Adjacent to the bit about 100vh, I’d add an item about the much older fundamental stupidity of viewport units, which Firefox tried to fix but no one else got on board and so they eventually removed their patch and went back to being as broken as everyone else. That is: they ignore scrollbars. Use a platform with 17px-wide scrollbars, and in a document with vertical scrolling, 100vw is now 100% of the viewport width… plus 17px. People get this wrong all the time, and it’s only increased as more platforms have switched to overlay scrollbars by default.
> Blur does not consider ambient things.
Need to make that backdrop blur.
> Whitespace collapse. HTML Whitespace is Broken
I always hated that article title. It’s not broken, it’s just different from what you occasionally expected, mostly for very good reasons that let it do what you expected most of the time. I also disagreed with some significant other parts of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42971415.
> Two concepts: code point (rune), grapheme cluster:
I have problems with this lot.
Firstly: add code units. When dealing with UTF-8 and you can access individual bytes, they’re UTF-8 code units. When dealing with UTF-16 and you can access 16-bit values, including surrogates, they’re UTF-16 code units.
Secondly: don’t talk about code points in general, talk about scalar values, which are what code points would have been were it not for that accursèd abomination UTF-16. Specifically, scalar values excludes the surrogate code points.
Sensible things work with scalar values. Python is the only thing I can think of that gets this wrong: its strings are sequences of code points, so you can represent lone surrogates (representable in neither UTF-8 nor UTF-16). This is so stupid.
Thirdly: ditch the alias “rune”, Go invented it and it never caught on. I don’t know of anything else that uses the term (though maybe a few things do), and the term rune gets used for other unrelated things (e.g. in Svelte 5).
> Some text files have byte order mark (BOM) at the beginning. For example, EF BB BF is a BOM that denotes the file is in UTF-8 encoding. It's mainly used in Windows. Some non-Windows software does not handle BOM.
BOM was about endianness, and U+FEFF. Link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark. It made sense in UTF-16 and UTF-32: for UTF-16, if the file starts with FE FF it’s UTF-16BE, if FF FE it’s UTF-16LE. UTF-8 application of it was always a mess, never really caught on, and I think can fairly be considered completely obsolete now: the typical person or software will never encounter it. Very little software will actually handle it any more. Fortunately, it doesn’t tend to matter much: U+FEFF is the BOM for a reason, it’s ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE.
> YAML:
I’d add “disallows Tab indentation”. It’s the only thing I can immediately think of that’s like that. (Make is roughly the opposite, recipe lines having to start with a single Tab. Python doesn’t let you mix spaces and tabs. These are all I can immediately think of.)
> Blur does not consider ambient things.
Need to make that backdrop blur.
> Whitespace collapse. HTML Whitespace is Broken
I always hated that article title. It’s not broken, it’s just different from what you occasionally expected, mostly for very good reasons that let it do what you expected most of the time. I also disagreed with some significant other parts of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42971415.
> Two concepts: code point (rune), grapheme cluster:
I have problems with this lot.
Firstly: add code units. When dealing with UTF-8 and you can access individual bytes, they’re UTF-8 code units. When dealing with UTF-16 and you can access 16-bit values, including surrogates, they’re UTF-16 code units.
Secondly: don’t talk about code points in general, talk about scalar values, which are what code points would have been were it not for that accursèd abomination UTF-16. Specifically, scalar values excludes the surrogate code points.
Sensible things work with scalar values. Python is the only thing I can think of that gets this wrong: its strings are sequences of code points, so you can represent lone surrogates (representable in neither UTF-8 nor UTF-16). This is so stupid.
Thirdly: ditch the alias “rune”, Go invented it and it never caught on. I don’t know of anything else that uses the term (though maybe a few things do), and the term rune gets used for other unrelated things (e.g. in Svelte 5).
> Some text files have byte order mark (BOM) at the beginning. For example, EF BB BF is a BOM that denotes the file is in UTF-8 encoding. It's mainly used in Windows. Some non-Windows software does not handle BOM.
BOM was about endianness, and U+FEFF. Link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark. It made sense in UTF-16 and UTF-32: for UTF-16, if the file starts with FE FF it’s UTF-16BE, if FF FE it’s UTF-16LE. UTF-8 application of it was always a mess, never really caught on, and I think can fairly be considered completely obsolete now: the typical person or software will never encounter it. Very little software will actually handle it any more. Fortunately, it doesn’t tend to matter much: U+FEFF is the BOM for a reason, it’s ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE.
> YAML:
I’d add “disallows Tab indentation”. It’s the only thing I can immediately think of that’s like that. (Make is roughly the opposite, recipe lines having to start with a single Tab. Python doesn’t let you mix spaces and tabs. These are all I can immediately think of.)