Cool Links

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.

Optimizing the resources your website loads is the best way of making sure it loads faster for everyone. I’ve talked before about ways of doing that, but turns out there’s a new, better way of telling browsers what they should load first!

The article has many examples of use cases, but these are my favorites:

• Hero images: “Images inside the viewport typically start at a Low priority. After the layout is complete, Chrome discovers that they’re in the viewport and boosts their priority. This usually adds a significant delay to loading the critical images, like hero images.”
• Image Carousels: “For example, in an image carousel, only the first visible image needs a higher priority, and the others, typically offscreen initially can be set to have lower priority.”

Great analysis of how most uses of generative AIs (or at least what companies are trying to sell as use cases) are primarily selfish.

If you can’t bother to do something yourself and instead ask a computer to do it, why should you expect someone to bother reading/watching it?

The corporate use cases for this are somewhat understandable - most content on the web is written for robots, not for people, for example (I know, sad). But Apple has been recently trying to sell it as a way to have a complete emotional detachment from your family as well. We truly live in the worst timeline.

The best part about Mastodon is the lack of a “For You” algorithm. That means nobody controls what you see (except for Time, I guess, since it’s chronological).

That is also the worst part of it. Sometimes I just can’t keep up with all the posts in there.

Sill is a neat little service that checks your timeline daily and sends you an email with the most shared links in your timeline. It works really well and it’s a neat way to make sure you didn’t miss a really cool project or article from your timeline even if you have skipped social media for a day (which you should really try). And, at least for now, it’s free!

Oh, it also works with BlueSky, though I haven’t tried it with that.