Journal tags: graph

The Session has been online in some form since the late 1990s. That’s long before web fonts existed.

To begin with, Times New Roman was the only game in town if you wanted serif type on a website. When Microsoft introduced Georgia it was a godsend. A beautiful typeface designed by Matthew Carter for the screen. I put it right at the start of my font stack for The Session.

Later, web fonts came along. Boy, does that short sentence belie the drama! There were very heated discussions about whether web browsers should provide this ability at all, and what it would mean for type foundries.

Microsoft led the way with their prorietary EOT format. Then everyone agreed on WOFF. Finally we got WOFF2, Electric Boogaloo.

Perhaps more important than that, we got intermediaries. Typekit, Fontdeck, and then the big daddy, Google Fonts.

That’s pretty much the state of play today. Oh yeah, and we’ve got variable fonts now.

I remember Nick Sherman presenting the idea of variable fonts at an Ampersand event years ago. I remember thinking “great idea, but it’ll never happen.” Pure science fiction. I thought the same thing when I first saw a conference presentation about a miraculous image format called Scalable Vector Graphics.

Sometimes I like to stop and take stock of what we take for granted in web browsers now. Web fonts. Variable web fonts. SVG. Flexbox. Grid. Media queries. Container queries. Fluid typography. And I haven’t even mentioned how we were once limited to just 216 colours on the web.

Georgia

Given all the advances in web typography, you might be wondering how my font strategy for The Session changed over the years.

It didn’t.

I mean, sure, I added fluid typography. That was a natural extension of my love for liquid layouts and, later, responsive design. But the font stack itself? That was still Georgia all the way.

Y’see, performance has always been a top priority for The Session. If I was going to replace a system font with a web font that the user had to download, it really needed to be worth it.

Over the years I dabbled with different typefaces but none of them felt quite right to me. And I still think Georgia is a beautiful typeface.

“But your website will look like lots of other websites!” some may cry. That used to be true when all we had was system fonts. But now that web fonts have become the norm, it’s actually pretty unusual to see Georgia in the wild.

Lora

Recently I found a font I liked. Part of why I like it is that it shares a lot of qualities with Georgia. It’s Lora by Olga Karpushina and Alexei Vanyashin.

I started to dabble with it and began seriously contemplating using it on The Session.

It’s a variable font, which is great. But actually, I’m not using that many weights on The Session. I could potentially just use a non-variable variety. It comes in fixed weights of regular, medium, semibold, and bold.

Alas, the regular weight (400) is a bit too light and the medium weight (500) is a bit too heavy. My goldilocks font weight is more like 450.

Okay, so the variable font it is. That also allows me to play around with some subtle variations in weights. As the font size gets bigger for headings, the font weight can reduce ever so slightly. And I can adjust the overall font weight down in dark mode (there’s no grading feature in this font, alas).

Subsetting

Lora supports a lot of alphabets, which is great—quite a few alphabets turn up on The Session occasionally. But this means that the font file size is quite large. 84K.

Subsetting to the rescue!

I created a subset of Lora that has everything except Cyrillic, Greek, and Latin Extended-B. I created another subset that only has Cyrillic, Greek, and Latin Extended-B. Now I’ve got two separate font files that are 48K and 41K in size.

I wrote two @font-face declarations for the two files. They’ve got the same font-family (Lora), the same font-weight (400 700), and the same font-style (normal) but they’ve got different values for unicode-range. That way, browsers know to only use appropriate file when characters on the page actually match the unicode range.

The first file is definitely going to be used. The second one might not even be needed on most pages.

I want to prioritise the loading of that first subsetted font file so it gets referenced in a link element with rel="preload".

The switcheroo

As well as file size, my other concern was how the swapping from Georgia to Lora would be perceived, especially on a slow connection. I wanted to avoid any visible rejiggering of the content.

This is where size-adjust comes in, along with its compadres ascent-override and descent-override.

Rather than adjusting the default size of Lora to match that of Georgia, I want to do it the other way around; adjust the fallback font to match the web font.

Here’s how I’m doing it:

@font-face {
    font-family: 'Fallback for Lora';
    src: local('Georgia');
    size-adjust: 105.77%;
    ascent-override: 95.11%;
    descent-override: 25.9%;
}

And then my font stack is:

font-family: Lora, 'Fallback for Lora', Georgia, serif;

It’s highly unlikely that any device out there has a system font called “Fallback for Lora” so I can be pretty confident that the @font-face adjustment rules will only get applied to browsers that have the right local font, Georgia.

But where did those magic numbers come from for size-adjust, ascent-override, and descent-override?

They came from Katie Hempenius. As well as maintaing a repo of font metrics, she provides the formula needed to calculate all three values. Or you could use this handy tool to eyeball it.

With that, Georgia gets swapped out for Lora with a minimum of layout shift.

First-timers and repeat visitors

Even with the layout shift taken care of, do I want to serve up web fonts to someone on a slow connection?

It depends. Specifically, it depends on whether it’s their first time visiting.

The Session already treats first time visitors differently to repeat visitors. The first time you visit the site, critical CSS is embedded in the head of the HTML page instead of being referenced in an external style sheet. Only once the page has loaded does the full style sheet also get downloaded and cached.

I decided that my @font-face rules pointing to the web fonts are not critical CSS. If it’s your first time visiting, those CSS rules only get downloaded after the page is done loading.

And unless you’re on a fast connection, you won’t see Georgia get swapped out for Lora. That’s because I’ve gone with a font-display value of “optional”.

Most people use “swap”. Some people use “fallback”. You’ve got to be pretty hardcore to use “optional”.

But the next page you go to, or the next time you come to the site, you more than likely will see Lora straight away. That’s because of the service worker I’ve got quietly putting static assets into the Cache API: CSS, JavaScript, and now web fonts.

So even though I’m prioritising snappy performance over visual consistency, it’s a trade-off that only really comes into play for first visits.

Next

I’m pretty happy with the overall strategy. Still, I’m not going to just set it and forget it. I’ll be monitoring the CRUX data for The Session keeping a particular eye on cumulative layout shift.

Before adding web fonts, the cumulative layout shift on The Session was zero. I think I’ve taken all the necessary steps to keep it nice and low, but if I’m wrong I’ll need to revisit my strategy.

Update: Big thanks to Roel Nieskens—of Wakamai Fondue fame—who managed to get the file size of my main subsetted font down even further; bedankt!

I watched a good film last night. Tornado from the same writer and director of the also-excellent Slow West.

Tornado is a Scottish Samurai Western set in the 1790s. Although it’s not likely that many Samurai would’ve been in Scotland during the sakoku period, I was willingly able to suspend my disbelief …until something quite minor happened on screen.

One of the characters is seen playing a concertina. “Hang on”, I thought, “1790s? That’s not right!”

And indeed, once the film was over I reached for my laptop and confirmed that the concertina is very much a 19th century invention.

Look, it’s not that I know when most musical instruments were invented, but I happened to know about the concertina’s origin because of a different technology.

See, the concertina was invented by one Charles Wheatsone. He invented quite a few things. He, along with William Cooke, more or less created the electric telegraph, around the same time as Samuel Morse.

I only know this because of the excellent book by Tom Standage called The Victorian Internet:

The remarkable story of the telegraph and the nineteenth century’s online pioneers.

Prompted by that book, I found out more about Wheatstone, including the fact that he invented the concertina. So that’s why I found myself slightly taken out of the action when watching that film last night. In the 1790s, nobody was playing the concertina in Scotland or anywhere else.

Today, though, the concertina is thriving, especially in Ireland. It’s particularly popular in County Clare. Though, as I’m writing this, I’m listening to the playing of a Kerryman, Cormac Begley.

I’ll be seeing him play tonight in the Brighton Dome where he’ll be providing the music for the superb Teaċ Damhsa production, MÁM. This’ll be my second time experiencing it. Táim ar bís!

In an Irish session, tunes are almost never played in isolation. They’re played in sets.

A set of tunes might be as few as two. More usually, it’s three or more.

It’s unusual to change from one tune type into another. You tend to get a set of jigs, or a set of reels, or a set of hornpipes. But it’s very common to change key within a set. In fact, that’s often where a good set really stands out. There can be a real joy at that moment of switching. You might get a “Hup!” from someone listening to the session at that changeover.

So how do you decide what tunes to play in a set?

There are no real rules to this. Some people make up the set on the fly. Or you might try playing a set that you’ve heard other people play, maybe on a recording you like.

On the one hand, you’re looking for contrast. You probably don’t want to play three tunes all in the same key. On the other hand, it’s nice when there’s some kind of connection between the tunes—something about the phrasing or emphasis perhaps.

Pairing tunes for sets always reminds me of pairing typefaces. You don’t want the body copy and the headlines to be too similar, but you do want them to share some quality.

In his classic book, On Web Typography, Jason says:

When it comes to choosing and pairing typefaces, I keep two things in mind: distinction and harmony. To keep the system you’ve created for visual communication properly balanced, you need to choose typefaces that don’t compete too much with each other, but aren’t so similar as to be indistinguishable.

The same could be said for pairing tunes in sets!

Jason also says:

As another approach, opt for typefaces that share the same maker.

That can work for sets of tunes too. While most tunes are traditional, with no known composer, the really good composed tunes have entered the canon.

I’ve taken Jason’s advice for typefaces and applied to sets by playing a set of tunes by Junior Crehan or a set of tunes by Vincent Broderick.

Mostly though, there’s no real system to it. Or at least, not one that can be easily articulated. Like Jason says:

And we’re back to that old chestnut about rules: there are many right answers, and no answers are really wrong; there are just different degrees of good.

I’ve been thinking about the kind of CSS I write by default when I start a new project.

Some of it is habitual. I now use logical properties automatically. It took me a while to rewire my brain, but now seeing left or top in a style sheet looks wrong to me.

When I mentioned this recently, I had some pushback from people wondering why you’d bother using logical properites if you never planned to translate the website into a language with a different writing system. I pointed out that even if you don’t plan to translate a web page, a user may still choose to. Using logical properties helps them. From that perspective, it’s kind of like using user preference queries.

That’s something else I use by default now. If I’ve got any animations or transitions in my CSS, I wrap them in prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference query.

For instance, I’m a huge fan of view transitions and I enable them by default on every new project, but I do it like this:

@media (prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference) {
  @view-transition {
    navigation: auto;
  }
}

I’ll usually have a prefers-color-scheme query for dark mode too. This is often quite straightforward if I’m using custom properties for colours, something else I’m doing habitually. And now I’m starting to use OKLCH for those colours, even if they start as hexadecimal values.

Custom properties are something else I reach for a lot, though I try to avoid premature optimisation. Generally I wait until I spot a value I’m using more than two or three times in a stylesheet; then I convert it to a custom property.

I make full use of clamp() for text sizing. Sometimes I’ll just set a fluid width on the html element and then size everything else with ems or rems. More often, I’ll use Utopia to flow between different type scales.

Okay, those are all features of CSS—logical properties, preference queries, view transitions, custom properties, fluid type—but what about actual snippets of CSS that I re-use from project to project?

I’m not talking about a CSS reset, which usually involves zeroing out the initial values provided by the browser. I’m talking about tiny little enhancements just one level up from those user-agent styles.

Here’s one I picked up from Eric that I apply to the figcaption element:

figcaption {
  max-inline-size: max-content;
  margin-inline: auto;
}

That will centre-align the text until it wraps onto more than one line, at which point it’s no longer centred. Neat!

Here’s another one I start with on every project:

a:focus-visible {
  outline-offset: 0.25em;
  outline-width: 0.25em;
  outline-color: currentColor;
}

That puts a nice chunky focus ring on links when they’re tabbed to. Personally, I like having the focus ring relative to the font size of the link but I know other people prefer to use a pixel size. You do you. Using the currentColor of the focused is usually a good starting point, thought I might end up over-riding this with a different hightlight colour.

Then there’s typography. Rich has a veritable cornucopia of starting styles you can use to improve typography in CSS.

Something I’m reaching for now is the text-wrap property with its new values of pretty and balance:

ul,ol,dl,dt,dd,p,figure,blockquote {
  hanging-punctuation: first last;
  text-wrap: pretty;
}

And maybe this for headings, if they’re being centred:

h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {
  text-align: center;
  text-wrap: balance;
}

All of these little snippets should be easily over-writable so I tend to wrap them in a :where() selector to reduce their specificity:

:where(figcaption) {
  max-inline-size: max-content;
  margin-inline: auto;
}
:where(a:focus-visible) {
  outline-offset: 0.25em;
  outline-width: 0.25em;
  outline-color: currentColor;
}
:where(ul,ol,dl,dt,dd,p,figure,blockquote) {
  hanging-punctuation: first last;
  text-wrap: pretty;
}

But if I really want them to be easily over-writable, then the galaxy-brain move would be to put them in their own cascade layer. That’s what Manu does with his CSS boilerplate:

@layer core, third-party, components, utility;

Then I could put those snippets in the core layer, making sure they could be overwritten by the CSS in any of the other layers:

@layer core {
  figcaption {
    max-inline-size: max-content;
    margin-inline: auto;
  }
  a:focus-visible {
    outline-offset: 0.25em;
    outline-width: 0.25em;
    outline-color: currentColor;
  }
  ul,ol,dl,dt,dd,p,figure,blockquote {
    hanging-punctuation: first last;
    text-wrap: pretty;
  }
}

For now I’m just using :where() but I think I should start using cascade layers.

I also want to start training myself to use the lh value (line-height) for block spacing.

And although I’m using the :has() selector, I don’t think I’ve yet trained my brain to reach for it by default.

CSS has sooooo much to offer today—I want to make sure I’m taking full advantage of it.

Here’s one photo from each month in 2024

I really like the newly-launched website for this year’s XOXO festival. I like that the design is pretty much the same for really small screens, really large screens, and everything in between because everything just scales. It’s simultaneously a flyer, a poster, and a billboard.

Trys has written about the websites he’s noticed using fluid type and spacing: There it is again, that fluid feeling.

I know what he means. I get a similar feeling when I’m on a site that adjusts fluidly to any browser window—it feels very …webby.

I’ve had this feeling before.

When responsive design was on the rise, it was a real treat to come across a responsive site. After a while, it stopped being remarkable. Now if I come across a site that isn’t responsive, it feels broken.

And now it’s a treat to come across a site that uses fluid type. But how long will it be until it feels unremarkable? How will it be until a website that doesn’t use fluid type feels broken?

There’s a lovely CSS property called hanging-punctuation. You can use it to do exactly what the name suggests and exdent punctuation marks such as opening quotes.

Here’s one way to apply it:

html {
  hanging-punctuation: first last;
}

Any punctuation marks at the beginning or end of a line will now hang over the edge, leaving you with nice clean blocks of text; no ragged edges.

Right now it’s only supported in Safari but there’s no reason not to use it. It’s a perfect example of progressive enhancement. One line of CSS to tidy things up for the browsers that support it and leave things exactly as they are for the browsers that don’t.

But when I used this over on The Session I noticed an unintended side-effect. Because I’m applying the property globally, it’s also acting on form fields. If the text inside a form field starts with a quotation mark or some other piece of punctuation, it’s shunted off to the side and hidden.

Here’s the fix I used:

input, textarea {
  hanging-punctuation: none;
}

It’s a small little gotcha but I figured I’d share it in case it helps someone else out.

I had a lot of fun making the website for Patterns Day.

If you’re interested in the tech stack, here’s what I used:

1. HTML
2. CSS

Actually, technically it’s all HTML because the styles are inside a style element rather than a separate style sheet, but you know what I mean. Also, there is technically some JavaScript but all it does is register a service worker that takes care of caching and going offline.

I didn’t use any build tools. There was no pipeline. There is no node_modules folder filling up my hard drive. Nothing was automated. The website was hand-crafted the long hard stupid way.

I started with the content. I wrote out the words and marked them up with the most appropriate HTML elements.

Time to layer on the presentation.

For the design, I turned to Michelle for help. I gave her a brief, describing the vibe of the conference, and asked her to come up with an appropriate visual language.

Crucially, I asked her not to design a website. Instead I asked her to think about other places where this design language might be used: a poster, social media, anything but a website.

Partly I was doing this for my own benefit. If you give me a pixel-perfect design for a web page and tell me to code it up, either I won’t do it or I won’t enjoy it. I just don’t get any motivation out of that kind of direct one-to-one translation.

But give me guardrails, give me constraints, give me boundary conditions, and off I go!

Michelle was very gracious in dealing with such a finicky client as myself (“Can you try this other direction?”, “Hmm… I think I preferred the first one after all!”) She delivered a colour palette, a type scale, typeface choices, and some wonderful tiling patterns …it is Patterns Day after all!

With just a few extra lines of CSS, the basic typography was in place.

I started layering on the colours. Even though this was a one-page site, I still made liberal use of custom properties in the CSS. It just feels good to be able to update one value and see the results, well …cascade.

I had a lot of fun with the tiling background images. SVG was the perfect format for these. And because the tiles were so small in file size, I just inlined them straight into the CSS.

By this point, I felt like I was truly designing in the browser. Adjusting spacing, playing around with layout, and all that squishy stuff. Some of the best results came from happy accidents—the way that certain elements behaved at certain screen sizes would lead me into little experiments that yielded interesting results.

I’m not sure it’s possible to engineer that kind of serendipity in Figma. Figma was the perfect tool for exploring ideas around the visual vocabulary, and for handing over design decisions around colour, typography, and texture. But when it comes to how the content is going to behave on the World Wide Web, nothing beats a browser for fidelity.

By this point I was really sweating the details, like getting the logo just right and adjusting the type scale for different screen sizes. Needless to say, Utopia was a godsend for that.

I was also checking back in with Michelle to get her take on design decisions I was making.

I could’ve kept tinkering but the diminishing returns were a sign that it was time to put this out into the world.

It felt really good to work on a web page like this. It felt like I was getting my hands into the soil of the web. I don’t think it’s an accident that the result turned out to be very performant.

Getting hands-on like this stops me from getting rusty. And honestly, working with CSS these days is a joy. There’s such power to be had from using var() in combination with functions like calc() and clamp(). Layout is a breeze with flexbox and grid. Browser differences are practically non-existent. We’ve never had it so good.

Here’s something I noticed about my relationship to CSS; my brain has finally made the switch to logical properties. Now if I’m looking at some CSS and I see left, right, top, or bottom, it looks like a bug to me. Those directional properties feel loaded with assumptions whereas logical properties feel much more like working with the grain of the web.

Some lovely people have recently made some lovely websites.

Dan has launched his type foundry, Simple Type Co. and it’s gorgeous!

For as long as I’ve been making websites, Dan’s designs have been an inspiration: Corkd, Dribbble, his own website; whenever he unveils something it always sits just right with me.

Oh, and I love the tagline for Simple Type Co.:

Never perfect. Always a-okay.

Someone who is a perfectionist is Marcin. He’s been working on his book about keyboards for years now (the Kickstarter project will launch in February) and he’s made a stunning website for the book called Shift Happens. Click around and find out.

Mandy has a lovely new professional website, courtesy of Ethan. It’s called everything changes. I love the subtletly of the different colour schemes for dark and light modes. It’s almost as if Ethan knows a thing or two about responsive design.

Look! Jason has new professional website too. The text is just scrumptious. It’s almost as if Jason knows a thing or two about typography.

And look! Lynn has done it again—a new site design for a new year. Beautiful stuff, as always—have a look through the archive if you want to the creativity she puts into this every single year.

All of these people are my web design heroes.

Gerry talks about “top tasks” a lot. He literally wrote the book on it:

Top tasks are what matter most to your customers.

Seems pretty obvious, right? But it’s actually pretty rare to see top tasks presented any differently than other options.

Look at the global navigation on most websites. Typically all the options are given equal prominence. Even the semantics under the hood often reflect this egalitarian ideal, with each list in an unordered list. All the navigation options are equal, but I bet that the reality for most websites is that some navigation options are more equal than others.

I’ve been guilty of this on The Session. The site-wide navigation shows a number of options: tunes, events, discussions, etc. Each one is given equal prominence, but I can tell you without even looking at my server logs that 90% of the traffic goes to the tunes section—that’s the beating heart of The Session. That’s why the home page has a search form that defaults to searching for tunes.

I wanted the navigation to reflect the reality of what people are coming to the site for. I decided to make the link to the tunes section more prominent by bumping up the font size a bit.

I was worried about how weird this might look; we’re so used to seeing all navigation items presented equally. But I think it worked out okay (though it might take a bit of getting used to if you’re accustomed to the previous styling). It helps that “tunes” is a nice short word, so bumping up the font size on that word doesn’t jostle everything else around.

I think this adjustment is working well for this situation where there’s one very clear tippy-top task. I wouldn’t want to apply it across the board, making every item in the navigation proportionally bigger or smaller depending on how often it’s used. That would end up looking like a ransom note.

But giving one single item prominence like this tweaks the visual hierarchy just enough to favour the option that’s most likely to be what a visitor wants.

That last bit is crucial. The visual adjustment reflects what visitors want, not what I want. You could adjust the size of a navigation option that you want to drive traffic to, but in the long run, all you’re going to do is train people to trust your design less.

You don’t get to decide what your top task is. The visitors to your website do. Trying to foist an arbitrary option on them would be the tail wagging the dog.

Anway, I’m feeling a lot better about the site-wide navigation on The Session now that it reflects reality a little bit more. Heck, I may even bump that font size up a little more.

I’m standing on a huge stage in a giant hangar-like room already filled with at least a thousand people. More are arriving. I’m due to start speaking in a few minutes. But there’s a problem with my laptop. It connects to the external screen, then disconnects, then connects, then disconnects. The technicians are on the stage with me, quickly swapping out adaptors and cables as they try to figure out a fix.

This is a pretty standard stress dream for me. Except this wasn’t a dream. This was happening for real at the giant We Are Developers World Congress in Berlin last week.

In the run-up to the event, the organisers had sent out emails about providing my slide deck ahead of time so it could go on a shared machine. I understand why this makes life easier for the people running the event, but it can be a red flag for speakers. It’s never quite the same as presenting from your own laptop with its familiar layout of the presentation display in Keynote.

Fortunately the organisers also said that I could present from my own laptop if I wanted to so that’s what I opted for.

One week before the talk in Berlin I was in Amsterdam for CSS Day. During a break between talks I was catching up with Michelle. We ended up swapping conference horror stories around technical issues (prompted by some of our fellow speakers having issues with Keynote on the brand new M1 laptops).

Michelle told me about a situation where she was supposed to be presenting from her own laptop, but because of last-minute technical issues, all the talks were being transferred to a single computer via USB sticks.

“But the fonts!” I said. “Yes”, Michelle responded. Even though she had put the fonts on the USB stick, things got muddled in the rush. If you open the Keynote file before installing the fonts, Keynote will perform font substitution and then it’s too late. This is exactly what happened with Michelle’s code examples, messing them up.

“You know”, I said, “I was thinking about having a back-up version of my talks that’s made entirely out of images—export every slide as an image, then make a new deck by importing all those images.”

“I’ve done that”, said Michelle. “But there isn’t a quick way to do it.”

I was still thinking about our conversation when I was on the Eurostar train back to England. I had plenty of time to kill with spotty internet connectivity. And that huge Berlin event was less than a week away.

I opened up the Keynote file of the Berlin presentation. I selected File, Export to, Images.

Then I created a new blank deck ready for the painstaking work that Michelle had warned me about. I figured I’d have to drag in each image individually. The presentation had 89 slides.

But I thought it was worth trying a shortcut first. I selected all of the images in Finder. Then I dragged them over to the far left column in Keynote, the one that shows the thumbnails of all the slides.

It worked!

Each image was now its own slide. I selected all 89 slides and applied my standard transition: a one second dissolve.

That was pretty much it. I now had a version of my talk that had no fonts whatsoever.

If you’re going to try this, it works best if don’t have too many transitions within slides. Like, let’s say you’ve got three words that you introduce—by clicking—one by one. You could have one slide with all three words, each one with its own build effect. But the other option is to have three slides: each one like the previous slide but with one more word added. If you use that second technique, then the exporting and importing will work smoothly.

Oh, and if you have lots and lots of notes, you’ll have to manually copy them over. My notes tend to be fairly minimal—a few prompts and the occasional time check (notes that say “5 minutes” or “10 minutes” so I can guage how my pacing is going).

Back to that stage in Berlin. The clock is ticking. My laptop is misbehaving.

One of the other speakers who will be on later in the day was hoping to test his laptop too. It’s Håkon. His presentation includes in-browser demos that won’t work on a shared machine. But he doesn’t get a chance to test his laptop just yet—my little emergency has taken precedent.

“Luckily”, I tell him, “I’ve got a backup of my presentation that’s just images to avoid any font issues.” He points out the irony: we spent years battling against the practice of text-as-images on the web and now here we are using that technique once again.

My laptop continues to misbehave. It connects, it disconnects, connects, disconnects. We’re going to have to run the presentation from the house machine. I’m handed a USB stick. I put my images-only version of the talk on there. I’m handed a clicker (I can’t use my own clicker with the house machine). I’m quickly ushered backstage while the MC announces my talk, a few minutes behind schedule.

It works. It feels a little strange not being able to look at my own laptop, but the on-stage monitors have the presentation display including my notes. The unfamiliar clicker feels awkward but hopefully nobody notices. I deliver my talk and it seems to go over well.

I think I’ll be making image-only versions of all my talks from now on. Hopefully I won’t ever need them, but just knowing that the backup is there is reassuring.

Mind you, if you’re the kind of person who likes to fiddle with your slides right up until the moment of presenting, then this technique won’t be very useful for you. But for me, not being able to fiddle with my slides after a certain point is a feature, not a bug.

I don’t know about you, but it seems like everyone I follow on Twitter is playing Wordle. Although I don’t play the game myself, I think it’s pretty great.

Not only does Wordle have a very sweet backstory, but it’s also unashamedly on the web. If you want to play, you go to the URL powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle. That’s it. No need to download an app.

That hasn’t stopped some nefarious developers trying to trick people into downloading their clones of Wordle from app stores. App stores, which are meant to be curated and safe, are in fact filled with dodgy knock-offs and scams. Contrary to popular belief, the web is quite literally a safer bet.

Wordle has a web app manifest, which means you can add it to your home screen and it will behave just like a native app (although I don’t believe it has offline support). That’s great, but the process of adding a web app to your home screen on iOS is ludicrously long-winded.

Macworld published an article detailing how to get the real Wordle app on your iPhone or iPad. On the one hand it’s great to see this knowledge being spread. On the other hand it’s dispiriting that it’s even necessary to tell people that they can do this, like it’s a hidden nerdy secret just for power users.

At this point I’ve pretty much given up on Apple ever doing anything about this pathetic situation. So what can I do instead?

Well, taking my cue from that Macworld article, the least I can do is inform people how they can add a progressive web app to their home screen.

That’s what I’ve done on thesession.org. I’ve published a page on how to install The Session to your home screen.

On both Android and iPhone the journey to installing a progressive web app begins with incomprehensible iconography. On Android you must first tap on the unlabeled kebab icon—three vertical dots. On iOS you must first tap on the unlabeled share icon—a square with an arrow coming out of it.

When it comes to mobile operating systems, consumer choice means you choose which kind of mystery meat to eat.

I’ve included screenshots to help people identify these mysterious portals. For iOS I’ve also included a video to illustrate the quest to find the secret menu item buried beneath the share icon.

I’ve linked to the page with the installation instructions from the site’s “help” page and the home page.

Handy tip: when you’re adding a start_url value to your web app manifest, it’s common to include a query string like this:

start_url: "/?homescreen"

I’m guessing most people to that so they can get analytics on how many people are starting from an icon tap. I don’t do analytics on The Session but I’m still using that query string in my start_url. On the home page of the site, I check for the existence of the query string. If it exists, I don’t show the link to the installation page. So once someone has installed the site to their home screen, they shouldn’t see that message when they launch The Session.

If you’ve got a progressive web app, it might be worth making a page with installation instructions rather than relying on browsers to proactively inform your site’s visitors. You’d still need to figure out the right time and place to point people to that page, but at least the design challenge would be in your hands.

Should you decide to take a leaf out of the Android and iOS playbooks and use mystery meat navigation to link to such a page, there’s an emoji you could potentially use: 📲

It’s still worse than using actual words, but it might be better than some random combination of dots, squares and arrows.

(I’m not really serious about using that emoji, but if you do, be sure to use a sensible aria-label value on the enclosing a element.)

Last month I wrote about writing on web.dev. At that time, the first five parts of a fourteen-part course on responsive design had been published. I’m pleased to say that the next five parts are now available. They are:

1. Typography
2. Responsive images
3. The picture element
4. Icons
5. Theming

It wasn’t planned, but these five modules feel like they belong together. The first five modules were concerned with layout tools—media queries, flexbox, grid, and even container queries. The latest five modules are about the individual elements of design—type, colour, and images. But those elements are examined through the lens of responsiveness; responsive typography with clamp, responsive colour with prefers-color-scheme, and responsive images with picture and srcset.

The final five modules should be available later this month. In the mean time, I hope you like the first ten modules.

If you’re using web fonts, there are good performance (and privacy) reasons for hosting your own font files. And fortunately, Google Fonts gives you that option. There’s a “Download family” button on every specimen page.

But if you go ahead and download a font family from Google Fonts, you’ll notice something a bit odd. The .zip file only contains .ttf files. You can serve those on the web, but it’s far from the best choice. Woff2 is far leaner in file size.

This means you need to manually convert the downloaded .ttf files into .woff or .woff2 files using something like Font Squirrel’s generator. That’s fine, but I’m curious as to why this step is necessary. Why doesn’t Google Fonts provide .woff or .woff2 files in the downloaded folder? After all, if you choose to use Google Fonts as a third-party hosting service for your fonts, it most definitely serves up the appropriate file formats.

I thought maybe it was something to do with the licensing. Maybe some licenses only allow for unmodified truetype files to be distributed? But I’ve looked at fonts with different licenses—some have Apache 2 licensing, some have Open Font licensing—and they’re all quite permissive and definitely allow for modification.

Maybe the thinking is that, if you’re hosting your own font files, then you know what you’re doing and you should be able to do your own file conversion and subsetting. But I’ve come across more than one website in the wild serving up .ttf files. And who can blame them? They want to host their own font files. They downloaded those files from Google Fonts. Why shouldn’t they assume that they’re good to go?

It’s all a bit strange. If anyone knows why Google Fonts only provides .ttf files for download, please let me know. In a pinch, I will also accept rampant speculation.

Trys also pointed out some weird default behaviour if you do let Google Fonts do the hosting for you. Specifically if it’s a variable font. Let’s say it’s a font with weight as a variable axis. You specify in advance which weights you’ll be using, and then it generates separate font files to serve for each different weight.

Doesn’t that defeat the whole point of using a variable font? I mean, I can see how it could result in smaller file sizes if you’re just using one or two weights, but isn’t half the fun of having a weight axis that you can go crazy with as many weights as you want and it’s all still one font file?

Like I said, it’s all very strange.

Episode three of the Clearleft podcast is here!

This one is a bit different. Whereas previous episodes focused on specific topics—design systems, service design—this one is a case study. And, wow, what a case study! The whole time I was putting the episode together, I kept thinking “The team really did some excellent work here.”

I’m not sure what makes more sense: listen to the podcast episode first and then visit the site in question …or the other way around? Maybe the other way around. In which case, be sure to visit the website for Wildlife Photographer Of The Year.

That’s right—Clearleft got to work with London’s Natural History Museum! A real treat.

This episode of the podcast ended up being half an hour long. It should probably be shorter but I just couldn’t bring myself to cut any of the insights that Helen, James, Chris, and Trys were sharing. I’m probably too close to the subject matter to be objective about it. I’m hoping that others will find it equally fascinating to hear about the process of the project. Research! Design! Dev! This has got it all.

I had a lot of fun with the opening of the episode. I wanted to create a montage effect like the scene-setting opening of a film that has overlapping news reports. I probably spent far too long doing it but I’m really happy with the final result.

And with this episode, we’re halfway through the first season of the podcast already! I figured a nice short run of six episodes is enough to cover a fair bit of ground and give a taste of what the podcast is aiming for, without it turning into an overwhelming number of episodes in a backlog for you to catch up with. Three down and three to go. Seems manageable, right?

Anyway, enough of the backstory. If you haven’t already subscribed to the Clearleft podcast, you should do that. Then do these three things in whichever order you think works best:

• Visit the website for Wildlife Photographer Of The Year.
• Read the case study on the Clearleft website.
• Listen to episode three of the Clearleft podcast

Do you have a favourite non-personal photograph?

By non-personal, I mean one that isn’t directly related to your life; photographs of family members, friends, travel (remember travel?).

Even discounting those photographs, there’s still a vast pool of candidates. There are all the amazing pictures taken by photojournalists like Lee Miller. There’s all the awe-inspiring wildlife photography out there. Then there are the kind of posters that end up on bedroom walls, like Robert Doisneau’s The Kiss.

One of my favourite photographs of all time has music as its subject matter. No, not Johnny Cash flipping the bird, although I believe this picture to be just as rock’n’roll.

This is a photograph of Séamus Ennis and Jean Ritchie. It was probably taken around 1952 or 1953 by Ritchie’s husband, George Pickow, when Jean Ritchie and Alan Lomax were in Ireland to do field recordings.

I love everything about it.

Séamus Ennis looks genuinely larger than life (which, by all accounts, he was). And just look at the length of those fingers! Meanwhile Jean Ritchie is equally indominatable, just as much as part of the story as the musician she’s there to record.

Both of them have expressions that convey how intent they are on their machines—Ennis’s uilleann pipes and Ritchie’s tape recorder. It’s positively steampunk!

What a perfect snapshot of tradition and technology meeting slap bang in the middle of the twentieth century.

Maybe that’s why I love it so much. One single photograph is filled with so much that’s dear to me—traditional Irish music meets long-term archival preservation.

CSS got some pretty nifty features recently. There’s the min() and max() functions. If you use them for, say, width you can use one rule where previously you would’ve needed to use two (a width declaration followed by either min-width or max-width). But they can also be applied to font-size! That’s very nifty—we’ve never had min-font-size or max-font-size properties.

There’s also the clamp() function. That allows you to set a minimum size, a default size, and a maximum size. Again, it can be used for lengths, like width, or for font-size.

Over on thesession.org, I’ve had some media queries in place for a while now that would increase the font-size for larger screens. It’s nothing crucial, just a nice-to-have so that on wide screens, the font is bumped up accordingly. I realised I could replace all those media queries with one clamp() statement, thanks to the vw (viewport width) unit:

font-size: clamp(1rem, 1.333vw, 1.5rem);

By default, the font-size is 1.333vw (1.333% of the viewport width), but it will never get smaller than 1rem and it will never get larger than 1.5rem.

That works, but there’s a bit of an issue with using raw vw units like that. If someone is on a wide screen and they try to adjust the font size, nothing will happen. The viewport width doesn’t change when you bump the font size up or down.

The solution is to mix in some kind of unit that does respond to the font size being bumped up or down (like, say, the rem unit). Handily, clamp() allows you to combine units, just like calc(). So I can do this:

font-size: clamp(1rem, 0.5rem + 0.666vw, 1.5rem);

The result is much the same as my previous rule, but now—thanks to the presence of that 0.5rem value—the font size responds to being adjusted by the user.

You could use a full 1rem in that default value:

font-size: clamp(1rem, 1rem + 0.333vw, 1.5rem);

…but if you do that, the minimum size (1rem) will never be reached—the default value will always be larger. So in effect it’s no different than saying:

font-size: min(1.rem + 0.333vw, 1.5rem);

I mentioned this to Chris just the other day.

Anyway, I got the result I wanted. I wanted the font size to stay at the browser default size (usually 16 pixels) until the screen was larger than around 1200 pixels. From there, the font size gets gradually bigger, until it hits one and a half times the browser default (which would be 24 pixels if the default size started at 16). I decided to apply it to the :root element (which is html) using percentages:

:root {
  font-size: clamp(100%, 50% + 0.666vw, 150%);
}

(My thinking goes like this: if we take a screen width of 1200 pixels, then 1vw would be 12 pixels: 1200 divided by 100. So for a font size of 16 pixels, that would be 1.333vw. But because I’m combining it with half of the default font size—50% of 16 pixels = 8 pixels—I need to cut the vw value in half as well: 50% of 1.333vw = 0.666vw.)

So I’ve got the CSS rule I want. I dropped it in to the top of my file and…

I got an error.

There was nothing wrong with my CSS. The problem was that I was dropping it into a Sass file (.scss).

Perhaps I am showing my age. Do people even use Sass any more? I hear that post-processors usurped Sass’s dominance (although no-one’s ever been able to explain to me why they’re different to pre-processers like Sass; they both process something you’ve written into something else). Or maybe everyone’s just writing their CSS in JS now. I hear that’s a thing.

The Session is a looooong-term project so I’m very hesitant to use any technology that won’t stand the test of time. When I added Sass into the mix, back in—I think—2012 or so, I wasn’t sure whether it was the right thing to do, from a long-term perspective. But it did offer some useful functionality so I went ahead and used it.

Now, eight years later, it was having a hard time dealing with the new clamp() function. Specifically, it didn’t like the values being calculated through the addition of multiple units. I think it was clashing with Sass’s in-built ability to add units together.

I started to ask myself whether I should still be using Sass. I looked at which features I was using…

Variables. Well, now we’ve got CSS custom properties, which are even more powerful than Sass variables because they can be updated in real time. Sass variables are like const. CSS custom properties are like let.

Mixins. These can be very useful, but now there’s a lot that you can do just in CSS with calc(). The built-in darken() and lighten() mixins are handy though when it comes to colours.

Nesting. I’ve never been a fan. I know it can make the source files look tidier but I find it can sometimes obfuscate what you’re final selectors are going to look like. So this wasn’t something I was using much any way.

Multiple files. Ah! This is the thing I would miss most. Having separate .scss files for separate interface elements is very handy!

But globbing a bunch of separate .scss files into one .css file isn’t really a Sass task. That’s what build tools are for. In fact, that’s what I was already doing with my JavaScript files; I write them as individual .js files that then get concatenated into one .js file using Grunt.

(Yes, this project uses Grunt. I told you I was showing my age. But, you know what? It works. Though seeing as I’m mostly using it for concatenation, I could probably replace it with a makefile. If I’m going to use old technology, I might as well go all the way.)

I swapped out Sass variables for CSS custom properties, mixins for calc(), and removed what little nesting I was doing. Then I stripped the Sass parts out of my Grunt file and replaced them with some concatenation and minification tasks. All of this makes no difference to the actual website, but it means I’ve got one less dependency …and I can use clamp()!

Remember a little while back when I was making a dark mode for my site? I made this observation:

Let’s just take a moment here to pause and reflect on the fact that we can now use CSS to create all sorts of effects that previously required a graphic design tool like Photoshop.

It feels like something similar has happened with tools like Sass. Sass was the hare. CSS is the tortoise. Sass blazed the trail, but now native CSS can achieve much the same result.

It’s like when we used to need something like jQuery to do DOM Scripting succinctly using CSS selectors. Then we got things like querySelector() in JavaScript so we no longer needed the trailblazer.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the goal of any good library should be to get so successful as to make itself redundant. That is, the ideas and functionality provided by the tool are so useful and widely adopted that the native technologies—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—take their cue from those tools.

You could argue that this is what happened with Flash. It certainly happened with jQuery and Sass. I’m pretty sure we’ll see the same cycle play out with frameworks like React.

Trys and James recently unveiled their Utopia project. They’ve been tinkering away at it behind the scenes for quite a while now.

You can check out the website and read the blog to get the details of how it accomplishes its goal:

Elegantly scale type and space without breakpoints.

I may well be biased, but I really like this project. I’ve been asking myself why I find it so appealing. Here are a few of the attributes of Utopia that strike a chord with me…

It’s collaborative

Collaboration is at the heart of Clearleft’s work. I know everyone says that, but we’ve definitely seen a direct correlation: projects with high levels of collaboration are invariably more successful than projects where people are siloed.

The genesis for Utopia came about after Trys and James worked together on a few different projects. It’s all too easy to let design and development splinter off into their own caves, but on these projects, Trys and James were working (literally) side by side. This meant that they could easily articulate frustrations to one another, and more important, they could easily share their excitement.

The end result of their collaboration is some very clever code. There’s an irony here. This code could be used to discourage collaboration! After all, why would designers and developers sit down together if they can just pass these numbers back and forth?

But I don’t think that Utopia will appeal to designers and developers who work in that way. Born in the spirit of collaboration, I suspect that it will mostly benefit people who value collaboration.

It’s intrinsic

If you’re a control freak, you may not like Utopia. The idea is that you specify the boundaries of what you’re trying to accomplish—minimum/maximum font sizes, minumum/maximum screen sizes, and some modular scales. Then you let the code—and the browser—do all the work.

On the one hand, this feels like surrending control. But on the other hand, because the underlying system is so robust, it’s a way of guaranteeing quality, even in situations you haven’t accounted for.

If someone asks you, “What size will the body copy be when the viewport is 850 pixels wide?”, your answer would have to be “I don’t know …but I do know that it will be appropriate.”

This feels like a very declarative way of designing. It reminds me of the ethos behind Andy and Heydon’s site, Every Layout. They call it algorithmic layout design:

Employing algorithmic layout design means doing away with @media breakpoints, “magic numbers”, and other hacks, to create context-independent layout components. Your future design systems will be more consistent, terser in code, and more malleable in the hands of your users and their devices.

See how breakpoints are mentioned as being a very top-down approach to layout? Remember the tagline for Utopia, which aims for fluid responsive design?

Elegantly scale type and space without breakpoints.

Unsurprisingly, Andy really likes Utopia:

As the co-author of Every Layout, my head nearly fell off from all of the nodding when reading this because this is the exact sort of approach that we preach: setting some rules and letting the browser do the rest.

Heydon describes this mindset as automating intent. I really like that. I think that’s what Utopia does too.

As Heydon said at Patterns Day:

Be your browser’s mentor, not its micromanager.

The idea is that you give it rules, you give it axioms or principles to work on, and you let it do the calculation. You work with the in-built algorithms of the browser and of CSS itself.

This is all possible thanks to improvements to CSS like calc, flexbox and grid. Jen calls this approach intrinsic web design. Last year, I liveblogged her excellent talk at An Event Apart called Designing Intrinsic Layouts.

Utopia feels like it has the same mindset as algorithmic layout design and intrinsic web design. Trys and James are building on the great work already out there, which brings me to the final property of Utopia that appeals to me…

It’s iterative

There isn’t actually much that’s new in Utopia. It’s a combination of existing techniques. I like that. As I said recently:

I’m a great believer in the HTML design principle, Evolution Not Revolution:

It is better to evolve an existing design rather than throwing it away.

First of all, Utopia uses the idea of modular scales in typography. Tim Brown has been championing this idea for years.

Then there’s the idea of typography being fluid and responsive—just like Jason Pamental has been speaking and writing about.

On the code side, Utopia wouldn’t be possible without the work of Mike Reithmuller and his breakthroughs on responsive and fluid typography, which led to Tim’s work on CSS locks.

Utopia takes these building blocks and combines them. So if you’re wondering if it would be a good tool for one of your projects, you can take an equally iterative approach by asking some questions…

Are you using fluid type?

Do your font-sizes increase in proportion to the width of the viewport? I don’t mean in sudden jumps with @media breakpoints—I mean some kind of relationship between font size and the vw (viewport width) unit. If so, you’re probably using some kind of mechanism to cap the minimum and maximum font sizes—CSS locks.

I’m using that technique on Resilient Web Design. But I’m not changing the relative difference between different sized elements—body copy, headings, etc.—as the screen size changes.

Are you using modular scales?

Does your type system have some kind of ratio that describes the increase in type sizes? You probably have more than one ratio (unlike Resilient Web Design). The ratio for small screens should probably be smaller than the ratio for big screens. But rather than jump from one ratio to another at an arbitrary breakpoint, Utopia allows the ratio to be fluid.

So it’s not just that font sizes are increasing as the screen gets larger; the comparative difference is also subtly changing. That means there’s never a sudden jump in font size at any time.

Are you using custom properties?

A technical detail this, but the magic of Utopia relies on two powerful CSS features: calc() and custom properties. These two workhorses are used by Utopia to generate some CSS that you can stick at the start of your stylesheet. If you ever need to make changes, all the parameters are defined at the top of the code block. Tweak those numbers and watch everything cascade.

You’ll see that there’s one—and only one—media query in there. This is quite clever. Usually with CSS locks, you’d need to have a media query for every different font size in order to cap its growth at the maximum screen size. With Utopia, the maximum screen size—100vw—is abstracted into a variable (a custom property). The media query then changes its value to be the upper end of your CSS lock. So it doesn’t matter how many different font sizes you’re setting: because they all use that custom property, one single media query takes care of capping the growth of every font size declaration.

If you’re already using CSS locks, modular scales, and custom properties, Utopia is almost certainly going to be a good fit for you.

If you’re not yet using those techniques, but you’d like to, I highly recommend using Utopia on your next project.

Years ago, the world of web standards was split. Two groups—the W3C and the WHATWG—were working on the next iteration of HTML. They had different ideas about the nature of standardisation.

Broadly speaking, the W3C followed a specification-first approach. Figure out what should be implemented first and foremost. From this perspective, specs can be seen as blueprints for browsers to work from.

The WHATWG, by contrast, were implementation led. The way they saw it, there was no point specifying something if browsers weren’t going to implement it. Instead, specs are there to document existing behaviour in browsers.

I’m over-generalising somewhat in my descriptions there, but the point is that there was an ideological difference of opinion around what standards bodies should do.

This always reminded me of a similar ideological conflict when it comes to language usage.

Language prescriptivists attempt to define rules about what’s right or right or wrong in a language. Rules like “never end a sentence with a preposition.” Prescriptivists are generally fighting a losing battle and spend most of their time bemoaning the decline of their language because people aren’t following the rules.

Language descriptivists work the exact opposite way. They see their job as documenting existing language usage instead of defining it. Lexicographers—like Merriam-Webster or the Oxford English Dictionary—receive complaints from angry prescriptivists when dictionaries document usage like “literally” meaning “figuratively”.

Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive.

I’ve seen the prescriptive/descriptive divide somewhere else too. I’ve seen it in the world of design systems.

Jordan Moore talks about intentional and emergent design systems:

There appears to be two competing approaches in designing design systems.

An intentional design system. The flavour and framework may vary, but the approach generally consists of: design system first → design/build solutions.

An emergent design system. This approach is much closer to the user needs end of the scale by beginning with creative solutions before deriving patterns and systems (i.e the system emerges from real, coded scenarios).

An intentional design system is prescriptive. An emergent design system is descriptive.

I think we can learn from the worlds of web standards and dictionaries here. A prescriptive approach might give you a beautiful design system, but if it doesn’t reflect the actual product, it’s fiction. A descriptive approach might give a design system with imperfections and annoying flaws, but at least it will be accurate.

I think it’s more important for a design system to be accurate than beautiful.

As Matthew Ström says, you should start with the design system you already have:

Instead of drawing a whole new set of components, start with the components you already have in production. Document them meticulously. Create a single source of truth for design, warts and all.

Variable fonts are a very exciting and powerful new addition to the toolbox of web design. They was very much at the centre of discussion at this year’s Ampersand conference.

A lot of the demonstrations of the power of variable fonts are showing how it can be used to make letter-by-letter adjustments. The Ampersand website itself does this with the logo. See also: the brilliant demos by Mandy. It’s getting to the point where logotypes can be sculpted and adjusted just-so using CSS and raw text—no images required.

I find this to be thrilling, but there’s a fly in the ointment. In order to style something in CSS, you need a selector to target it. If you’re going to style individual letters, you need to wrap each one in an HTML element so that you can then select it in CSS.

For the Ampersand logo, we had to wrap each letter in a span (and then, becuase that might cause each letter to be read out individually instead of all of them as a single word, we applied some ARIA shenanigans to the containing element). There’s even a JavaScript library—Splitting.js—that will do this for you.

But if the whole point of using HTML is that the content is accessible, copyable, and pastable, isn’t a bit of a shame that we then compromise the markup—and the accessibility—by wrapping individual letters in presentational tags?

What if there were an ::nth-letter selector in CSS?

There’s some prior art here. We’ve already got ::first-letter (and now the initial-letter property or whatever it ends up being called). If we can target the first letter in a piece of text, why not the second, or third, or nth?

It raises some questions. What constitutes a letter? Would it be better if we talked about ::first-character, ::initial-character, ::nth-character, and so on?

Even then, there are some tricksy things to figure out. What’s the third character in this piece of markup?

<p>AB<span>CD</span>EF</p>

Is it “C”, becuase that’s the third character regardless of nesting? Or is it “E”, becuase techically that’s the third character token that’s a direct child of the parent element?

I imagine that implementing ::nth-letter (or ::nth-character) would be quite complex so there would probably be very little appetite for it from browser makers. But it doesn’t seem as problematic as some selectors we’ve already got.

Take ::first-line, for example. That violates one of the biggest issues in adding new CSS selectors: it’s a selector that depends on layout.

Think about it. The browser has to first calculate how many characters are in the first line of an element (like, say, a paragraph). Having figured that out, the browser can then apply the styles declared in the ::first-line selector. But those styles may involve font sizing updates that changes the number of characters in the first line. Paradox!

(Technically, only a subset of CSS of properties can be applied to ::first-line, but that subset includes font-size so the paradox remains.)

I checked to see if ::first-line was included in one of my favourite documents: Incomplete List of Mistakes in the Design of CSS. It isn’t.

So compared to the logic-bending paradoxes of ::first-line, an ::nth-letter selector would be relatively straightforward. But that in itself isn’t a good enough reason for it to exist. As the CSS Working Group FAQs say:

The fact that we’ve made one mistake isn’t an argument for repeating the mistake.

A new selector needs to solve specific use cases. I would argue that all the letter-by-letter uses of variable fonts that we’re seeing demonstrate the use cases, and the number of these examples is only going to increase. The very fact that JavaScript libraries exist to solve this problem shows that there’s a need here (and we’ve seen the pattern of common JavaScript use-cases ending up in CSS before—rollovers, animation, etc.).

Now, I know that browser makers would like us to figure out how proposed CSS features should work by polyfilling a solution with Houdini. But would that work for a selector? I don’t know much about Houdini so I asked Una. She pointed me to a proposal by Greg and Tab for a full-on parser in Houdini. But that’s a loooong way off. Until then, we must petition our case to the browser gods.

This is not a new suggestion.

Anne Van Kesteren proposed ::nth-letter way back in 2003:

While I’m talking about CSS, I would also like to have ::nth-line(n), ::nth-letter(n) and ::nth-word(n), any thoughts?

Trent called for ::nth-letter in January 2011:

I think this would be the ideal solution from a web designer’s perspective. No javascript would be required, and 100% of the styling would be handled right where it should be—in the CSS.

Chris repeated the call in October of 2011:

Of all of these “new” selectors, ::nth-letter is likely the most useful.

In 2012, Bram linked to a blog post (now unavailable) from Adobe indicating that they were working on ::nth-letter for Webkit. That was the last anyone’s seen of this elusive pseudo-element.

In 2013, Chris (again) included ::nth-letter in his wishlist for CSS. So say we all.