Damian’s notes

I remember the days of server-rendered or statically rendered HTML, in contrast to the modern approach of having a giant bundle of JavaScript faking the navigation and accessibility features HTML already provides. Jim Nielsen uses navigation between separate, simpler pages to power his site’s interactivity, with the new view-transitions CSS features providing the animations between states.

Cambridge University Press has a collection of original letter punches used to make the type of the Birmingham printer John Baskerville (1707-75), and they have an online exhibition of amazing-looking high-definition scans of these artefacts.

A video about making a submarine from Lego, a Raspberry Pi board, and a few other bits and bobs.

Latest HTML5 features allow you to create dialogues and popovers declaratively (just HTML attributes and some CSS to style it), rather than needing a giant bundle of JavaScript. Less JavaScript on web pages is always a good thing, and using built-in HTML features is good for accessibility as well. Here’s a blog post from David Bushell on how its done.

Long ago I discovered that when it comes to averaging or mixing colours in code, it works better when you use one of the colour spaces like CIELab that model colour perception rather than the RGB signal strengths used in colour production. Björn Ottosson is an indie developer whose OKLch and OKLab colour-space definitions have rapidly become standard in web browsers and editors. Here’s a blog post where he discusses creating colour-picker UIs using variations on the OKLab system.

I love letter-carving—that is, I love watching other people do it, I have not tried it myself. In this video from the V&A, sculptor Miriam Johnson is taking it old-school by carving Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The Zed typeface superfamily (Peter Biľak et al.) is a variable font with four axes (width, weight, slant, and roundedness). Just van Rossum came up with an elegant interactive visualization of the mind-boggling design space.

Browsing the Tangible Media site and here’s something I didn’t know about: a microfilm blueprint embedded in a punched card encoding the metadata identifying the image. A highly tangible digital–analogue crossover format!

I am old enough to remember when different charsets for different locales was the norm and Unicode was a controversial and ambitious project to create one character set to represent all languages. UTF-8, the very clever encoding format for Unicode is ubiquitous now but is actually so new the original default for web pages was the relatively parochial ISO 8859-1. Here is a very clear 37-minute tutorial on why UTF-8 and what it is, with bonus coda on the cunning way Korean Hangul script is represented in Unicode.