Key data structures and their roles in RenderingNG

Digging deeper into Chromium’s RenderingNG architecture, this post explains its key data structures: Frame trees, The immutable fragment tree, Property trees, Display lists and paint chunks, and Compositor frames. Let’s dig into the key data structures that are inputs and outputs to the rendering pipeline. Would love to see this as a talk at a …

CSS Shape Path Editor extension for Chrome DevTools

The Firefox DevTools come with a built-in editor to manipulate CSS Shapes, as demonstrated by Miriam Suzanne in the video below. For the Chromium-based browsers (Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, …) the DevTools currently sport no such thing. Thankfully there’s an extension that can provide it for us. Once installed you’ll get an extra Shapes panel …

imgproxy: fast and secure on-the-fly image processing

In the previous post on AVIF, the folks at Evil Martians, also talked about imgproxy — their standalone server for resizing and converting remote images. It looks like a pretty amazing product, allowing you to run your own imgix-like service, warranting this separate post about it. imgproxy can be used to provide a fast and …

Tint User-Interface Controls with CSS accent-color

CSS accent-color from the CSS UI specification is here to tint elements with one line of CSS, saving you from customization efforts by providing a way to bring your brand into elements. The CSS for the screenshot above is this: input { accent-color: hotpink; } 💡 You can also set this declaration onto form, as …

Web Terminology: Site vs. Origin

With this tool you should be able to (better) grasp the difference between the term SameSite and SameOrigin The concepts of Origin and Site may be confusing, yet they are important because browsers make security decisions based on the fact whether two interacting contexts are in the same origin or in the same site. In …

Miniature Calendar by Tatsuya Tanaka

I love these diorama-style miniatures using everyday items by Tatsuya Tanaka. He’s been creating them ever since April 2011. Broccoli and parsley may sometimes look like a forest of trees, and tree leaves floating on the surface of water may sometimes look like little boats. Everyday occurrences seen from a miniature perspective can bring us …

Why WebKit supports AVIF but Safari does not

Jon Henshaw, writing for Coywolf: WebKit added support for the AVIF image format in April 2021, but it’s still unavailable in Safari. Its absence is because Apple chose an unconventional method for decoding images in its browser. Long story short: Safari does not decode images using WebKit — its underlying rendering engine — but delegates …

Helvetica® Now Variable

Helvetica® Now, available as a Variable Font Helvetica® Now Variable builds on the groundbreaking work of 2019’s Helvetica Now release—all of the clarity, simplicity and neutrality of classic Helvetica with everything 21st-century designers need (optical sizing, stylistic alternates, and extended character set). Don’t really understand why they ship the Regular and Italic variants separately. I’d’ve …