Mustache can be used for HTML, config files, source code - anything. It works by expanding tags in a template using values provided in a hash or object.
We call it “logic-less” because there are no if statements, else clauses, or for loops. Instead there are only tags. Some tags are replaced with a value, some nothing, and others a series of values.
Relevant points [of disabling Disqus] are:
- Load-time goes from 6 seconds to 2 seconds.
- There are 105 network requests vs. 16.
- There are a lot of non-relevant requests going through to networks that will be tracking your movements.
Among the networks you can find:
disqus.com- Obviously!google-analytics.com- Multiple requests; no idea who’s capturing your movements.connect.facebook.net- If you’re logged into Facebook, they know you visit this site.accounts.google.com- Google will also map your visits to this site with any of your Google accounts.pippio.com- LiveRamp identify mapping for harvesting your details for commercial gain.bluekai.com- Identity tracking for marketing campaigns.crwdcntrl.net- Pretty suspect site listed as referenced by viruses and spyware.exelator.com- More identity and movement tracking site which even has a virus named after it!doubleclick.net- We all know this one: ad services and movement tracking, owned by Google.tag.apxlv.net- Very shady and tricky to pin-point an owner as they obsfuscate their domain (I didn’t even know this was a thing!). Adds a tracking pixel to your site.adnxs.com- More tracking garbage, albeit slightly more prolific.adsymptotic.com- Advertising and tracking that suppposedly uses machine learning.rlcdn.com- Obsfuscated advertising/tracking from Rapleaf.adbrn.com- “Deliver a personalized customer journey across devices, channels and platforms with Adbrain customer ID mapping technology.”nexac.com- Oracle’s Datalogix, their own tracking and behavioural pattern rubbish.tapad.com- OK, I cant’t be bothered to search to look this up anymore.liadm.com- More? Oh, ok, then…sohern.com- Yup. Tracking.demdex.net- Tracking. From Adobe.bidswitch.net- I’ll give you one guess…agkn.com- …mathtag.com- Curious name, maybe it’s… no. It’s tracking you.I can’t visit many of these sites because I have them blocked in uBlock Origin so information was gleaned from google crawl results of the webpages and 3rd parties. Needless to say, it’s a pretty disgusting insight into how certain free products turn you into the product. What’s more worrying are the services that go to lengths to hide who they are and what their purposes are for tracking your movements.
I ran across an issue today where I had set some generated content to an unusual character (an open quotation mark), but the compiled and minified CSS served by Drupal was showing me the wrong characters. It was likely caused by character encoding getting screwed up somewhere along the line. The solution was to specify the Unicode character I wanted in the format seen in the code block below, as demonstrated in the source link below and this Stack Overflow answer.
p:before {
content: "\201C";
}
If you ever wanted a mini-cheat sheet for what every part of a CSS rule is called, here it is:
- The whole thing is a ruleset.
- The curly braces and everything inside is a declaration block.
- The bit before the opening curly brace is a selector.
- Each key/value pair, as separated by a colon and ending in a semicolon, is a declaration.
- In those key/value pairs, the key is a property (or property name), and the value is a value (or property value).
We built the commercial internet by mastering techniques of persuasion and surveillance that we’ve extended to billions of people, including essentially the entire population of the Western democracies. But admitting that this tool of social control might be conducive to authoritarianism is not something we’re ready to face. After all, we’re good people. We like freedom. How could we have built tools that subvert it?
[…]
The learning algorithms have no ethics or boundaries. There’s no slot in the algorithm that says “insert moral compass here”, or any way to tell them that certain inferences are forbidden because they would be wrong. In applying them to human beings, we leave ourselves open to unpleasant surprises.
The issue is not just intentional abuse (by trainers feeding skewed data into algorithms to affect the outcome), or unexamined bias that creeps in with in our training data, but the fundamental non-humanity of these algorithms.
[…]
So what happens when these tools for maximizing clicks and engagement creep into the political sphere?
This is a delicate question! If you concede that they work just as well for politics as for commerce, you’re inviting government oversight. If you claim they don’t work well at all, you’re telling advertisers they’re wasting their money.
Facebook and Google have tied themselves into pretzels over this. The idea that these mechanisms of persuasion could be politically useful, and especially that they might be more useful to one side than the other, violates cherished beliefs about the “apolitical” tech industry.
[…]
One problem is that any system trying to maximize engagement will try to push users towards the fringes. You can prove this to yourself by opening YouTube in an incognito browser (so that you start with a blank slate), and clicking recommended links on any video with political content. When I tried this experiment last night, within five clicks I went from a news item about demonstrators clashing in Berkeley to a conspiracy site claiming Trump was planning WWIII with North Korea, and another exposing FEMA’s plans for genocide.
This pull to the fringes doesn’t happen if you click on a cute animal story. In that case, you just get more cute animals (an experiment I also recommend trying). But the algorithms have learned that users interested in politics respond more if they’re provoked more, so they provoke. Nobody programmed the behavior into the algorithm; it made a correct observation about human nature and acted on it.
[…]
But even though we’re likely to fail, all we can do is try. Good intentions are not going to make these structural problems go away. Talking about them is not going to fix them.
We have to do something.
I haven’t checked how accessible this is, and I’m torn on the concept of custom scrollbars, but this is interesting at the very least:
Custom scrollbars are extremely rare and that’s mostly due to the fact that scrollbars are one of the remaining bits on the web that are pretty much unstylable (I’m looking at you, date picker). You can use JavaScript to build your own, but that’s expensive, low fidelity and can feel laggy. In this article we will leverage some unconventional CSS matrices to build a custom scroller that doesn’t require any JavaScript while scrolling, just some setup code.
TL;DR:
You don’t care about the nitty gritty? You just want to look at the Nyan cat demo and get the library? You can find the demo’s code in our GitHub repo.
Use scale transforms when animating clips. You can prevent the children from being stretched and skewed during the animation by counter-scaling them.
[…]
In this post we’re going to look over what’s involved if you want performant clip animations. If you want to see a demo, check out the Sample UI Elements GitHub repo.