Notices by Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social), page 37

Design can be free (part 3) - Scott Jenson: https://jenson.org/free3/

Journalists, You Should Be Looking for Undocumented APIs. Here’s How to Start - Leon Yin: https://themarkup.org/levelup/2023/03/03/journalists-you-should-be-looking-for-undocumented-apis-heres-how-to-start

Check your CSS source code order before shovelling on more CSS - Andy Bell: https://andy-bell.co.uk/check-your-css-source-code-order-before-shovelling-on-more-css/

Cascade layers can help here, now that that's a thing!

Website complexities - Manuel Moreale: https://manuelmoreale.com/@/page/5eFRQeLujB54ByWM

I dream that eventually my browserdev work will build up to WYSIWYG editors, seperate ones for HTML vs CSS, which should make webdev more approachable. Can't promise that yet!

Styling External Links - Jake Bauer "Parity Bit": https://www.paritybit.ca/blog/styling-external-links.html

How teams choose the JavaScript tools that they use (it's often not because it's the best tool for the job) - Go Make Things: https://gomakethings.com/how-teams-choose-the-javascript-tools-that-they-use-its-often-not-because-its-the-best-tool-for-the-job/

Avoid The Randomness From The Sky - Filippo Valsorda: https://words.filippo.io/dispatches/avoid-the-randomness-from-the-sky/

Someone was making fun of 90s table-based HTML layouts in an instagram chat with me. The instagram chat looks like this:

Scrubbing Twitter links from https://iconfactory.com

Feels good, man.

Working my way through getting unittests working on the abstract type. Transliterating over my existing tests.

Something's going wrong in height computation when testing margin collapsing. I'll investigate tomorrow, I'm too exhausted right now.

@mathew Well I'm boosting these articles chronologically-backwards...

Honorable mention: #GlamorousToolkit, which is not a browser development toolset, but it gets the basic idea right for its domain. It uses Miller columns to let you drill down in an object graph and switch between multiple viewers—plus create your custom viewers on-the-fly.

Every debugger should ship with this kind of tightly integrated inspector framework to let probe whatever you want that's in scope like this when stopped at a breakpoint.

<https://gtoolkit.com/>

This wasn't a problem in Joe Hewitt's original DOM Inspector. You could right click any object (e.g. DOM node) and bring up a new inspector window for that object. You could do the same for another object, and another. You could have multiple "viewers" trained on a single object.

Then Joe made Firebug and gave it a modal UI, and literally every browser has copied that same basic design error. Exasperating!

It boggles my mind that I seem to be the only one annoyed by the modal interaction style that modern browser devtools inherited from Firebug.

I see people constantly talk about how they can't imagine working without multiple displays because it affords the ability to put so much on the screen at once. So they say. Meanwhile, I do everything on a ~13 laptop screen. But I'm the one who has to point out how crazy it is that you can't inspect the style rules of two elements at the same time?

@colby Blogpost: https://argonaut-constellation.org/2021/12/23/amphiarao.html

@colby Code: https://git.argonaut-constellation.org/~alcinnz/amphiarao

(bad) homepage: http://rhapsode-web.org/amphiarao

@colby I think my "Amphiarao" webpage debugger has accidentally solved your gripe: Right-click -> "Open in new tab".

Took a bit more than I thought to get some integrate all my CatTrap layout logic into a single function, & get that compiling. But I've done that now! I will have some unittests written today!

@tbernard I really think it's a combination of the sheer challenge & most programmers being satisfied with plain text editors. Meanwhile these devs are drawn to exploring how to improve GUI developer-experience in languages (like Rust & Haskell) poorly suited to GTK/Qt's traditional OO architecture.

It is very unfortunate there's no embeddable document-editting engines, though browserengines do solve basically the same problem. Hopefully I can do something about that...

Finally not all information is inherently visual, so we tend to consult some more-or-less sophisticated lookup table to determine how to represent each symbol.

You can view both CSS & font files in these terms! So this is mostly where I play...

UI frameworks may be stretching the concept some, but ofcourse icon themes fit!

4/4 Fin for today!