Marbla
A fun variable font with three axes: inktrap, balloon, and curve.
Link tags: experiment
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The Splintered Mind: The Black Hole Objection to Longtermism and Consequentialism
Stick a singularity in your “effective altruism” pipe and smoke it.
A year of new avenues
All along, from the frothy 1990s to the percolating 2000s to the frozen 2010s to today, the web has been the sure thing. All along, it’s been growing and maturing, sprouting new capabilities. From my vantage point, that growth has seemed to accelerate in the past five years; CSS, in particular, has become incredibly flexible and expressive. Maybe even a bit overstuffed — but I’ll take it.
For people who care about creating worlds together, rather than getting rich, the web is the past and the web is the future. What luck, that this decentralized, permissionless system claimed a position at the heart of the internet, and stuck there. It’s limited, of course; frustrating; sometimes maddening. But that’s every creative medium. That’s life.
Auto Dark Theme - Chrome Developers
At first glance, this looks like a terrible idea. But the key is in the implementation. In this case, the implementation is truly awful.
The section on detecting “auto dark theme” is, as far as I can tell, not intended as a joke.
Mind you, this could all be a galaxy-brain idea to encourage more developers to provide their own dark mode styles. (In much the same way that AMP was supposed to encourage better performance.)
CSS Font Lorem Ipsum
Professional web designer on a closed course. Do not attempt.
Social Attention: a modest prototype in shared presence (Interconnected)
I love, love, love this experiment from Matt—messin’ around in websites!
Blob Opera — Google Arts & Culture
Ridiculously cute and fun—all in the browser.
Accessible to some - Manuel Matuzović
A score of 100 in Lighthouse or 0 errors in axe doesn’t mean that you’re done, it means that you’re ready to start manual testing and testing with real users, if possible.
How readable—Findings
The results are in for Daniel van Berzon’s most recent experiment into accurately measuring code readability. You can read the results and read about the methodology behind them.
What would happen if we allowed blocking 3rd-Party JavaScript as an option?
This would be a fascinating experiment to run in Firefox nightly! This is in response to that post I wrote about third-party scripts.
(It’s fascinating to see how different this response is to the responses from people working at Google.)
The Flawed Reasoning Behind the Replication Crisis — Nautilus
Bayesian analysis vs. statistical significance, clearly explained.
Variable Fonts for Developers
A showcase of fun experiments with variable fonts, courtesy of Mandy.
Word Bubbles — The Man in Blue
Wheeee! Another fun experiment from Cameron.
The 500-Year-Long Science Experiment - The Atlantic
Running an experiment for 500 years is hard enough. Then there’s the documentation…
The hard part is ensuring someone will continue doing this on schedule well into the future. The team left a USB stick with instructions, which Möller realizes is far from adequate, given how quickly digital technology becomes obsolete. They also left a hard copy, on paper. “But think about 500-year-old paper,” he says, how it would yellow and crumble. “Should we carve it in stone? Do we have to carve it in a metal plate?” But what if someone who cannot read the writing comes along and decides to take the metal plate as a cool, shiny relic, as tomb raiders once did when looting ancient tombs?
No strategy is likely to be completely foolproof 500 years later. So the team asks that researchers at each 25-year time point copy the instructions so that they remain linguistically and technologically up to date.
9 squares – The Man in Blue
Some lovely little animation experiments from Cameron.
Text Effects - a Collection by Mandy Michael on CodePen
Mandy’s experiments with text effects in CSS are kinda mindblowing—I can’t wait to see her at Ampersand at the end of the month!
JavaScript Systems Music
A massively in-depth study of boundary-breaking music, recreated through the web audio API.
- Steve Reich - It’s Gonna Rain (1965)
- Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music for Airports, 2/1 (1978)
- Brian Eno - Discreet Music (1975)
You don’t have to be a musician or an expert in music theory to follow this guide. I’m neither of those things. I’m figuring things out as I go and it’s perfectly fine if you do too. I believe that this kind of stuff is well within reach for anyone who knows a bit of programming, and you can have a lot of fun with it even if you aren’t a musician.
One thing that definitely won’t hurt though is an interest in experimental music! This will get weird at times.
Font Map · An AI Experiment by IDEO
Fontlandia is yours to explore.
By leveraging AI and convolutional neural networks to draw higher-vision pattern recognition, we have created a tool that helps designers understand and see relationships across more than 750 web fonts.
Detecting text in an image on the web in real-time - Tales of a Developer Advocate by Paul Kinlan
The text detection API is still in its experimental stage, but it opens up a lot of really interesting possibilities for the web: assistive technology to read out text, archiving tools for digitising text …it’s all part of the nascent shape detection API.
It’s more than just the words
I can relate to what Rachel describes here—I really like using my own website as a playground to try out new technologies. That’s half the fun of the indie web.
I had already decided to bring my content back home in 2017, but I’d also like to think about this idea of using my own site to better demonstrate and play with the new technologies I write about.