Link tags: string

UA gotta be kidding

Brian recounts the sordid messy history of user-agent strings.

I remember somebody once describing a user-agent string as “a reverse-chronological history of web browsers.”

1loc | Favorite JavaScript single line of code

This is very handy indeed! Quick one-line JavaScript helpers categorised by type.

And, no, you don’t need to npm install any of these. Try “vendoring” them instead (that’s copying and pasting to you and me).

Currying in CSS? | Trys Mudford

I don’t understand what currying is, but Trys points out a really interesting thing about custom properties in CSS:

The value after the : in the CSS custom property does not have to be valid CSS.

That means you can use custom properties to store arbitrary strings of text, which can then be combined within a calc() function, at which point they get evaluated.

Intent to Deprecate and Freeze: The User-Agent string - Google Groups

Excellent news! All the major browsers have agreed to freeze their user-agent strings, effectively making them a relic (which they kinda always were).

For many (most?) uses of UA sniffing today, a better tool for the job would be to use feature detection.

How many dimensions are there, and what do they do to reality? | Aeon Essays

In this terrific essay by Marina Benjamin on the scientific and mathematical quest for ever-more dimensions, she offers this lovely insight into the mind-altering effects that the art of Giotto and Uccello must’ve had on their medieval audience:

By consciously exploring geometric principles, these painters gradually learned how to construct images of objects in three-dimensional space. In the process, they reprogrammed European minds to see space in a Euclidean fashion.

In a very literal fashion, perspectival representation was a form of virtual reality that, like today’s VR games, aimed to give viewers the illusion that they had been transported into geometrically coherent and psychologically convincing other worlds.

Essential Vanilla JavaScript Functions

The title is overkill, but these functions ported from PHP to JavaScript could be useful (especially for dealing with arrays).

MTA.ME

The New York subway schedule converted into sound by treating each line as a string.

as days pass by » Blog Archive » Internationalisation

Stuart posts a really handy string for testing internationalisation: Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn