I’ve been helping my mum fill out various forms for a house purchase for the past week or so. All of the forms are sent to her as PDFs by the solicitors, which are not the easiest or most intuitive to fill in electronically when you’re not a digital native. My first instinct was to open them in Adobe Acrobat, which I feel like has been the go-to PDF viewer since forever. But my goodness, the UI is a mess. A bunch of mystifying toolbars compete with big, shiny, distracting AI buttons and p...| CSS In Real Life
Yesterday I attended Green IO conference in London for the second year running, this time bringing along one of my Ada Mode colleagues. I only managed to attend Day 2, (the main conference day) and not the preceding day’s workshops, but there was plenty to take away and be inspired by from the talks. I’m not one for taking a lot of notes at conferences, so you’ll have to excuse me for the lack of precise detail in my recollections, but I wanted to jot a few things down to capture the ge...| CSS { In Real Life } | Reflections From Green IO 2025
This briefing is intended to help people with a responsibility for AI projects understand the considerations around their direct negative environmental impact arising from AI.| Green Web Foundation
For many projects I work on it’s useful to define all of our brand colours in a JavaScript file, particularly as I work on a lot of data visualisations that use them. Here’s an abridged example of how I define brand colours, as well as those used for data visualisations, and their variants:| CSS { In Real Life } | Creating CSS Theme Variables from a JS file
Earlier this year the BBC published a report on digital sustainability, Does what you scroll burn coal? Mythbusting energy consumption on the web. The report seeks to address some of the ways our online activities consume energy but interestingly, is quite critical of some of the web sustainability guidelines that have been developed and published by the community.| CSS { In Real Life } | Wholegrain Digital’s Response to the BBC’s Web Sus...
A recently published post by the science fiction writer Robin Sloan (Is It Okay?, published 11th February 2024) ignited some examination and debate among my little corner of the web. The post asks the question of whether it’s ethical, from an individual moral standpoint to use an LLM (Large Language Model, such as Claude or GPT-4). Robin raises some important points about the trade-offs that come with LLMs, depending on their application.| CSS In Real Life
Recently I’ve been working with map data to create interactive visualisations. When working with maps it’s common to receive data as GeoJSON, a JSON format for encoding geographic features, which specifies the type of geometry and co-ordinates for the features we want to display on a map. Javascript mapping libraries such as Mapbox GL are designed to consume GeoJSON to render features on a canvas. I’m fairly accustomed to using GeoJSON in this way — for example, rendering geographic a...| CSS In Real Life
I’m pretty proud that I managed to keep my iPhone 8 going for over five years (with one battery replacement in that time). But recently it’s been increasingly unreliable, switching itself off at random times, and spontaneously draining the battery after doing anything remotely taxing. This combined with the fact that software updates are no longer available for this model led me to the conclusion that buying a new phone was probably a good idea at this point.| CSS In Real Life
Baldur Bjarnason shared an article in a recent edition of his newsletter about AI in education. As a parent of an 8-year-old, this is something that’s been on my mind a lot recently. Like most other parents I’ve encountered, I find the idea that teachers can be “replaced” by AI so preposterous that I’d imagine no one who’s ever had a child, met a child, or even been a child would take it seriously. Apparently though, there are some for whom the idea of taking an immeasurably compl...| CSS In Real Life
Ahmad Shadeed has published a great article digging into the proposed CSS masonry layout syntax. In case you’re unaware, the term “masonry” for layout is used to describe the kind of grid layout where instead of items of various heights being aligned in neat horizontal rows, they are shifted to fill the leftover space, effectively creating a brickwork effect. It was popularised by the website Pinterest some years ago, and became a widespread UI design trend for a while.| CSS In Real Life
The Green Web Foundation have published a thorough and insightful report into the sustainability of AI, and the results are pretty damning. Over the couple of years I’ve been talking about web sustainability I haven’t really touched upon AI a whole lot, partly as there wasn’t a lot of publicly available hard data about its environmental impact. Now, however, it’s become an issue that’s too big to ignore. We can’t not talk about it.| CSS In Real Life
When writing blog posts in Markdown files I often find myself needing to add HTML elements that aren’t accounted for in Markdown. Some common ones are <aside> elements, where I include content tangentially related to the post itself, or external references.| CSS In Real Life
