clairity

you can listen to "Inflation", the song at the center of this story, on spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/0PUWmPna5P0hKtSwXWin9o?si=1f8... and apple music: https://music.apple.com/au/album/inflation-single/1651110334

it's actually pretty catchy and funky, so worth a listen, as well as to support an unknown but talented artist (earnest jackson).

the first step, repainting lines on roads to add (ideally protected) bike/scooter lanes, is a large but imminently manageable project that can get done quickly. while that's happening, you direct various agencies to favor bike/scooter parking over cars, perhaps introducing necessary legislation to that effect. the harder and longer changes are removing/reducing over-zealous zoning, deceptive environmental lawsuits, and overly-specified building codes. it won't happen in a few months, but a lot can happen in a few years for a motivated electorate.

> "It's sad, but we've gotten to the point where you simply cannot trust major news organizations to report on science without ridiculous levels of clickbait spin."

news may have waxed and waned on reputability but it's never really been highly reputable. we had a blip from the 70s-90s where it was contextually limited enough that our national narrative was fairly aligned and unchallenged. but that exposed the natural weakness of monoliths, which provided an opening to folks like murdoch to exploit, followed by the explosion of social media, which increased noise several-fold while increasing signal much less than that.

there is no shortcut to thinking for yourself. that's a civic responsibility as much as an individual one. folks need to dig past the veneer presented to examine the veracity and credibility of the narrative presented.

when it comes to climate change, mediopolitical narrative imposes too much bullshit and religious fervor for most of us to make real sense of it, and that's why we mostly shortcut to tribal affiliation as a proxy for what we should think/believe.

personally, i think we should focus on (air, water, land) pollution first and foremost, as that is concretely a problem yesterday, today, and tomorrow, starting with reducing coal worldwide. strategically, that has the advantage of narrowing our focus (less bullshit and influence potential), doing something that materially helps us now, and potentially does something to help the far off climate future.

yah, as i noted in my other reply, tab in that post seems to have been trying to solve the problem of sharing css across regular dom and shadow dom, rather than focusing on regular dom css and trying to remove the need for js and css preprocessors (which is what i'm more interested in). i could be wrong, as it's been a while since i read it.

yah, i've read that thread before, as well as tab atkins' "abandoning @apply" post, and i think both are trying to solve problems that are beyond css itself (js-style scoping in the first, and shadow dom styling in the latter).

what i'm imagining is something more like this very contrived example:

  :root {
    --thick: 4px;
    --border-color: black;
  }

  $standard-border {
    border: 2px solid var(--border-color); /* not evaluated here */
  }

  div {
    @apply $standard-border; /* evaluated here */
  }

  /* somewhere else, perhaps a different file */
  .bordered {
    --border-color: grey;
    @apply $standard-border; /* evaluated here */
    border-width: var(--thick); /* an override */
  }

here, the string would simply be substituted into place and then evaluated as if the substitution had been written there all along. this seems like it would avoid the multiple evaluation and circularity issues that have sunken prior proposals.

yes, cost was mentioned in my original post.

two things that sass has that i want to see in plain ol' css:

1. nesting - but this is coming!

2. mixins - not even static mixins are coming =(

static mixins might seem to be limited in utility at first, but it'd alleviate a lot of duplicate css by allowing you to have orthogonal groups of styles. so you could have sets of static mixins for borders/shadows, spacing, layout, fonts, etc. that you could mix and match into both element and class styles as you need.

too much nesting can lead to a rat's nest of css (ha), but shallow nesting (1 level mostly, 2 levels on occasion) adds clarity and structure.

not remove, but rather replace. put the BQE underground.

are OG form elements actually reimplemented in shadow DOM, like they're doing with open UI (https://open-ui.org/) custom elements?

i've seen safari and chrome (but not firefox) expose some form input components as shadow DOM (e.g., slots), but wasn't sure if it was actually reimplemented.

yes, i was excited about finding this explanatory article because i knew there was a mathematical basis behind the scenes for these blend modes, but it's not obvious from the names. just the grouping of the modes should help with recall in the future.

there's a subtlety missing: :is() selects the highest specificity from the selector list while :where() sets specificity to 0 for anything in the selector list. this leaves out the (admittedly narrow) case where you want the lowest matching specificity (in case 2+ selectors match) rather than just 0, which is probably what most folks would expect, just as we would tend to expect selector lists to be forgiving (following the principle of least surprise).

you're right, it's an online discussion. the traffic from the BQE already goes to local streets. the point is to give the above ground space back to people, and perhaps clean the air while we're at it.

you could also put in a subway track down the middle while you're at it, but the primary point of undergrounding the road is so we get our most precious above ground space back for people, not cars. it's not simply about optimizing throughput, though that's also a worthy, and compatible, goal.

:has() is my most anticipated as well. it has the biggest potential to not only simplify our html (e.g., divitis) but also remove the need for js compensations in many content-oriented sites. come on firefox, let's get :has() across the finish line!

container queries are also neat, but still rely on having a wrapper container, which isn't ideal--why can't i style the component itself based on its own calculated height/width rather than having to involve a parent element?

i'm still waiting for chrome to implement subgrid, which will simplify any kind of card-type layout.

i also wish we had native "mixins" (@apply had this potential, but it was removed from the spec), so we could have a bundle of styles we could inject into different declarations as a group. then you could have different sets of styles in orthogonal groups (layout, spacing, border, text, inline) that you could apply in any combination. this is especially useful if you want to style a base html element a certain way and then also have a utility class with the same style later in the stylesheet (with maybe a slight tweak) that can be applied to more than just that type of element (like <div>s, <article>s, and <section>s).

edit: oh, and lch/oklch for more perceptually uniform and expanded colorspaces, combined with the new color functions (e.g., color-mix) is exciting too.

i believe the problem with form elements like checkboxes is that they are 'replaced elements', which the browser defers to the underlying operating system, and that's why it requires a "hack" like accent-color rather than direct styling. this is also why you can't use ::before and ::after on form elements (to do things like add a 'required' indicator using css only).

pretty sure the contractors and engineers would consider that before they started digging. do you think boston didn't have underground infrastructure already?

this is neat, but seems to be focused primarily on the configurations of thoroughfare lanes? i'd love something that lets you change with setbacks, parkways, sidewalks, building heights/shadows as well, then render that reasonably (but not necessarily perfectly photorealistically) for sharing and discussion.

put the BQE underground and you get the best of both worlds. scrub all the pollution (not CO₂) out of the exhaust and it's environmentally positive too. sure, it's expensive, but we're the richest country in the world. boston did it and everyone loves the result now despite the grousing about cost and inconvenience during construction.

you'll have to visit this page in a chromium-based browser as it depends on the experimental @property feature. the site style features the author's http://augmented-ui.com/ design, which is also css only.

yah, the other neat thing about lab/lch/oklab/oklch is that they're theoretically unbounded, so as our screens get better at reproducing more of the visible spectrum, you just use more extant values rather than switching color spaces (unlike rgb & hsl).

i haven't read that book, but i'll have to check it out!

"monopoly" is a red herring here. if they were under 10%, you might have a case (though there are many factors besides market share that need to be considered, like supplier power).

the issue that we the people, and by extension our antitrust regulators, care about is market distortion, and 15% is well within the range at which a competitor can unduly distort a market in their favor by sheer size alone. markets exist for the benefit of society as a whole, not just giant corporations.

i'm primarily using hsl now (though have long used rgb before that), but have experimented with oklch because of the promise of an even more uniform perceptual color space. the big problem i found with lch & oklch are discontinuities in the valid ranges of lightness and chroma, which functionally dependent on the hue value (from my perspective that hue is the independent variable to set first).

color spaces definitely defy straightforward intuition about them.

that's good to hear. hopefully watering regularly and remulching will lead to big beautiful trees here as well!

yah, good soil is an ecosystem of living things, not an inert medium. urban soil tends to be more depleted and polluted than average, so needs even more attention to get trees to grow. i'm not really a gardener type, but i do love me some trees and shade!

yes, LA has a program to give away trees for planting in yards and parkways, and my read of the program is that, while it's goal is laudable, the implementation is lacking. earlier this year, a partner non-profit planted 2 trees for us and i planted an additional 2 trees that another org gave us, and i learned that it's not a set-it-and-forget-it type of endeavor. walking around my neighborhood, many of these trees, even though most are native species adapted to the environment, will end up dying because of the lack of care and the lack of education that comes with the trees. beyond enriching the soil when planting, it apparently takes ~5 years for the trees to establish themselves, and so requires constant watering for at least that amount of time.

ours sprouted quickly when first planted but then stagnated through the hottest parts of the summer. now we're entering the winter season and i'm wondering what we need to do to revitalize the soil again to help them grow in the spring.

abortion has been a personal choice for most of humanity. only relatively recently have social mores become coercive like this, on which foucault wrote a whole treatise.

abortion itself, being a personal decision/action, doesn't seek to affect the thoughts and behaviors of other people. perhaps you mean anti-abortion, since that attempts to be positively coercive of others?

too bad it loads 3 trackers and puts all your personal data into salesforce. i think governments shouldn't be allowed to share personal data like this with corporations--e.g., software/servers should have to be on-prem.

yah, that's the kind of thing subgrid is meant to solve. in my head, the structure looks more like:

  <body class="content">
    <header class="popout"></header>
    <main></main> <!-- implicitly in the content track -->
    <footer class="full"></footer>
  </body>

you shouldn't have to add an extra div inside <main> to be able to use the parent grid. so you subgrid on <main> and get the benefits of just adopting the parent grid for popping things out, rather than nesting with extra divs/classes.

right, but that's the old, divitis way of doing it. using grid this way let's you set all the children to the content width and then selectively break out of that with just a class on the child element (without extra divs).

i use a responsive gutter in my default grid that is akin to the article's technique, for the same issue that sometimes you want a little padding and sometimes you want full bleed (usually for just the background). once subgrid comes to chrome, it will be even easier to control content width without divitis.