Damian’s notes

“Simplicity is a great virtue, but it requires hard work to achieve and education to appreciate. And to make matters worse, complexity sells better.” — Edsger Dijkstra

It’s so much easier to show off a complex new solution than a simpler, better one. How can we address this?

So excited to see CSS Form Control Styling Module Level 1. In less than ten years time we will be able to style the menu drop down of SELECT elements with CSS and throw away the gigabytes of buggy JavaScript used to fake this feature for the last couple of decades.

Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering by Rune Skovbo Johansen is a really interesting stylistic shader for 3d renders where it appears to be dithered with the dots both remaining stuck to the surface but also appearing roughly the same size as each other. It looks amazing. This video demonstrates the shader and explains the clever way it is achieved.

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.