Topics /

Web & Frontend

The most popular blog posts about web & frontend on Hacker News. 306 posts.

2021
273

Please Stop “Fixing” Font Smoothing (2012)

I wrote two posts on the topic of WebKit font smoothing before, but unfortunately the situation has grown worse since then. In allowing the designer to pick their own font smoothing mode with the -webkit-font-smoothing CSS property, WebKit developers have opened up an opportunity for typographic abuse, namely, the…

283

The web browser as a tool of thought

A month ago, I built a personal search engine called Monocle that let me search through a trove of personal information I’ve saved over time, from notes to journal entries to bookmarks and tweets. Shortly thereafter, I switched my default search engine in my web browser from Google to Monocle, marking the start of my…

286

Instanced Line Rendering Using WebGL

Native line rendering in WebGL leaves a lot to be desired. There's inconsistency in the implementation, so you can't trust that the line width you want will be available to you, for example. It's also missing some pretty important features, like line joins and caps. For these reasons, quite a bit of work has been done…

287

The Third Web

(This text is very long. Maybe too long. You can find a PDF and an EPUB of it below.The current version of this text will always live at https://web3.tante.ccSatya has created an audio version of this essay. Eine deutsche Version findet sich hier. Una versione italiana di questo testo è qui – grazie Nebbia! En […]

294

Authoring a SIMD enhanced WASM library with Rust

All the pieces have come together for widespread Wasm SIMD usage. The majority of browsers and Node 16 LTS support Wasm SIMD out of the box, and Rust recently learned how to compile Wasm intrinsics. Now I need to port a library from x86 SIMD to Wasm SIMD and distribute it in such a way that will fallback to a non-SIMD…

297

NFT misconception: JPEG aren't stored on the Blockchain

Today’s biggest misconception about NFTs is that they’re “jpeg” images stored on the Ethereum blockchain, it’s not. Probably because that digital art can be easy to visualize, and famous artists attempt today to sell their digital art as an NFT on a platform such as Opensea, it has gained lot of attention these past…

300

Introduction to WebAssembly Components

WebAssembly and WASI show great promise for the future of computing outside the browser, and the WebAssembly component model aims to improve the portability, cross-language, and composition story for Wasm. This article explains the goals of the component model, and showcases how to use tooling from the Bytecode…