a text in a certain filetype to autocomplete to something, even dynamic. See how I built the auto-completion for dateC which becomes dateCreated: 2020-05-02 15:27 CET, which is current date of course, in my custom format.

I just exported the small number of posts as JSON (12 KB) I had on micro.blog.

Diving into the topic of accessibility I found so much more than I expected. The first was the fact that "About 1 in 5 people has some type of disability.". I always knew and fought for doing accessibility at least better than yesterday, but effecting 20% by doing it badly can be painful, not only emotionally also for a business.