today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 05, 2023

• Day 73: size container features

  In my previous posts about size container features I’ve only used the min-width feature, but there’s actually more you can query.

  container-type: inline-size establishes size containment only on the inline axis. There is no block-size option because it wasn’t possible for browsers to implement, but there is a size option, which establishes size containment on both dimensions of the container. According to Miriam Suzanne, you should be careful using this option because I may cause side effects, but it allows you to query more than just the width/inline-size.

• Day 72: the masonry-auto-flow property

  If you’re creating a masonry layout, the packing algorithm puts items into the column with the most space by default. This can cause accessibility issues. The masonry-auto-flow property gives us control over the automatic placement of items in a masonry layout.

• Day 71: the masonry keyword

  The masonry keyword allows you to create masonry grid layouts.

• Thinking Systematically

  This got me ruminating on design systems work, but also system abstractions in general.

  Thinking systematically, you begin to see abstractions in the one-offs which helps you translate the execution of a specific design to traits of a generalized one.

  What am I talking about? Take color, for example.

• Why I still have an old-school cert on my https site

  People sometimes ask me why I don't use Let's Encrypt, and it's a long story. It has a lot to do with just how damn evil the protocol is. It looks like it was created by people who had been drinking FAR too much of the web kool-aid, since it's chock full of terrible things. It should be a small amount of drama to start a process, receive a magic string, sock it away somewhere at a magic path, then poke the validator and say "go for it". Then you just check back and see whether it worked or not.

• Konami Code Domain Name

  Yup, copy and paste that into your browser and it will resolve.

• Emojis in domain names, punycode and performance

  Punycode is a tricky format. Thankfully, domain names are made of labels (e.g., in microsoft.com, microsoft is a label) and each label can use at most 63 bytes. In total, a domain name cannot exceed 255 bytes, and that is after encoding it to punycode if necessary.

  Some time ago, Colm MacCárthaigh suggested that I look at the performance impact of punycode. To answer the question, I quickly implemented a function that does the job. It is a single function without much fanfare. It is roughly derived from the code in the standard, but it looks simpler to me. Importantly, I do not claim that my implementation is particularly fast.

• Booting Gentoo on a BTRFS from multiple LUKS devices

  This is mostly a reminder for myself. I installed Gentoo on a machine, but I reused the same BTRFS filesystem where NixOS is already installed, the trick is the BTRFS filesystem is composed of two partitions (a bit like raid 0) but they are from two different LUKS partitions.

  It wasn't straightforward to unlock that thing at boot.

• Thoughts on an implementation of Gemini mentions

  I also did a second implemenation that addresses all these points (and the code for this version is very similar to the other one). I guess I'll see which one becomes more popular.

• Does a Blog Need to Integrate?

  Having RSS integration on your site is hugely important.