Week Notes №2 ending 7 June 2019
Chromium Edge and FOIT
With Edge’s move to a new Chromium-based build, Microsoft’s long defense of FOUT (visible fallback text for web fonts) as a default behavior is changing.
Per sources (the lovely Greg Whitworth), this default may change back if feedback dictates. But we’re gaining something in this trade, too. When the default changes, support for the font-display descriptor comes with it which will allow us to customize this behavior in Edge as needed.
I’ll wait to update A Historical Look at FOUT and FOIT after a stable version of Chromium Edge is released.
JS Party!
I was on JS Party last week to talk about web font loading and Eleventy! I was really excited to do this because it was the first legitimate time I got to talk about Eleventy in a public forum 😎. Also it felt really comfortable talking to NEJS CONF co-organizer Nick Nisi and former speaker Divya Sasidharan. Look for the episode to be published soon!
Top 3 Blog Posts
- Andrew Betts has another very important post on AMP: Cake or Death: AMP and the Worrying Power Dynamics of the Web. Make sure you stick around for the footnote.
“The web is open and decentralised. We spend a lot of time valuing the first of these concepts, but almost none trying to defend the second.”
- I absolutely devoured every word of this post from one of the maintainers of Babel, Henry Zhu: (Open) source of anxiety. Not that Eleventy has seen any measure of popularity on a Babel scale (and honestly, I hope it never does), maintenance of maintainers is an important thing to discuss.
- Self-Host Your Static Assets by Harry Roberts. This discussion comes up every few years (luv u Google Fonts) and I think Harry nails it down here: if you want speed, self host.
Email development
I’ve been doing a bit of HTML email dev this week and it’s been frustrating. Look, I was around for IE6. I was doing heavy JavaScript coding in the IE7 days. I felt real relief when IE8 came out. But this is a whole new level of pain.
If it isn’t the email clients that will burn you, it’s the tooling around them. The micromanagement of testing tools: Litmus, pain; Email on Acid, pain. Everything is pain.
The Watchlist
To be frank I’m not a big talk-video watcher (I consider this a failing, not a strength) but here are the two from this week that I’m really looking forward to consuming:
- The economics of open source by C J Silverio at JSConf EU 2019. C J is the former CTO of npm and shared a stage at the same conference on the same day with the person at npm that fired them. Courageous. Related Twitter search: #npmlayoffs
- The World-Wide Work by Ethan Marcotte at New Adventures 2019. By all accounts this may be the most important talk of the year. Certainly not going to miss this one.
Addendum, in Passing 💨
- Soon you’ll be able to download fonts on the Apple App Store. Related post by Matthew Rechs (former head of Adobe TypeKit)