WDRL — Edition 220: Focus, CSS Like In The 90s, And Auto-Fill/-Fit in Grid

Celý článek

Hey,

a lot of things change but maybe we focus on the wrong things? The mixture of news and questions whether how we write CSS is the right way to do let me think about this for quite some time. While we achieve a lot with technology, it gets clearer that it affects our happiness negatively and adds stress to our body and mind. And while we get new CSS Grid properties and display values in browsers, other people look at the output we generate with our amazing tools and realize that we could optimize the output files a lot more when changing the way we’re writing stylesheets.

News

• Chrome 65 is coming soon and will bring new stuff: The CSS Paint API will ship, the Server Timing API, display: contents (supported in Firefox, Safari as well) and this article explains these features in detail.

Accessibility

• Stefan Judis collects good and useful accessibility resources on his website and shares the list with us. With the categorization it’s a helpful resource to research particular problems once we encounter them.

CSS

• Sara Soueidan shares the difference between CSS Grid’s auto-fill and auto-fit.
• Jens Oliver Meiert’s new article “We write CSS like we did in the 90s, and yes, it’s silly’ is a thought-provoking but data backed piece that shows that despite more tooling and conventions we fail to improve at writing CSS. This is not about writing CSS in Javascript or a class naming convention but more about how our tools work and how we try to optimize things while not changing the bigger picture.

Work & Life

• The MIT OpenCourseWare released a lot of free audio and video lectures. This is amazing news and makes great content available to broader masses.
• Jake Knapp says great work requires idealism and cynicism and has strong arguments to back this thesis up. A well worth reading article.
• There’s an important study about America’s rising unhappiness in the population since around the year 2000. And it reveals that while income inequality might play a role, the more important part is that young people who use a lot of digital media are unhappier than those who only use it a little (up to an hour a day). Interestingly, people not using digital media at all are unhappy, too, so the outcome of this is likely that we should try to use digital media only in moderation. This might be impossible if you’re like me working in a field of digital media but we can apply this at least to our private life and I bet it makes a big difference.

Go beyond…

• Anton Sten reminds us about wise words from Apple CEO Tim Cook: “You have to make sure that you’re focused on the thing that matters.” We can not only apply that as bussiness advice but also for our own life: Focus on things that really matter and embrace them.

—Anselm