Reading List 243
(Last Updated on )
It’s been a busy week for one of the projects I’m involved with, along with my old chum Håkon Wium Lie (co-creator of CSS). Prince is a software package that produces beautiful, accessible PDFs from HTML, SVG and CSS. On Tuesday we released Prince 13 with support for CSS variables (aka custom properties), lots of goodies for non-Latin scripts like Arabic & Indic, & support for fragmenting single-column/row flex containers across multiple pages. Give it a whirl if you need to produce PDFs – it’s free for non-commercial use.
Then the next day, we open-sourced our Allsorts font parser, shaping engine, & subsetter for OpenType, WOFF, and WOFF2 under the Apache 2.0 license so everyone can have better Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indic scripts in PDF. Allsorts was extracted from Prince and is implemented in Rust.
- Web Almanac 2019 – HTTPArchive’s 20 chapters looking at what the made is made from, data mining from nearly 6 million web pages
- e-Conomy SEA 2019 – Southeast Asia’s internet economy hits $100 billion; 90% of SE Asia’s 360m web users connect primarily through their mobile phones. And, for the love of Dawkins, stop treating a good user experience as subordinate to a good developer experience. Or your competitors will eat your noodles.
- Creating complex layouts using CSS Grid – “This tutorial is for people who have heard of css-grid and are interested to see what it can do or perhaps are not sure how to fit it into their workflow.”
- The Front-End Tooling Survey 2019 – “63.13% of respondents said that they didn’t use any tools to accessibility test their projects”. FFS. “just 5.79% of developers said that they were implementing AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) on their projects.”
- KaiOS named as one of Time Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2019 – India’s second most common mobile OS is a fork of Firefox OS, and powers cheap feature phones
- 52 UX Cards to Discover Cognitive Biases – a lovely freebie from the splendid @walterstephanie and the fabulous @hellgy
- Ideas for Making the WordPress Back End More User Friendly
- De-identification for data journalists “Getting important stories into the open, without revealing unnecessary personal details”
- Geneva – a new Artificial Intelligence-based system that automatically learns to evade censorship in India, China, and Kazakhstan.
- Hikvision marketed an AI camera that automatically identifies Uyghurs in China, and now covers it up. Ugh.
- The size of space – nice wow-filled data visualisation.
- ButtyStock is “The number one site for free crisp sandwich photos”