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15 posts total
Eric A. Meyer

This afternoon, while hanging out with my ~14 month old granddaughter, I figured out how to play “Baby Shark” on her toy xylophone. So I went with it, because it’s one of her favorite songs.

On the third or fourth repeat, she turned to me, gave me just the kindest smile, and took the mallet away from me.

Eric A. Meyer

Hey, everyone! “Design for Real Life” is now available online, in full, for free, at dfrlbook.com. It’s all the same content Sara Wachter-Boettcher and I wrote in 2016, but now it’s free for everyone. (If you’d like your own paper or electronic copy, there’s a “Buy the book” page on the site.) Read, share, spread the word—thanks!

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Raphael

@Meyerweb Currently in the Introduction.

One small anecdote that might be related to what you're talking about: pretty much the only times my Mom uses the camera on her cellphone is when she's visiting her parents' graves and takes photos of those graves.

As a result, she clearly dislikes Google's occasional attempts to make her watch a slide show of her recent photos.

Soliyra (she/they)

@Meyerweb Reading the part about the fb "Year in review" feature, launched in 2014. 2014 was, and still is, the worst year of my life (nice try, 2020!), so this chapter hits hard.

Iestyn Lloyd :PencilRuler:

@Meyerweb Thanks for reminding me. I already purchased 😃

Eric A. Meyer

So… O’Reilly sent me email today hyping up how my books (really, just the one, I assume) is going to be AI-translated into Spanish and German, with other languages to follow. This was probably inevitable, but I still have concerns.

First: are there no human translators of these languages?

Second: who’s going to proof-read all 1,126 pages to make sure nothing got botched, especially given the technical nature of the content? The readers? Which isn’t even crowd-sourcing: it’s customer-sourcing.

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Waldo Jaquith

@Meyerweb We’ve done a lot of work on AI-assisted translation at U.S. Digital Response for the past year. It can make a good first draft for a translator, but it is in no way a replacement for a human translator.

Lisa L. Spangenberg

@Meyerweb Amd that's a terrible idea. I've worked on Help documents with a first pass translation done by a specialized deliberately-created-for-the-purpose LLM, and that's not bad, but it's still double checked by humans

Bramus

@Meyerweb We have machine translations for web.dev and developer.chrome.com and the results are often really bad.

The Dutch translation of my recent “Animate to height: auto in CSS” article translates back into something along the lines of “Animate on altitude: automatic with CSS” 😬

Eric A. Meyer

⌨️ New post! In which I announce a new service that helps web devs keep up to date on changes to support for web features (CSS, JS, SVG, HTML, and all that sort of thing); you can subscribe to RSS to get weekly reports on BCD changes. Thanks to @igalia for supporting this work! meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/202

A screenshot of the BCD Watch service, showing changes of support in JS APIs and CSS.
Eric A. Meyer

@igalia If you want to jump straight to the service and figure it out without the backstory: bcd-watch.igalia.com

Eric A. Meyer

I just saw someone characterize running a Mastodon instance as being “no harder than running your own mail server” and I thought “oof, that’s a savage takedown” before grasping that they meant it as a positive.

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Matt Maddux

@Meyerweb When was the last time this person hosted their own mail server, 2002?

Julien Silland

@Meyerweb lovely how ~30% of the replies are about how running an email server is actually not that hard, unless you want it to work

Mikael Hansson

@Meyerweb Looking at the negative replies I wonder what the big issue is. You shouldn’t be careless while originally setting up a mail server, but once properly configured, receiving and sending email just works. Now if you want to do things that look a lot like spamming, that’s a different question, but for personal or regular business use? No problem at all. I don’t have an opinion on running a Mastodon instance as I don’t do that.

Eric A. Meyer

OpenAI stealing Scarlett’s voice for their new product after being told “no” is so perfectly on-brand, it’s almost painful. npr.org/2024/05/20/1252495087/

Mayank

@Meyerweb `:focus { outline: none; }` is harmful and unnecessary. just using `:focus-visible` for custom focus styles should be enough

Andrew Feeney

@Meyerweb These are truly the most wonderful feats of engineering, albeit they don't actually do anything useful.

Eric A. Meyer

I know I have very little ground on which to comment on the beauty of a typeface, but this variable font is *SO GOOD* and I really wish I’d found it before “CSS: The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition” published a month back, because it would have been **perfect** for the examples in the Fonts chapter.

Try out all the features and variability of Elstob at psb1558.github.io/Elstob-font/, which also links to a Github repository where you can get it.

Elstob
A variable font for medievalists (and others) 
BASED ON TYPES USED BY THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS IN THE 17TH AND 18TH CENTURIES.
Honoring Elizabeth Elstob (1683-1756), pioneering scholar of early English literature Licensed under the SIL OpenFont License Free for all to use

Image of the title page of an old book, reading (with “long s” glyphs which read as lowercase “f” to the modern eye):

AN 
Englifh-Saxon Homily 
ON THE BIRTH-DAY 
OF 
St. GREGORY: 
Anciently ufed in the 
Englih-Saxon Church. 

Giving an Account of the 
Converfion of the ENGLISH 
FROM 
PAGANISM TO CHRISTIANITY. 

Translared into Nodern Finglish, with Notes, &c.
By ELIZ. ELsTOB. 
LONDON: 
Printed by W. Bowyer. MDCCIX.
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Luis Villa

@Meyerweb yeah, it is gorgeous. I immediately wanted to switch the headers in my blog to it.

Ralph Giles

@Meyerweb That's a nice font! Always nice to see new work with an open license. No support for Egyptian transliteration, unfortunately.

eyrea

@Meyerweb It's gorgeous and I am so using it!

But I'm not sure why they say it's for medievalists when it's definitely post-medieval. Renaissance and Enlightenment, yes! But not medieval (unless, you know, they just like it anyway).

Eric A. Meyer

Twitter learned, and Reddit is fast learning, that people are not addicted to the platform, they’re addicted to the community they found there. Ruin the community, and people will leave the platform. It really is that simple.

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Urzl

@Meyerweb We keep saying this but nobody hears it.

We're not addicted to our phones/computers, we're social animals addicted to each other and this is where we find the connection.

Eric A. Meyer

“Even if Twitter were to drop the designation altogether, [NPR CEO John] Lansing says the network will not immediately return to the platform. 'At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter,' he says. 'I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again.' ” npr.org/2023/04/12/1169269161/

Darwin Woodka

@Meyerweb Twitter cannot be trusted. It doesn't take any time to understand that.

Eric A. Meyer

I have officially reached the point in book edits where I hate everything I wrote and want to just burn it all and start over.

Eric A. Meyer

“Once you start down the Dark Mode path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you, it will.” —FEDi Master Yoda

Eric A. Meyer

This is a really, really nice base stylesheet with excellent typography (at least in the serif and monospace families) and markup considerations. edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-cs

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Mr. Completely

@Meyerweb Ed Tufte the absolute king. I started reading his work in the very early days of web design and he changed the way I see everything - now he's foundational of course, but for awhile there "actually, unless it's an art site, focus on the content and make the presentation serve that" was a bit revolutionary on the ol interwebs

Catherine Berry

@Meyerweb , while reading the overview document I discovered that their "clever" CSS trick to underline links in a nonstandard way results in invisible underlines when viewed in forced dark mode on all browsers I tested. Forced dark mode (light text on dark background) is an essential accessibility feature for many vision-impaired users, including me.

I understand the desire to share an artistic vision through site design. I just wish people would do it without creating a11y barriers.

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