Journal

The best SL-1200/10 set-up video I’ve seen.

At the height of my playing career, David Baddiel wore blackface and put a pineapple on his head to mock me on national television every Friday night. While the chants have remained ever present, and David’s name has become synonymous with mine, it’s taken 25 years for us to finally meet face-to-face. In this episode, I talk with David about the impact his racist sketches had on me, my family and the wider community, and why allyship needs to become a bigger part of football.

This article is not about when or why you would use visually-hidden content. There’s a number of excellent articles that discuss these questions in detail, notably Scott O’Hara’s Inclusively Hidden. But most of them don’t go into much detail about the specific CSS involved — why do we use this particular pattern, with these specific properties? So today I’m going to dissect it, looking at each of the properties in turn, why it’s there, and why it isn’t something else.

Loved this thoughtful and insightful interview with Jeff Mills by Marcus Barnes.

Here’s a lovely slow-mo comparison of Liam Pitchford’s backhand technique versus that of an amateur.

People have used the HTML title attribute to achieve a native “tooltip” effect for many years. However accessibility experts have recommended that we should avoid this practice, and here I summarise my research on the topic.

I’ve been stockpiling good records for a while and it’s time they got an airing. I’ll be playing a few on Radio Buena Vida, Saturday 19/11 at 4–5pm. Tune in or even come hang out in the café, if you’re in the hood.

There’s a classic web developer interview question that goes something like this:

What happens when you type in “bbc.co.uk” into a browser? Describe the journey that results in you seeing a page.

There’s so much to admire in Nord Health’s Design System and specifically its reference website.

Whether I’m thinking about inclusive hiding, hamburger menus or web components one UI pattern I keep revisiting is the disclosure widget. Perhaps it’s because you can use this small pattern to bring together so many other wider aspects of good web development. So for future reference, here’s a braindump of my knowledge and resources on the subject.