The Worst-Designed Thing You’ve Never Noticed

Roman Mars is obsessed with flags — and after you watch this talk, you might be, too. In this surprising and hilarious talk about vexillology — the study of flags — Mars reveals the five basic principles of flag design and shows why he believes they can be applied to just about anything. Worth your …

The future of loading CSS

It’s soon OK to link to stylesheets directly from anywhere inside the <body> without having FOUCs: The plan is for each <link rel="stylesheet"> to block rendering of subsequent content while the stylesheet loads, but allow the rendering of content before it. The stylesheets load in parallel, but they apply in series. This makes <link rel="stylesheet"> …

Typed Arrays in PHP

Tim Bezhashvyly: Typed arrays exist in PHP, at least to some degree. This wonderful feature sneaked in as a side-effect of variadic functions that were added to the language in PHP 5.6. Turns out one can actually typehint the variadic parameter, as so: <?php function foo (Product …$products) { /* … */ } Only works …

A faster, more stable Chrome on iOS

The Chromium Blog: In Chrome 48 we’ve made the switch from UIWebView to WKWebView, leading to dramatic improvements in stability, speed, responsiveness, and web compatibility. The improvements are indeed remarkable and – from a user’s point of view – very noticeable. Additionally it’s also more stable: With WKWebView’s out-of-process rendering, when the web view crashes …

Viewports Visualisation App

PPK: Instead of the work I was supposed to do I spent about a day and a half on the alpha version of a viewports visualisation app. It’s already been very useful to me, since figuring out how the viewports actually work is necessary for full understanding. I hope it does the same for you. …

Too many people have peed in the pool

Stephen Fry, on deactivating his Twitter account: Twitter has become a stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to second-guess, to leap to conclusions and be offended – worse, to be offended on behalf of others they do not even know. It’s as nasty and unwholesome a characteristic as can be imagined. It doesn’t …