Cool Links

This is such a cool idea that I definitely want to copy in the future. I’m a bit wary of making so much private information public (especially dates), so I might not ever make this public anywhere. But still, a nice personal exercise and a perfect memento mori.

That article about the faux containers lead me to this one. I knew about naming CSS grid areas, but I had no idea about the [area-start/end] pattern! You can set those explicitly or have them be automatically added by CSS. This is pretty cool!

Jake gives a really thorough explanation on view transitions, showing some of its shortcomings when animating some specific elements and how to fix them. View transitions are so nice 🤩

The smoothness of a web application is an anti-indicator of its reliability and predictability as a web page.

your team almost certainly doesn’t have what it takes to out-engineer the browser. The browser will continuously improve the experience of plain HTML, at no cost to you, using a rendering engine that is orders of magnitude more efficient than JavaScript.

I remember when I first learned about SPAs and how amazing it seemed like to be able to have smooth transitions between pages. Then, as I started building and using them, it became apparent that those benefits also brought a lot of issues that took a lot of dev work to fix.

Luckily, with View Transitions, lazy loading, and predictive pre-rendering (start loading a page before you click on its link) that a lot of frameworks have now, we can have most of the SPA benefits without having to reinvent the wheel.

Apparently when your indie app does not collect any amount of data, the data reapers get confused.

This is so cool! This website allows you to explore the 3D models of maps from a variety of old-ish games from the Wii, GameCube, DS and PS2 eras. If you’ve played any of them, it might be worth having a look. My favorite ones to explore like this were the maps from Pokémon HeartGold/SoulSilver and Platinum.

I recommend opening the site on a computer though. The touch controls aren’t great.

Incredible article that not only explains the new-ish text-wrap: balance and text-wrap: pretty CSS properties in-depth, it also goes into the caveats those properties have. It’s well-written, well illustrated, and interactive. What else could you want?

Henry’s personal website is absolutely stunning! It has an unique design that is, above all, fun to explore. I miss exploring websites, instead of being guided through them.

Ahmad once again writing the articles I wish I did. Another well-written and interactive article going in-depth on the also new-ish overflow: clip CSS property. clip has helped me implement designs more than once and it’s so nice to have something that works just like I always expected overflow: hidden to work.

Most of what Neal makes is pure gold and this is no exception. This game is no different than most of what you can find on your App Store, it’s just more honest about it…

A really well-designed post from the Chrome team showing the coolest new things that were introduced to CSS in 2024. A lot of the things in there are really cool! The sad part is that, unless you’re running an up-to-date Chromium browser, you might not be able to see them in action. I initially saw this blog post on my iPhone (which only has access to Safari) and almost none of them worked.

This is such a good article that resonated very deeply with me. As someone who wished could do more to help the world and as a software developer who thinks about scalability, it’s a hard realization when you get older and don’t see yourself as someone who’s made a big difference.

But turns out that caring for someone or something doesn’t scale. It can’t, otherwise it’s not care anymore.

A self-guaranteeing promise does not require you to trust anyone.

Steph Ango is the lead developer behind Obsidian, and I’ve mentioned him before on my Owning your stuff is pretty cool, actually post earlier this year. On this article he talks about how the only way to guarantee ownership of your data is if the service can never access it in the first place. Terms of service guarantees are based on trust that the company’s priorities will never change, and that trust has been broken again and again.

It’s always fun to see these “State of…” surveys. Noteworthy thing being Astro completely dominating the framework numbers (except for usage, but I can totally see it becoming #1 soon).

Josh has always been one of my favorite bloggers, and this blog post is awesome. You’ve probably seen me talking about Progressive Enhancement before, and this article talks about browser support and figuring out how and where to progressively enhance things.

This is the best explanation of the new HTML/CSS popover API that I’ve seen. It still looks overly complex, mind you, and I’m not sure I like that API. But if you wanna find out about what it is and possible use cases, this video is a nice start!

Great article reflecting on how job descriptions usually suck and how hard it is to find a job working with the things you want to work on, especially if your expertise is in the gap between two different job descriptions. Turns out the easiest way is to try and carve out a way into the work you do best.

(No, it’s not something you use to browse horses. Unless that’s what you want to use an internet browser for.)

I love highly-specialized software that tries to solve a problem without worrying about the “regular” use cases. The Horse Browser seems like a pretty neat thing for people doing researches - it remembers, organizes and allows you to export all the links you click when doing research (or just going down rabbit holes).

I can see it being useful when writing papers or even when trying to look for a solution to a nasty bug. It’s definitely not something you’d want for regular browsing, but that’s fine. There are plenty of other browsers to use for that end.

There’s a neat review of this browser up on MacStories if you’re interested.

Nowadays it seems most packages and developers expect you to use a build system like Vite, Webpack, or anything with NodeJS to build websites.

That shouldn’t be true, but if you’re ever building a simple buildless website and want to use packages, Julia Evans explain how to do that and also a bit of how the different kinds of JS modules work.