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6, 97: Why scorpions?

A fascinating and inspiring meditation on aerodynamics.

The Demise of the Mildly Dynamic Website

It me:

Broadly, these are websites which are still web pages, not web applications; they’re pages of essentially static information, personal websites, blogs, and so on, but they are slightly dynamic. They might have a style selector at the top of each page, causing a cookie to be set, and the server to serve a different stylesheet on every subsequent page load.

This rings sadly true to me:

Suppose a company makes a webpage for looking up products by their model number. If this page were made in 2005, it would probably be a single PHP page. It doesn’t need a framework — it’s one SELECT query, that’s it. If this page were made in 2022, a conundrum will be faced: the company probably chose to use a statically generated website. The total number of products isn’t too large, so instead their developers stuff a gigantic JSON file of model numbers for every product made by the company on the website and add some client-side JavaScript to download and query it. This increases download sizes and makes things slower, but at least you didn’t have to spin up and maintain a new application server. This example is fictitious but I believe it to be representative.

Also, I never thought about “serverless” like this:

Recently we’ve seen the rise in popularity of AWS Lambda, a “functions as a service” provider. From my perspective this is literally a reinvention of CGI, except a) much more complicated for essentially the same functionality, b) with vendor lock-in, c) with a much more complex and bespoke deployment process which requires the use of special tools.

Tim Brown: CSS forces

Some interesting thoughts from Tim here. What if CSS could “displace” design decisions from one area to another?

For example, a flexible line spacing value in one container could influence margins that surround the text block. That change in spaciousness may mean that nearby headings need size or spacing adjustments to stay feeling connected.

This feels like the complete opposite way that most people approach design systems—modular, componentised, and discrete—but very in-line with the way that CSS has been designed—interconnected, relational and cascading.

The Baked Data architectural pattern

Simon describes the pattern he uses for content sites to get all of the resilience of static site generators while keeping dynamic functionality.

At Dynamicland, The Building Is The Computer — Carl Tashian

A look at the ubiquitous computing work that Bret Victor has been doing over the past few years at Dynamicland.

A bit of a tangent, but I love this description of reading maps:

Map reading is a complex and uniquely human skill, not at all obvious to a young child. You float out of your body and into the sky, leaving behind the point of view you’ve been accustomed to all your life. Your imagination turns squiggly blue lines and green shading into creeks, mountains, and forests seen from above. Bringing it all together in your mind’s eye, you can picture the surroundings.

Dynamicland

An interesting Xerox-PARC-like project dedicated to making a programmable platform out of paper and other physical objects.

A humane dynamic medium embraces the countless ways in which human beings use their minds and bodies, instead of cramming people into a tiny box of pixels.

Mavo: A new, approachable way to create Web applications

A really interesting new project from Lea that aims to put dynamic sites within the reach of everyone. The emphasis is on declarative languages—HTML and CSS—no JavaScript knowledge required.

Lea has also written an introductory article on Smashing Mag.