https://abookapart.com/products/demystifying-public-speaking

Looks like @sazzy is ready to bring some magic to the @aneventapart stage this morning.

The Tyrell Corporation is building hotels now.

This year’s models: @beep and @chriscoyier.

Now I get it.

This will-change property that was intended to SOLVE problems for animators may end up doing the opposite.

It seems wise for the browsers to step back and let the spec authors fill in the implementation details and gain consensus before moving forward.

Sous vide lamb.

This is what tells all our browsers on all our devices to set the viewport to be the same width of the current device, and to also set the initial scale to 1 (not scaled at all). This essentially allows us to have responsive design consistently.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

The viewport value for the meta element was invented by Apple when the iPhone was released. Back then, it was a safe bet that most websites were wider than the iPhone’s 320 pixel wide display—most of them were 960 pixels wide …because reasons. So mobile Safari would automatically shrink those sites down to fit within the display. If you wanted to over-ride that behaviour, you had to use the meta viewport gubbins that they made up.

That was nine years ago. These days, if you’re building a responsive website, you still need to include that meta element.

That seems like a shame to me. I’m not suggesting that the default behaviour should switch to assuming a fluid layout, but maybe the browser could just figure it out. After all, the CSS will already be parsed by the time the HTML is rendering. Perhaps a quick test for the presence of a crawlbar could be used to trigger the shrinking behaviour. No crawlbar, no shrinking.

Maybe someday the assumption behind the current behaviour could be flipped—assume a website is responsive unless the author explicitly requests the shrinking behaviour. I’d like to think that could happen soon, but I suspect that a depressingly large number of sites are still fixed-width (I don’t even want to know—don’t tell me).

There are other browser default behaviours that might someday change. Right now, if I type example.com into a browser, it will first attempt to contact http://example.com rather than https://example.com. That means the example.com server has to do a redirect, costing the user valuable time.

You can mitigate this by putting your site on the HSTS preload list but wouldn’t it be nice if browsers first checked for HTTPS instead of HTTP? I don’t think that will happen anytime soon, but someday …someday.

I believe that talking about mental health issues and sharing our experiences—not just those of people who suffer, but also those who live with and support us—can help everyone. Whether you struggle with your own mental health or care for someone who does, you can help others to understand how you cope. Geek Mental Help Week is all about sharing those experiences.

A spot of six-up sketching at @Clearleft.

Kebab.

Eagerly anticipating a kebab from @TheTrollsPantry.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/europeanspaceagency/sets/72157638315605535/

Napoletana.

Passed by a second-hand book stall on the way into work. My defences were down.

Not a bad haul for a fiver.

Gazing at moonlander.seb.ly like it’s one big interactive screensaver.