Notes

(Current mood: Mademoiselle Non.)

Confusingly, individual songs from the Faust 1971-1974 box set are appearing as either singles or whole albums on Spotify. No matter! This is fucking incredible music.

Yes, ironically enough, Safari 15.0’s diabolical tab styling (and Gruber is 100% right about how poorly designed they are), has made me consider using, erm, Safari instead of (or side by side with, maybe) Firefox. After seeing what all the fuss was about, I found out you can turn off the absurd shove-everything-into-the-tab-even-the-address-bar-and-make-each-tab-a-different-colour UI so it remains usable.

The very good thing about Safari is it’s nativeness. It looks and feels right on MacOS, and you get the share icon.

Firefox has also decided to make tabs not like tabs, going for what I call the lozenge look.

Decided not to in the end, though. Firefox has better privacy options and some killer extensions that I couldn’t do without, especially Stylus and Hide Fixed Elements. And we need to support the independent browser.

Erm, sorry for all the malformed micro.blog links. I’ve been updating mt MB RSS feed today, fairly unsuccessfully.

Thinking about classifying website and user navigation needs and resultant navigation UI (hiding, laying bare, TOCs, headers and never hamburgers).

The platform is down but My website is not.

I wish I’d added a section on how font size, measure and leading relate to the reader’s distance from the screen to my measure article – how good typography allows us to recline.

So, we have a plugin which appears to trawl through a folder of images and output webp versions. I see in the config you can opt to replace the existing extension (png, jpg etc.) or append webp to it (resulting in a filename like image.jpg.webp). Second option sounds best as it will avoid having to do some string manipulation with the filename in the figure and image includes (i.e. replace jpg with webp). Assuming the first build will be the most painful as hopefully it checks for an existing webp file before creating a new one. Let’s see.

Noted, graffiti on this morning’s walk with Melie, down an unnamed folly.

Colin writes on brutalism in web design:

This site is predominantly text (with the occasional image, video or audio file) but there are some JavaScript flourishes and features to give things a little movement and character… what harm are they doing beyond adding just a few kB to the total payload?

Which is right. I’ve been down the brutalist/minimalist rabbit hole many times, and, while fun, it’s pretty pointless. In the scheme of things, serving pages of 100kb probably makes you lighter than 95% of the rest of the web – adding 32kb of minimised, gzipped jquery is not a crime. (Incidentally, using jquery is more efficient than React, Angular et al.)

Where does web design as a discipline sit alongside architecture, furniture design, landscape design etc? I think there’s a relatively banal interpretation of brutalism which produces kitsch looking websites that make a nod to how brutalist architecture can jar – I think this is what Colin is objecting to. But viewing brutalism as an approach to designing websites could be more fruitful, as the web’s materials are inherently fluid, responsive, distributable and plastic. Working with the web’s grain could help produce more accessible web pages. What aesthetic – if any – would that approach result in?