Writing

As per his usual, good advice from Zach about loading fonts: this time, advising not to pair font-display: optional with preload.

Wonderful walk-through of just how much data you're sharing when you do something as simple as pizza and a movie.

Jessica was recently in South Africa for PixelUp (an event I keep hearing good things about) and wrote about her experience going on a safari and what sounds like an incredible encounter with an upset elephant.

The writing here is so good it makes me want to tear up everything I've ever written and try again.

Mr. Calvano with a really good explanation of HTTP Caching. Particularly interesting to me was the bit about the heuristic cache limits of different browsers—something I had never really dug into.

In the Chromium source as well as the Webkit source, we can see that the lifetimes.freshness variable is set to 10% of the time since the object was last modified (provided that a Last-Modified header was returned). The 10% since last modified heuristic is the same as the suggestion from the RFC. When we look at the Firefox source code, we can see that the same calculation is used, however Firefox uses the std:min() C++ function to select the less of the 10% calculation or 1 week.

I don't spend much time in Sketch myself, but this seems like a really clever way of mirroring Brad's Atomic Design inside Sketch files.

I really like the format (and subject!) of Jeremy's new workshop. Super hands-on, no slides, and different every time as the attendees go in different directions.

VoiceOver has a bug that causes it to misbehave when content is broken up, such as by a
or inside a link or header. This is a quick explanation of the issue and how to use role="text" to fix it.

There is so much to like in this post by Lisa Maria Martin about keeping politics out of talks.

I love the careful definition of political versus partisan:

First, let’s get one definitional issue out of the way. Sometimes when people hear the term “political,” they understand it as “partisan.” To be political is to acknowledge the lived experiences of people outside of yourself. To be partisan is to advocate for the beliefs or propaganda of a specific party affiliation.

And also her point that the impact of our technology is never neutral:

“Please keep politics out of your talks” takes neutrality as a baseline. It relies on the premise that our viewpoints exist in frictionless purity, and we simply need to keep them there to communicate them appropriately. But this is a myth; there is no such thing as neutrality.

And again:

Our choices are always guided by something—laws, morals, values, rules. And because that something is not neutral, our choices cannot be either. And what is design, if not a series of choices? Our web work, no matter how insignificant we may think it, is inherently political, and to pretend otherwise is willful ignorance.

I am not saying every talk needs to be about the political ramifications of your work. Just don’t pretend those ramifications aren’t there. Recognize that your choices draw boundaries.

Viewing the broader context of what we build is something I've been thinking a lot about as of late (while reading some great books on the topic). We need more discussion like this.

After a recent flurry of worry online around a CSS keylogger, Jake points out the real issue (emphasis mine):

Some folks called for browsers to 'fix' it. Some folks dug a bit deeper and saw that it only affected sites built in React-like frameworks, and pointed the finger at React. But the real problem is thinking that third party content is 'safe'.

Jeremy has been thinking about when the ends justify the means, a topic I've been thinking about a lot as of late as well.

When do the ends justify the means? Isn’t the whole point of having principles that they hold true even in the direst circumstances? Why even claim that corporations shouldn’t influence politics if you’re going to make an exception for net neutrality? Why even claim that free speech is sacrosanct if you make an exception for nazi scum?

Those two examples are pretty extreme and I can easily justify the exceptions to myself. Net neutrality is too important. Stopping fascism is too important. But where do I draw the line? At what point does something become “too important?”

It's a lovely post that connects dots between censorship, AMP, HTTPS as a requirement for new features and more.

An incredibly detailed walkthrough of optimizing the heck out of some JavaScript. Some really impressive gains here and lots of great, low-level information.