I was ready to be annoyed by this, and it is a ridiculous design, but the article is a pretty good discussion of CSS's round display extensions. Those have been sort of sitting around gathering dust as far as I can tell, but the idea seems pretty cool and potentially useful. I like that they're proposing a safe area constant, which makes a lot of sense. This is a really great way to see it all actually working and figure out what still needs to happen.

With that said, they lose the plot a bit when the iPhone X's safe area adds unnecessary padding outside of the notch, and then double down on that mistake when they talk about their brand new `min()` and `max()` functions. When you start combining math functions in CSS, you need to back up and ask what you did wrong, because you definitely did something wrong.

What you should do is add some padding for the safe area, which might be 0, and then add some more padding (of your choosing) beyond that. Same way any other screen works. But it's Apple, so it will probably end with everyone forced to make the same stupid mistake and then we'll need a new standard to get rid of it all.

Anyway, grumbles aside, I think Apple deserves kudos here for pushing forward some existing standards in a mostly constructive way.