Tags: diff

RSS Anything

Next time you’re frustrated by a website that doesn’t provide an RSS feed, try using this tool:

Transform any old website with a list of links into an RSS Feed

this vs that - What is the difference between ___ and ___ in the front-end development?

A handy reference for explaining the differences between confusingly similar bits of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Reef

This micro libarary does DOM diffing in native JavaScript:

Reef is an anti-framework.

It does a lot less than the big guys like React and Vue. It doesn’t have a Virtual DOM. It doesn’t require you to learn a custom templating syntax. It doesn’t provide a bunch of custom methods.

Reef does just one thing: render UI.

Twitter thread as blog post: Thoughts on how we write CSS | Lara Schenck

CSS only truly exists in a browser. As soon as we start writing CSS outside of the browser, we rely on guesses and memorization and an intimate understanding of the rules. A text editor will never be able to provide as much information as a browser can.

Why is CSS frustrating? ･ Robin Rendle

CSS is frustrating because you have to actually think of a website like a website and not an app. That mental model is what everyone finds so viscerally upsetting. And so engineers do what feels best to them; they try to make websites work like apps, like desktop software designed in the early naughts. Something that can be controlled.

Why is CSS Frustrating? | CSS-Tricks

Why do people respect JavaScript or other languages enough to learn them inside-out, and yet constantly dunk on CSS?

The headline begs the question, but Robin makes this very insightful observation in the article itself:

I reckon the biggest issue that engineers face — and the reason why they find it all so dang frustrating — is that CSS forces you to face the webishness of the web. Things require fallbacks. You need to take different devices into consideration, and all the different ways of seeing a website: mobile, desktop, no mouse, no keyboard, etc. Sure, you have to deal with that when writing JavaScript, too, but it’s easier to ignore. You can’t ignore your the layout of your site being completely broken on a phone.

Complexity Explorables

A cornucopia of interactive visualisations. You control the horizontal. You control the vertical. Networks, flocking, emergence, diffusion …it’s all here.

Going Critical — Melting Asphalt

This is an utterly fascinating interactive description of network effects, complete with Nicky Case style games. Play around with the parameters and suddenly you can see things “going viral”:

We can see similar things taking place in the landscape for ideas and inventions. Often the world isn’t ready for an idea, in which case it may be invented again and again without catching on. At the other extreme, the world may be fully primed for an invention (lots of latent demand), and so as soon as it’s born, it’s adopted by everyone. In-between are ideas that are invented in multiple places and spread locally, but not enough so that any individual version of the idea takes over the whole network all at once. In this latter category we find e.g. agriculture and writing, which were independently invented ~10 and ~3 times respectively.

Play around somewhere and you start to see why cities are where ideas have sex:

What I learned from the simulation above is that there are ideas and cultural practices that can take root and spread in a city that simply can’t spread out in the countryside. (Mathematically can’t.) These are the very same ideas and the very same kinds of people. It’s not that rural folks are e.g. “small-minded”; when exposed to one of these ideas, they’re exactly as likely to adopt it as someone in the city. Rather, it’s that the idea itself can’t go viral in the countryside because there aren’t as many connections along which it can spread.

This really is a wonderful web page! (and it’s licensed under a Creative Commons Zero licence)

We tend to think that if something’s a good idea, it will eventually reach everyone, and if something’s a bad idea, it will fizzle out. And while that’s certainly true at the extremes, in between are a bunch of ideas and practices that can only go viral in certain networks. I find this fascinating.

Attachment #317095 for bug #175115

I’ve never been so excited by a single diff in a JSON file.

Service workers are coming to Safari.

gmetais/sw-delta: An incremental cache for the web

Here’s an interesting use of service workers: figure out the difference (the delta) between the currently-cached version of a file, and the version on the network, and then grab only the bits that have changed. It requires some configuration on the server side (to send back the diff) but it’s an interesting approach that could be worth keeping an eye on.

And They All Look Just the Same

Greg isn’t just lamenting a perceived “sameness” in web design here. He’s taking a long-zoom view and pointing out that there’s always a sameness …and you can choose to go along with it or you can choose to differentiate.

5 years of little. yellow. different.

Ernie's been writing online for five years. Mozzeltof!