Frontity to Join Automattic

Automattic, Themes, WordPress

Since Frontity launched their open source framework, they have been making the integration between React and WordPress easier. Their proven drive and experience with clean technological solutions will benefit our efforts as we continue to make the block and theme APIs a joy to use and WordPress the best development platform on the web.

The next step in the growth of this relationship is for Frontity and its team to join Automattic and contribute to core WordPress.org as part of our commitment to Five for the Future.

I believe there’s still a lot that we can learn from decoupled systems and we can incorporate those learnings into WordPress itself as we emphasize performance, flexibility, and ease of development. I look forward to Frontity joining WordPress and channeling their efforts into the WordPress APIs, documentation, and Gutenberg’s full-site editing tools.

More Hidden Treasures

Meta, Music

I just found a list that summarizes everything I possibly wanted circa 1997.

  • U2 CDs
  • 64 megs of memory
  • Awe 64 Sound card or USB speakers
  • Mark 6 alto saxophone
  • Stereo:
    • Radio turner and mixer
    • CD Changer
    • Turntable with stereo output
    • Double tape deck
  • Books: anything by Isaac Asimov
  • Cool mousepad
  • Flatbed color scanner
  • 3D video card
  • Computer games
    • Quake II
    • Starcraft
    • Command and Conquer II: Red Alert
  • Fast CD-ROM with digital support
  • Cool speakers for Dolby 4-channel surround sound
  • Big Monitor
  • Caller ID
  • USB Port

By the metric of this list, I’ve achieved almost 100% success. It’s remarkable how the material things we want can change so much over the years, and how material things in and of themselves can become so much less important. I wonder if I made a list now, how would I look at it in five years?

Menu Revamped

Design, Meta

Okay, per Tantek’s suggestion I’ve made the menu entirely a nested list, and adjusted the CSS accordingly. I had to work out a few kinks with the specificity of the contextual selectors, but after that it was a breeze. However this has brought to my attention how terribly ugly the CSS ridge effect is in Mozilla—really unattractive. It’s a shame because a lot of people seem to like it, but I’m exploring other options. Structure is groovy. Hell is a world without the style attribute.

Future of Email

Books, Web Standards

A group I’m a part of is preparing to form a number of “working groups” and each group may prepare a number of documents. The proposed format for these documents is plain ASCII text wrapped at 74 characters. It’s not the IETF, and on the whole it seemed like a rather restrictive format to develop documents in, an opinion which I’ve been trying my best to communicate. The discussion is still ongoing, but there was a brief tangent where several people misconstrued my argument as being one for HTML email, which is a totally separate beast.

Anyway it got me thinking about how HTML email is almost universally condemned among tech-savvy email groups. The problem, I think, is not technological but in fact human. HTML email has the potential to be clean, structured markup that can add a number of rich elements that there is no standard way to add in plain ASCII, such as emphasis, links, quotes, and in general represent things in a more meaningful way. The problem is generally not in the receiving client; I can’t think of a client with no HTML reading support (even Pine does some). Also the MIME standard allows and encourages a plain text equivalent of all rich content. It’s a problem, to put it into Spiderman terms, of great power and great responsibility. Someone very near and dear to my heart sends me email with garish background, text that varies between large and red or some purple script font, and any number of images speckled about. To me an ideal solution would be an email composer that enforced strict separation of style and content, and a client which allowed any CSS attributes to be toggled at will. Someday, perhaps?