Category: development

Baseline

Max Böck makes some really good points about the expense of modern websites in load times and bandwidth. There was one paragraph that especially stuck out in my mind because it’s similar to a thought I’ve been pondering:

“The only thing missing here might be a few sensible lines of CSS to set better typography rules. Those could still be inlined in the head though, easily coming in under the 14KB limit for the first connection roundtrip.” — Max Böck

Why bother increasing the exemplar 1.2kb NPR text site to 14kb? I wonder if there’s room in the world for a better baseline stylesheet. We could move that burden to the browser and save 12.8kb times infinity plus not burden developers to learn or source design for basic content.

Perhaps there could be a new doctype that declares “I am the plainest of HTML and have no style whatsoever. Do with me what you will.” It could be a well-agreed-upon set of minimal enhancements to the present-day browser default styles, the modern equivalent of “links are all blue” and such. Alternately, it could take the form of multiple themes for the user to choose from as their preferred default viewing experience.

Maybe this is a pie-in-the-sky, grade-A terrible idea, but I think even minimum viable experiences should be better.

Quirky

Turns out an array from a document rendered in IE’s Compatibility Mode doesn’t do Array.map(); … even when it’s used in a document that’s in normal IE 11 mode.

I found this out while integrating a legacy application with a modern application that opens in a second window and needs to be tossed a configuration object. Interestingly, we’re using ExtJS as our framework for the modern application in question, and the config handler uses Ext.Array.map(), which is meant to use a polyfill when Array.map() support is not there.

The problem? Ext.Array.map() tests an exemplar array of its own making, not the one it’s about to act on. Probably helpful for performance, but not what I needed in this case. Luckily, the array structure wasn’t super vital, as there was a deprecated way of specifying the same configs via several booleans instead. Lucky I didn’t clean those up yet.

Another fun day in legacy code…

Inventory

Lately I’ve felt as though I’m spread quite thin. My default response to anything negative is to burden myself with an additional project, so a new blog seemed like an obvious choice. On further thought, having a single point of outward communication felt like a good way to condense and unify my ideas, and the feedback from friends, kind strangers, random hecklers, and so on.

I think a good first step in this newest endeavor is to take inventory of all of my projects and lay them all out for overview. This is most easily done by copying and pasting my list of domains from HostGator:

Continue reading Inventory