Complete side note: I’m on public wifi right now and the domain used to host the images in this article is, for some reason, blocked. But as the author (or whatever tool was used to generate the article) has taken time to write decent `alt` text, I can still get a good idea of what is going on. Kudos.
I used to share this sentiment (and I’m a web performance consultant by profession so very few people care about performance as much as me!), but when you consider how much calculation we _happily_ let our JS do at runtime, I don’t think forcing CSS to be static/preprocessed is worth it. And that’s not even me taking a swipe at overly-JSsed front-end; I’m talking about any runtime work that JS picks up.
Is preprocessed CSS faster? Yes. Is it meaningfully faster? Probably not.
An optimisation I've always wondered about for transforming/translating/animating elements: is it faster to use JS translations or animation API directly on the element (e.g. style.transform / element.animate), or updating CSS variables with JS to let the CSS engine reposition inheriting elements?
In the context of animations, I'd intuit the latter but would be open to hearing why.
jQuery has .animate() which uses the JS API and used to be very popular. When CSS Animations became available, that part of jQuery became obsolete overnight.
A firm here in my city once got all of their signage printed and installed _before_ securing the social media handles they’d put on them. The Instagram username they’d opted for was actually literally impossible to register as it contained a special character. That was about six years ago. The signs are still up.
Point 13, ironically, reminds me of one of the best bits of writing[1] I ever did. I somehow lost an entire near-complete draft[2] of an article, so I had to write it again from scratch. It came out much, much better than the original.
I’m on-site with a client in The Hague this week—the food and drink in this city is phenomenal, so these paintings definitely still ring true for me at least.
From my experience after moving here, the Dutch have three types of restaurants.
1. Cheap snack food hole in the walls that sometimes sell pizza too. Döner/kebab/fries etc. These are family owned and operated and generally just hanging on by a thread financially and it shows.
2. Slightly upscale bistros that are only open for lunch-5pm or dinner-10pm. The prices are such that they can support wait staff and skilled cooks but fall short of fine dining. Popular with middle class folks for a date night. Expect nicer serviceware and to spend €100 for two people after 1 drink each and dessert.
3. Fine dining with all the bells and whistles.
As a tourist, you often get lured into #2. If you’re coming from the US, it can seem quite fancy when you compare it to chains like Chilis and Olive Garden but the trends become very easy to spot after you see it enough times.
But what’s nice about #2 is that the staff do actually somewhat give a shit about their jobs and make an effort to provide an atmosphere that is inviting (gezelligheid). This also extends to the food which is artfully plated, even if the ingredients aren’t anything special.
As someone who's lived in the Netherlands for quite a long while, this is downright funny to read. No offense to the Dutch, but food is the last thing they're good at and they're pretty infamous for its blandness. Pretty much every good meal you can find in the Netherlands is either French, Indonesian, or etc. That said, the KLM sandwich is a very fine thing.
