anyway i'm actually writing the Thoughts On Mastodon post for real. already at 1k words and 6 footnotes and i'm not even out of the introduction. might be a bit until it's done.
some of the footnotes would work better as Asides so i'm genuinely considering writing an article theme that lets me use them that way.
100% agree with this, I love putting marginalia in shit I write and would love to provide some better way of formatting it on here
e.g. the electronic version of "host" by david foster wallace is an essential web text to me
nicky case's nutshell is also something I've been thinking a lot about recently
i am of the firm opinion that the best way to add marginalia to hypertext documents (if columns aren't feasible or don't fit) is the classic tooltip (or clicky popover).
as a magic content creator I'm super used to the style where if I mention a card, you can mouse over its name to see the card, and kinda think that's a good system
worth noting that the hovers in xkeeper and atomicthumbs's posts are entirely inaccessible on mobile. not even long press shows whatever is in there.
one of the many fun things I've discovered in my journey far deeper into front-end development than I had ever gone before is that it was only recently in HTML that you could condition the appearance of a UI element based on whether the user was using a pointing device which embodied the concept of "hovering" or not
before that, you kind of just had to guess, based on how wide their screen was
In order of how much I love them:
HTMLCanvasElement.getContext("webgl")will initialise WebGL and give you aWebGLRenderingContextobject so you can do fancy 3D graphics in browser. Except when it doesn't, which can happen for any number of sensible reasons such as- 3D hardware acceleration is unavailable on the system
- The graphics driver doesn't support OpenGL ES which WebGL is a subset of
- The graphics driver supports GLES but not WebGL
- WebGL is unavailable in the browser
- WebGL has been disabled in the browser
- WebGL is enabled and 3D acceleration is available, but the user's computer is running a graphics card or graphics driver version that's been blacklisted by the browser.
- WebGL is enabled, 3D acceleration is available, the graphics hardware and software are fine, but initialising it failed for any other fucking reason
- No, you can't check whether WebGL is theoretically or practically available on the system, just try and get a context you coward
- No, you can't query the graphics driver/hardware blacklist from within your program. Or generally. The blacklists differ from browser to browser and even between different versions of the same browser.
- No, you won't get a return value that tells you anything about why initialisation failed, you just get nothing instead of a
WebGLRenderingContext. - Fuck you
Date.getDate()returns the day of the month as a number from 1-31.Date.getMonth(), similarly, returns the month of the year as a number from 0-11.
HTMLMediaElement.canPlayType(mimetype)lets you check whether the user's browser can play media of the given MIME type. It returns one of:""(empty string) if the browser cannot play the media typeprobablymaybe
HTMLMediaElement.canPlayType deserves to be as broadly known and beloved as is_computer_on_fire()
