Category: thoughts

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.

Picturesque

I sometimes take for granted the experiences I have been graced with in my thirty years on this planet. In a fit of insomnia, one pair of experiences popped into my head.

Lately while working on a new puzzle game called Interst8, I’ve been delving into road geek forums and getting into all things highway. These topics reminded me of my own experience on one of the westernmost roads in the country, the Pacific Coast Highway. Traveling on the PCH is a goal of mine, but so farm I only had a taste of it; while in Los Angeles filming Superhuman, I used some free time to visit Santa Monica and crossed over the highway on a pedestrian walkway. Nothing but a means to get to the beach.

Fast forward a few months later and I’m back at my day job. Bugs are found. Our QA lead calls me to her desk. She opens Chrome, clicks the bookmark for our corporate email, and comments on the splash screen. Default Outlook splash screen with generic stock photos.

Then it hits me.

The bridge. The sandy coastline. The buildings in the background. It’s the pedestrian walkway I visited. Phones were taken out of pockets. Photos from Dropbox were loaded and compared with Google Street View and the Outlook splash screen. It was all a match, and it was all beautiful.

I know the novelty will fade as my insomnia wanes and I’ll finally be able to sleep, but for the moment I’m basking in the awe and satisfaction of having been somewhere so beautiful that its photo was used as a cheesy login screen background. There’s something special and amazing about it.