Journal

There was a heavy whiff of nostalgia about this gig for me. Jeff Mills is currently on a 30th anniversary tour of his mix album Live at the Liquid Room. I bought that album on cassette tape back then and was blown away by it. I subsequently first saw him DJ at the Arena in Glasgow in 1996. Since then I’ve experienced Jeff doing his thing many times and in various places around the world. His sets are the stuff of legend!

Manuel sensed a general misunderstanding of what an interactive element is and what focusable really means. He wasn’t totally sure himself either, so did some research. It’s a long post but the summary is that:

• an important characteristic of all interactive elements is they are natively focusable;
• focusable doesn't necessarily mean sequentially focusable (tabbable). Some interactive elements including dialog are click-focusable, and these are not tabbable but can be focused programmatically or via click.
• it’s also worth knowing that it's perfectly acceptable to place tabindex on a non-interactive element to aid with accessibility. But prefer applying it to semantic elements rather than divs.

This was a weird, mixed reading experience for me. It’s a short book and it’s good – it had me locked in really quickly and I was finished after a few nights. But it was an uneasy read.

This episode of The Question is – like they say during the conversation – one that doesn’t yet have any ready answers. Right now it’s just important that we’re asking the question and starting to move forward, establish goals and build vocabulary.

Great gig abroad for four pals who were equally excited to be there!

Highlights for me included:

• the crackling pre-gig atmosphere: lovely ambient sounds followed by a fun audiovisual performance via motorised black panels that called to mind Close Encounters of the Third Kind;
• when Thom nimbly moved from standing mic to the piano for the chords at the end of All I Need;
• how beautiful the glockenspiel parts sounded throughout;
• Thom’s atmospheric solo effort on Exit Music and the applause from Colin; and
• the amazing The Daily Mail.

Over the last few years I’ve played some radio shows but hadn’t done a mix of my own. I managed to rectify that the other night.

I read this book in two days while on holiday in Ibiza. It’s been a while since I’ve finished a book so quickly, but it’s short and once it had me locked in I couldn’t put it down.

The old adage that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover is definitely true of this one. The cover depicts a faun standing on a marble column and conjures images of fantasy and mythology. There is an element of that, but with constant hints to the modern world. And as clues emerge you start to wonder if you’re really in an another time and space, or in the middle of a dream or some Jacob’s Ladder style trip.

The protagonist, Piranesi, is really likeable and I loved the humour too. The puzzle he’s trying to solve called to mind Memento and the dream-like feel reminded me of the scene in Inception where Cobb meets Saito in Limbo.

I loved it! Thanks to Craigy B for the recommendation.

I’ve written before that CSS transition is great for simple animations triggered by an event. You might want to transition something in response to a focus or hover event. Or, perhaps your use case is that the user activates a button to launch a previously-hidden dialog element and you want to use transition to animate the dialogue’s entrance and exit.

Recently I updated this website’s git repository README to include a summary of my approach to supporting post excerpts.

I define an initial part of a post as the excerpt by adding a separator string between it and the remaining content. Then in my posts list I grab 11ty’s post.page.excerpt and pass that through a custom markdown-parsing filter.

This works pretty well but sometimes it’s a bit inflexible that the excerpt has to be part of the post. Sometimes you might want to say something different, or shorter and snappier in the excerpt.

I’m partial to going down the rabbit-hole on a niche aspect of front-end development. For example a few years ago I got the urge to dig into what’s going on with containers and items in Flexbox-powered layouts and noted my findings in Flexbox-fu. I do it to go beyond the thing’s theory and into its practical application for solving real web development challenges; to gain a deeper understanding of why things behave the way they do. These deep dives take time but are rewarding; usually I’ll learn about more than I expected.

Recently I dug into the characteristics and behaviour of the CSS outline property. The catalyst was seeing Heydon Pickering’s clever use of outline to automate divider lines within a flexbox powered navigation menu. I couldn’t fathom how it works so decided to reverse-engineer it. More on Heydon’s trick later, but I’ll start with a recap of what outline is good for.