MostExtremeCake

Realistic response: a camel requires that someone is always with it, telling it where to go. This thing can just be told to go 5 miles in a direction without supervision and will maybe reliably get there. It can also go through stuff that's too toxic for a camel/human being.

Tin-foil-hat response: Can't strap guns to a camel and have it shoot things. The progression from unmanned tech used for non-combat purposes to combat seems likely. Predator drones used to be used for surveillance and did not have hellfire missiles strapped to them.

It's unfair to judge this book before reading it, but the web page promoting it reads like an infomercial. Specifically, "You are a designer." and "Save thousands by not hiring a designer." make me feel like there is going to be a chapter about making font size smaller and jacking up leading.

What am I getting by reading this? Is it design basics that let me get started with modifying something? Is it the fundamentals? Is it a rundown of common contemporary design elements that can be combined to make a reasonable looking page?

Professional designers aren't selling overpriced witchcraft.

Makes sense. Do you ever run into specificity collisions when you pull styles out of the main style tree?

I could see whatever you pulled out being clobbered by the huge amount of specificity you have built up by mirroring the dom. Heavy use of the child selector would probably prevent that from happening as much, though.

While this sounds really awesome and clean, "just styling the markup you have" can produce horrific results in dynamic design/presentation-heavy sites.

I tend to chain selectors as little as possible in plain CSS, so I generally don't run into having to read huge chains of sub-selectors.

I will agree that heavily-cascaded stylesheets are practically impossible to read. Writing styles in a way that reduces your need to create long inheritance chains feels like a more flexible option (not so tightly dom-coupled) that doesn't require a "style model", though.

How do you handle adding the same styles to page elements that aren't siblings/exist in vastly different areas of the dom structure?

Mixins could probably do it, but writing too many of those would open up new problems.

I'm not sure how much I agree with this approach. When you do what this article is describing, you are creating a very tight coupling of your css structure to your dom hierarchy. This can create a lot of issues when you are trying to refactor your code or getting new people on-boarded to the project.

These rules can get very confusing when someone tries to edit your HTML by adding classes to a new element they created, only to figure out that those classes don't add any styles in that particular context. Good stylesheets should have classes that have consistent behavior no matter where they are on the page.

That said, I think SCSS (and sass/less) is pretty nifty. The real heavy lifting they do, for me at least, comes from mixins and being able to programmatically create classes.

For an example, look at how the rainbow effect is created on this page: http://html5readiness.com (it's with a for loop in sass, technique is outlined in http://nimbupani.com/notes-from-html5-readiness-hacking.html)

I think the author is trying to adress what he sees as almost a cargo cult mentality. Dressing and looking like Steve Jobs is cool for aesthetic reasons, the man has a distinctive look. Steve Jobs isn't successful because of how he dresses, though.

Why is the author so angry that people in college experiment with radical ideology? Is that a new thing? Why are PDF e-books bad? Why is the economic collapse in quotes and "so-called"?

The only actual philosophy the author ascribes to the dipsters seems to be that they care more about "appearing" than "being", but that's not a new criticism for a new time. It's basically the main theme in The Society of the Spectacle, and that was written in 67.

What am I supposed to do with the information in this article?

Here is a pertinent wikipedia article with some links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion

It's interesting how this applies to more trivial things, like trying to keep yourself from laughing.

Would it be a stretch to say that this supports the idea that we should automate as much of our lives as possible? If I don't have to decide to put a certain amount of my paycheck in savings every time I get it, and it happens automatically, I could potentially reserve that energy for another decision-based task.

It's mostly a cruft/style issue. Some people prefer to have as much of their style-related code in pure css as possible. People having javascript off is not really a concern anymore as long as you're providing them with a baseline experience.

For more complicated animation, css can perform better than javascript because the browser is allowed to optimize css animation as it sees fit.

For example: a browser will stop trying to figure out the position of an element animated using css when you switch to a different tab. It will then "catch up" when you switch back. With javascript, it does not have that option an will continue to animate all elements even when you can't actually see the tab. This can eat into battery life.

It is not the responsibility of the critic to fix problems.

Often, these kinds of articles are met with the "Well YOU build something and then you can talk" responses. This kind of response is an attack on the person making the argument (or at least their qualifications) and not on the argument itself.

I really wish they would also fix the "Crashing every 5 minutes" problem.

The problem I'm having with the app (besides the crashing) isn't the loneliness. It's that it's supposed to be this totally new model for sharing our lives, but I get no hints or instructions on how to use it well/as intended.

Unfortunately I forgot who I'm paraphrasing when I say this, but there is not intuitive, there is only familiar. The mechanics of this application are completely unfamiliar to most people. It would be nice to get some guidance on what kind of use tends to be fun.