One of my goals this year is getting better at CSS. I joke that my CSS skills peaked in 2015. But CSS has gained a ton of new, really cool things and browser support has been moving quickly compared the days of old.

This talk by Dylan Beattie from NDC London 2026 is a great introduction to what CSS is capable of these days.

I’m also slowly working through a course called CSS for JavaScript Developers by Josh Comeau, which is fantastically done.

The CSS Working Group publishes a page with all of the things that they’d like to fix in CSS but can’t because the “mistakes” are already in the wild and changing them would break the web—an unforgivable sin. Here are a few of my favorites:

• z-index should be called z-order or depth and should Just Work on all elements (like it does on flex items).
• The alignment properties in Flexbox should have been writing-mode relative, not flex-flow relative, and thus could have reasonably understandable names like align-inline-* and align-block-*.
• It shouldn’t be !important — that reads to engineers as “not important”. We should have picked another way to write this.
• Not quite a mistake, because it was a reasonable default for the 90s, but it would be more helpful since then if background-repeat defaulted to no-repeat.
• Box-sizing should be border-box by default.

And finally, the funniest one:

• Table layout should be sane.

I had a Fonts.com subscription for a number of years, followed by a Monotype one. I also had a cloud.typography sub for webfonts. All of those services were from Monotype, the largest type company in the world.

Lately I’ve been acquiring fonts from indie foundries and quit giving Monotype money. Feels good man.

Even if you’re not in the market for a professional font, just browsing the incredible artwork and type specimens from these foundries makes The Punch worth a look.

The popular CDN, bunny.net, has a drop-in replacement for Google Fonts that is privacy friendly and GDPR compliant.

I just came across this so I haven’t had time to use it yet, but I will definitely be trying it the next time I start to reach for Google Fonts.

As a typographical aside, you can get some nice fonts with a generous web license from both MBType and SimpleBits.

It’s always interesting reading about other people’s note taking setups. This one from Dave is interesting because he explains the thought process that went into it. And he dumps a huge list of Obsidian plugins that he is using.