KIXX.NEWS edition for:
Thursday, April 17, 2025
Today is National High Five Day in the US.
- Matt Mullenweg has some comments about SEO, Perplexity, and giving depositions in court.
- Joel Spolsky's classic rant on Unicode.
- How type is rendered on screens. Explains anti-aliasing.
- Seth Godin reminds us that AI still takes effort.
- Do we really have to layout our websites for mobile first?
- AMP email was a thing?
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Matt Mullenweg: My thoughts on WordPress 6.8
It's interesting to read Matt's thoughts about Google search results, Perplexity, and his comments about giving a deposition in court to "defend" WordPress. Strange times we live in!
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The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
"Did you ever get an email from your friends in Bulgaria with the subject line “???? ?????? ??? ????”? I’ve been dismayed to discover just how many software developers aren’t really completely up to speed on the mysterious world of character sets, encodings, Unicode, all that stuff."
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Type rendering on the web
Important background to fully understanding how typography is displayed on screens and what websites should be doing to make it nicer.
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The AI Effort Gap
Good work still takes effort: When AI shows up, our mistake is thinking that if we can’t find useful brilliance in one simple prompt, it’s broken.
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Mobile-First CSS: Is It Time for a Rethink?
The mobile-first design methodology has been a common design pattern for years. But I've recently noticed in my work over the last few years that thinking mobile first does not always get me the outcome I want, and can be harder to maintain. It's good to see a different perspective.
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How to think about Baseline and polyfills
From the Google Ivory Tower: Knowing when to use a polyfill for a feature depends on its availability across browsers, and Baseline can be helpful in making that determination.
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Whatever happened to AMP email?
Google's push for the AMP web stack, the invasion of AMP-enabled email. If we build sites the right way, AMP is a solution to a non-problem.
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